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This article first appeared in GP Racing magazine.
A highly sagacious individual - formerly on the staff of this very magazine, in fact - once said to me, "You know, the problem with Ron Dennis is that he always falls out with his best drivers..." And indeed, let's take a brisk roll-call of handy pilots who've said "do one, Ron" over the years: Niki Lauda, Alain Prost, Ayrton Senna, Mika Hakkinen, David Coulthard, Fernando Alonso, Lewis Hamilton...
But those fall-outs were generally transacted behind closed doors, and were predominantly a result of the McLaren boss having an occasional tendency to be gauche. On-track performance - or the lack thereof - seldom came into the equation. Quite the opposite: the majority of those drivers departed with at least one world championship courtesy of Woking machinery.
Ferrari, on the other hand, has a rich history of reverse alchemy - of turning partnerships freighted with promise into a soap opera of frustrations and disappointments. You could argue it's been happening since the early days of the world championship itself, when Alberto Ascari fell out with Enzo Ferrari over his salary and slung his hook.
