McLaren's man in the hot seat

Only four men have known what it means to take charge of the McLaren Formula 1 team. Martin Whitmarsh is now in his fifth season at the helm having succeeded Ron Dennis ahead of the 2009 season and now leads the squad into its second half-century.

During his tenure, he has steered the ship through some troubled waters - the loss of Lewis Hamilton, uncompetitive machinery in both his first and the current season, the end of Mercedes's co-ownership of the company and the striking up of a fresh alliance with Honda for 2015.

It has certainly never been dull.

The 55-year-old joined McLaren from British Aerospace as head of operations in 1989. Over the years, he accumulated ever-more responsibility, becoming first managing director and then chief executive officer of the team, emerging as a seemingly eternal team principal-in-waiting until Dennis finally stepped down.

Ostensibly, it was a seamless step, a logical move to just another level of responsibility. But Whitmarsh soon found it meant far more, such is the mystique of the team.

"Much more than I realised," he said when asked what it means to be team principal of McLaren in emotional terms.

"I didn't have a massive demand to be team principal, oddly. I turned it down on numerous occasions saying until Ron was totally comfortable with it I didn't want it.

"And when it did happen, I thought it was more symbolic. But it hadn't dawned on me... I look back and ask myself how could I have been so lacking in understanding?

"I had been on the podium quite a few times over the years but when I went on the podium in Hungary 2009 it was the first time I stood there as a team principal.

Hamilton's 2009 Hungarian GP win was Whitmarsh's first podium as McLaren team principal © LAT

"It was much more emotional, much bigger than I ever imagined it being. There's Bruce, Teddy and Ron; even to have my name in the same sentence as those three is a huge honour."

Inevitably, Whitmarsh has been exposed to plenty of criticism. As with anyone following a legendary figure like Dennis, any shortcomings in the team's progress is vastly exaggerated while his predecessor's virtues are multiplied.

After only one race in the role he was given a stark lesson in just how much scrutiny he was under after it emerged Hamilton and sporting director Dave Ryan had lied to the stewards in the previous race at Melbourne.

To his credit, Whitmarsh fielded some pretty aggressive questions in Malaysia the following weekend and showed himself capable of being calm under fire.

Such pressure comes with any team for which winning is considered the norm, rather than the exception.

While Whitmarsh takes tremendous pride in the 182 grand prix victories the famous team has claimed (112 of which have been since he joined the team), victories are not the primary source of satisfaction.

While perceived on the outside as a grey, clinical team, McLaren is one of the teams that engenders the most employee loyalty. Certainly, Whitmarsh enjoys watching the progress of those who join its number.

It also comes as no surprise to learn that double world champion Mika Hakkinen is a driver for which he has tremendous affection.

"The biggest pleasure is seeing the development of people," he says. "The satisfaction of seeing the Tim Gosses, the Phil Prews, people who I recruited as young graduates, become technical directors and chief engineers is massively satisfying.

"It's the same, to an extent, with drivers.

"Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna were here when I joined and we have had some other great ones, but to have worked with a driver like Mika from when he was a kid through to being a world champion is very satisfying.

Hakkinen's first win remains a highlight of Whitmarsh's career... © LAT

"Mika's first win [at Jerez in 1997] was one of those moments I remember. It was three or four o'clock in the morning afterwards and for some reason I was staring at the stars thinking it doesn't get any better than this!

"It's a moment I'm going to remember for the rest of my life."

Inevitably, there was a similar relationship with Hamilton. While Dennis is usually credited as the man behind Hamilton, which is to an extent true, it was Whitmarsh who had more day-to-day responsibility for him.

The relationship was not always easy - for example after Hamilton's first season in Formula 3 in 2004 he attempted to leave McLaren and go his own way to step up to GP2 a year earlier than he eventually did - but the first victory in Canada 2007 was a special one for Whitmarsh.

"Lewis in Canada was one of those moments but it was an odd one," continues Whitmarsh.

"I don't go onto the podium often but I wanted to because I'd worked with Lewis from the end of his karting career onwards and had some interesting incidents with him and his father!

