Why Whitmarsh is the best man for McLaren

If you'd picked up some of the national newspapers post-British Grand Prix, you might have been forgiven for thinking that McLaren was a team in crisis.

Inevitably perhaps, there were stories that team principal Martin Whitmarsh was a man under pressure.

Whitmarsh's leadership has never been called into question by McLaren © LAT

I say 'inevitably' because Silverstone was The Big One; the home race for the team and for Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button. The national paper men were out in force. Not just the F1 correspondents but chief sports writers, diarists and feature writers. The pressure was on to make a bit of a splash. And hell, in the best of traditions, don't let the facts get in the way.

Some of it was mere adoption of the football mentality: the big team with the home stars was losing out, so obviously the main man must go.

But F1 is not football. The average football manager is a former bladder kicker who is street smart with a big enough personality to smack a few heads together, bruise a few fragile egos and keep a dressing room onside.

There are exceptions. Iain Dowie, rejected by Southampton (Whitmarsh's team, coincidentally), completed a Master's degree in Aeronautical Engineering at the University of Hertfordshire and then went on to work for British Aerospace where, ironically, Whitmarsh began his managerial career. So you never know, maybe Dowie could help with an MP4-26 rear wing after all!

And Arsene Wenger apparently has two degrees - a Bachelor's in Electrical Engineering and a Master's in Economics, from the University of Strasbourg.

But probably more typical was the scenario at Fulham, when Jean Tigana was manager. He used to pepper his team talks with bon mots from French literary greats. One day one of his players asked him what he was reading. When told it was a book by Marcel Proust, the hapless midfielder replied, "The racing driver? I thought his name was Alain!"

Seriously though, try to find a successful team principal who was a renowned former driver and you will struggle. Bruce McLaren, Jack Brabham and er...

Prost himself is among those who did not make the transition and in the McLaren/Brabham era the constructors' job did not involve managing the engineering infrastructure necessary today, which is not to say they could not have done so.

Canada proved the only point of conflict within McLaren this year © LAT

But it's difficult and invariably benefits from continuity, provided you have the right man in the first place. And nobody that I've spoken to at McLaren doubts that Whitmarsh is the right man. Which is why I was surprised to see a claim in one of the newspaper stories that "there is growing discontent among engineering and design staff at McLaren about Whitmarsh's leadership."

If there is, it's well disguised, which doesn't tend to be the way of things in the F1 paddock. The only real evidence of internal conflict this year was Montreal, where Whitmarsh expressed the view that he may have gone in a different direction from the engineering staff on the rear wing. But it was not accusatory, merely offered as an explanation behind a feature that is always key in Canada and all the more so this year with DRS. The fact that McLaren chose to speak about it publicly was more a reflection of an open approach from a team comfortable within its own skin.

Yes, there have been operational mistakes, such as Hamilton's Monaco qualifying, but often ones that are errors only with the benefit of hindsight. What McLaren did in Monaco was a risk but nobody without a crystal ball new that Sergio Perez would red-flag the session.

Button's lost Silverstone wheel nut could have happened to anyone, as Ferrari proved at Nurburgring. There is huge pressure on the pit crew now that refuelling no longer makes it a leisurely task for the tyre men. Teams are constantly refining the process to gain hundredths of a second. Ferrari, for instance, has had cross-threading issues and so has adopted nuts with shorter threads. It solves one issue but makes the nut harder to handle, for which Felipe Massa paid the price in his fight with Vettel at Nurburgring.

It's always so much more complex than readily appreciated. If I had to hazard a guess at the cause of any dissent within the ranks of the design and engineering staff at McLaren, I'd suggest it's more likely to surround the prioritising of Friday tasks at a grand prix than any serious underlying issue. With no testing these days, you have to track test new components on Friday at a race meeting.

A race engineer and a driver will always want to concentrate on race set-up, while design staff will have an eye on future races and there is always a balance to be reached. Before the track action got underway in Germany, Button made a point of being supportive. He'd spent two days in the simulator at the factory after his disappointing exit from the British GP and visited as many of the guys as possible, "even the department where the wheel nuts are machined," he said.

Button praised the team atmosphere in Britain © LAT

"There was still a great atmosphere. Even though we had a tough time at Silverstone and a tough race the one before. The stuff that has been written about Martin is simply not correct. We all respect him. He's passionate in terms of the sport and, I think, a very intelligent guy who does a great job. He gets the troops in order and is very positive. We can move on and up."

Some expressed surprise that 'the chairman's vote of confidence' for Whitmarsh (usually so ominous for a football manager) came not from above (Ron Dennis in group terms) but from Jonathan Neale, who despite being managing director, is below Whitmarsh in McLaren's food chain. That's because it was no such thing, it was actually a response to a question from a media teleconference. Neale, however, made a good point when he said "Martin has done a fantastic job for McLaren and FOTA (Formula One Teams' Association). I think a lot of people behind us on the grid, while they might be looking at the heat we get in the press, wouldn't mind a bit of the action we get."

Dennis was always passionate about F1 affairs and trying to further not only McLaren's but also F1's interests. Some time ago, Dennis revealed in an interview that he believes that he has paid quite a high personal price for that. Whitmarsh has not shied away from doing likewise. He is in his second year as FOTA chairman and an insider spoken to last weekend insists that he, and he alone, should take full credit for resolving the conflict over F1's future engine regulations.

"I'm telling you," the insider said, "in 24 hours he persuaded Ferrari to sign for a V6, which wasn't too difficult, but also got Renault - at main board level - to change its mind on a publicly declared direction. And he persuaded an independent manufacturer to sign up to a new engine when Bernie [Ecclestone] was in everyones' ears about retaining V8s. It was all done and signed off in little more than a day, which was a phenomenal effort."

Much of the justification for the newspaper assassinations seemed to be that Whitmarsh had officially taken over from Dennis as front man of the F1 team in early 2009 and that McLaren has not managed to win a title since. But, short of a double diffuser in early '09 (an affliction suffered by 75 per cent of the grid) or failing to organise a professional hit on a certain Adrian Newey, it's hard to see what McLaren has done so disastrously wrong these past couple of seasons. It's not as if the team is sitting on zero points - it is second only to Red Bull in the Constructors' World Championship this season.

It's also worth pointing out that from 1998, the last time McLaren won the constructors' title, until the end of Ron's time at the helm, it won only a single title when Hamilton snatched the drivers' crown on the last corner of the last lap at Interlagos in '08. A barren decade then, and seven of those years with the benefit of Newey's presence. And a squeak was barely raised...

The best response of course, was McLaren's on-track one at the Nurburgring. Whitmarsh admitted that he doesn't spend time worrying about what's written in the press but he will assuredly have enjoyed his Sunday afternoon a lot more than his day at Silverstone. Crisis? What crisis?