Ron Dennis has likened McLaren to Manchester United, a once great team now scrapping around for the minor placings in its sport.
The analogy is apt and Dennis’ return to the helm of the Formula One team is akin to Sir Alex Ferguson returning to take over from David Moyes for next season.
The style in which the 66-year-old has come back to F1 is fairly remarkable. Effectively, at the turn of the year, he performed a bloodless coup, putting forward a case to the McLaren board for his return and giving them a six-day ultimatum to make up their minds.
They sided with Dennis and ousted Martin Whitmarsh, someone Dennis has since referred to as “my friend”. If that’s how he treats his friends, one wonders what lies in store for his enemies.
Either way, it brings back to the heart of the sport one of the most colourful and successful figures in F1 history. He will not return to his role as team principal. The running of the team will effectively be shared between Eric Boullier, brought in from Lotus, Jonathan Neale and Sam Michael but it is abundantly clear they will answer to Dennis and that’s what Dennis says, in F1 terms at least, goes.
The Dennis return is historically apt. Last year, McLaren had no race wins and were without a podium place for the first time since 1980, the season before Dennis, aged 34, took over as team boss, rapidly turning the team from also rans to a dominant force in the 1980s and 1990s.
His goal is abundantly clear… to win. It is the one word that has permeated every time he has spoken, whether it be to the team at McLaren’s state-of-the-art head-quarters in Woking in the UK or to the assembled international media in the F1 paddock.
Despite the dismal showing of 2013, Dennis is confident the team have turned things around rapidly enough. He said: “I believe we can win races this year. How many? I don’t know. How soon? I don’t know. If everyone matches my passion, commitment and focus, we will most definitely win.
“I’ve a lot to offer the company but what I have no intention of doing is running the grand prix team. I will guide them, give them the benefit or my knowledge and, if necessary, use my authority to change things.”
The team’s lead driver Jenson Button described Dennis at the last F1 test of the winter as “unusual”, a fitting description for a somewhat abrasive character, who has been known to rub people up the wrong way in the past.
There was no love lost between him and former FIA president Max Mosley. Dennis’ original demise effectively came at the behest of Mosley following the spy-gate row in 2007 in which McLaren employee Mike Coughlan was caught with reams of confidential technical information from former employers Ferrari.
Since his departure from F1, which did not come until after the 2008 season, it must have been galling to watch a team which he had built up not quite from scratch but from relative ruins at that stage begin to crumble again. Turning things around won’t happen overnight.
As Dennis said himself: “The company was a little unfit, it needs to get fit and there is pain in getting fit. They [the staff] were distracted, not focused enough. What we have to do is get them focused on what this company is exclusively about, which is winning.”
Admittedly, the team has not won a drivers’ title since Lewis Hamilton’s in 2007 and is without a constructors’ crown since 1998 but it’s also worth noting that since McLaren’s arrival in F1 in 1966, no team has won more grands prix.
The majority of those GP wins have come with Dennis at the helm. But there is still much for the team to do this season. They will start the season wit-out a title sponsor, Vodafone having severed ties last season. Plus there is the subject of their future direction on the track. Whitmarsh had been pushing for the board to sanction the signing of Fernando Alonso when his current Ferrari contract expires.
This now seems more unlikely with Dennis in charge despite him saying publicly he would be ok with Alonso’s return – the pair having undergone a gargantuan fall-out in 2007 amid the spy-gate row.
Whoever is at the wheel, the aim is the same… victory.