"The other two on the podium were Nick Heidfeld, who we were involved with in F3 and did an F3000 team for, and Alexander Wurz who was involved with McLaren after he fell out of Benetton.

"I had been involved in all their careers so it was an enormously special moment.

"Then there was Brazil 2008, obviously, which was one of the most exciting crescendo-finishes to a grand prix there has been!"

There have been the bad moments, too. Whitmarsh learned that the hard way. He cites the controversies of 2007, when the needle between Fernando Alonso and Hamilton and the spy scandal threatened to tear the team apart, Hakkinen's life-threatening shunt in Adelaide in 1995, and Imola 1994.

...while a troubled 2007 remains a nadir © XPB

But for all the negatives, the overriding narrative of McLaren during Whitmarsh's time there has been one of tremendous growth. The company has been transformed beyond all recognition.

"My initial impression in 1989 was that there was an incredible lack of structure and noticeable process," he recalls.

"But rather than there being a lack of accountability, everyone felt accountable. I found that really interesting at first."

Whitmarsh has attempted to preserve some of that flexibility and ensure individual responsibility was maintained even as the team grew, at the same time as playing a key role in bringing some of the engineering structures used in the aerospace industry to modernise the team.

While you could argue it failed to accommodate a free-spirited genius like Adrian Newey as well as it should have, on balance that has been a positive influence. Most importantly, McLaren has had to move with the times.

"It's fascinating to look back," says Whitmarsh.

"Several years into my time at McLaren, we had a mega-complicated car in 1993 with active ride, power braking, drive-by-wire, lots of instrumentation and data logging. We thought that it was an incredibly complex car.

"But pull the covers off MP4/8 now and there's nothing there! It looks so simple. Every year you have a set of increasingly restrictive technical regulations aimed at making the car slower and every year we have got to make the car quicker.

"We just couldn't envisage that in that era. The engineering office was 10-12 people when I joined and we were a big team!"

The transformation of the race team is just part of the equation. McLaren is now a group of companies, an ambitious performance road-car manufacturer and one of the leading suppliers of electronics to motorsport all over the world.

"You could see there was huge potential," he says. "To an extent, our brand had been subsumed by tobacco. Marlboro was a fantastic thing for us but our brand has now emerged.

"Today, we are a set of businesses with a tremendous brand, people, facilities, capability and intellectual property and we monetise that a variety of ways. The most obvious manifestation of that is automotive.

"You have to give a huge amount of credit to Ron for having the bravery, the conviction and the dedication to do it. It would have been easy to have sucked revenues out of the team, but Ron was willing to put it back in.

"He doesn't always make friends but what he has done is have massive ambition and foresight. I don't think Ron always gets the credit that he very obviously deserves."

McLAREN'S FOUR TEAM BOSSES

BRUCE McLAREN
1963-1970. Wins: 4

Started racing in self-prepped 1929 Austin 7, now on show on the McLaren Technology Centre 'boulevard', before emerging as a GP winner with Cooper. Started McLaren in 1963, taking the team's first world championship race win at Spa in 1968. He died a McLaren M8D Can-Am crash at Goodwood in June 1970.

TEDDY MAYER
1970-1980. Wins: 20

A lawyer by training, Mayer joined McLaren in its first year and was the driving force behind its survival after the death of its founder. He led the team to two drivers' titles and a constructors' crown but after three winless years lost control of the team in September 1980. Remained as co-managing director until 1982.

RON DENNIS
1980-2009. Wins: 138

Effectively gained control of the team after the Marlboro-triggered merger of McLaren and his own Project 4 concern, Dennis turned the team into the dominant force in grand prix racing through alliances with Porsche, Honda and Mercedes. Won nine drivers' and seven constructors' crowns.

MARTIN WHITMARSH
2009-to date Wins: 20

After a two-decade apprenticeship, succeeded Dennis for the 2009 season. Has yet to lead the team to a world title, but McLaren has won races every season under him save for the current one, and he has struck a key deal with Honda to run its engines from the start of 2015.

For this and more on McLaren at 50, see the September 5 issue of AUTOSPORT magazine