Dennis: McLaren flattered Ferrari

Dennis claims his team were on the back foot for most of the Magny-Cours weekend, having been concerned about engine performance, being unable to find a good balance in Friday practice and then seeing Fernando Alonso suffer an unexpected gearbox problem in qualifying.

Those factors resulted in McLaren under-delivering - which allowed Ferrari to have a fairly straightforward run to victory.

"We flattered them [Ferrari] this weekend," said Dennis. "They did a good job, and probably improved the car a little bit. But we made them look a lot better than they were. Hopefully, we will demonstrate that at Silverstone."

But Dennis was far from disheartened by the result, especially because it was Kimi Raikkonen and not McLaren's closest title challenger Felipe Massa who took the win.

"Overall, it was damage limitation from beginning to end," he explained. "Obviously we're delighted that Kimi won over Massa. It means he is only a couple of points closer to Lewis, and didn't close the gap that much, even on Fernando.

"If this is going to be our worst race then we'll be comfortable with that. And if we hadn't had such good races before, we wouldn't be where we are in the world championship. So we've got to put it down to the fact you can't win every race, and this is one we didn't win.

"But we've won here previously, and there is no reason that we can't win at Silverstone. You know, as history has shown, when you have got a good lead in the world championship, you have got to be pragmatic about your races.

"Lewis did a really solid job at finishing third. It's his eighth podium position, and there is no luck that gives you that sort of result. For me, I loved Fernando's fight; I think he was fighting from beginning to end, and he got the most out of a difficult situation. And that's motor racing."

Dennis believes McLaren did the right thing in keeping Hamilton on a three-stop strategy, even though it killed off any chances of the Briton challenging either Ferrari driver for position.

"Lewis didn't make a good start. He was able to hang on; there was no problem with pace, but it was going to be impossible to overtake.

"We then started to evaluate everything that could go wrong, or everything that was likely to cause us to lose third place, and then we switched him to a strategy to guarantee third place, and that was really what that was all about."

Dennis also said that he was baffled by Alonso's gearbox problem in qualifying, which was caused by the failure of a part that the team had used without issues for three years.

"The gearbox problem was difficult to accommodate, to say the least," he explained. "It was such a one-off. This is a component that we've used for three years and we're somewhat mystified.

"It's probably a batch problem, which we were able to eliminate with help from the factory. So we were comfortable that it wasn't going to be an issue in the race."