HOBBS: Ron Dennis Will Be Missed

Formula 1

HOBBS: Ron Dennis Will Be Missed

David Hobbs says that Ron Dennis' decision to step aside from his duties with the Mclaren Formula 1 team is a sad day for the sport.

David Hobbs | Posted April 17, 2009 Charlotte, NC

Alain Prost (left) was Ron Dennis' most successful driver, while Lewis Hamilton (center) is his most recent world champion (LAT)

The retirement of Ron Dennis fills me with a lot of sadness and regret.

Ron has been in Formula 1 for forty years or more, going back to his early days as a mechanic for Cooper, looking after Jack Brabham’s car in the early 1960s.

He steadily rose up through the ranks, and launched his own Formula 2 team with the late Bob Wollek as his driver, before taking over the Mclaren F1 team from Teddy Mayer in 1982. He won the title with Niki Lauda and Alain Prost, before ushering in a crushingly dominant era with Prost and Ayrton Senna, using the Honda engines.

Despite this level of success, he somehow never quite fitted the establishment, and I think that in the end, city hall has got him. Of course, there are plenty of other things for him to do at Mclaren, and I know they are bound and determined to make another road car, so I think he’s probably under a lot of external pressure to stand aside, especially with this upcoming World Motor Sport Council meeting on April 29 that will decide Mclaren’s final punishment for everything that happened in Australia.

I drove for a Mclaren myself of course, but it was back in the seventies, before Ron became part of the team. He wasn’t a guy that I knew terribly well until I started covering Formula 1 for television.

Once Bob Varsha and myself started going to the races regularly we would see Ron a lot, and when myself and my wife Margaret went to the opening of Mclaren’s Technology Centre in 2004, Ron certainly made a very good show of remembering who I was and what I had done with the team. Whether or not he had been reading up on his notes the night before, who knows!

Regardless of your allegiances you’ve got to have a lot of admiration for him, because Mclaren have become one of the major teams in the world. Ferrari have been around a lot longer than Mclaren, and have won a lot more races, but under Ron’s patronage Mclaren have been a major world force since 1984.

It is actually a slight omission that Ron Dennis has never been knighted, bearing in mind that Frank Williams and Jackie Stewart have both received such an honour. There again though, maybe his face doesn’t fit the establishment, although it must be said that Queen Elizabeth II, along with the Duke of Edinburgh, personally opened the Tech Centre, the nerve centre of Mclaren’s modern-day engineering might, so that was a big feather in the cap.

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David Hobbs

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