Why Boullier is the right man for McLaren

Bringing in Eric Boullier shows that Ron Dennis's second revolution at McLaren is heading in the right direction.

Dennis has never lacked for decisiveness and confidence. Those qualities were key to realising his vision of developing McLaren from struggling race team in 1980 into the multi-discipline group it is today.

But when it emerged that Dennis had reclaimed the McLaren Group CEO role with a mandate to overhaul the team and drag it back to winning ways, I was very sceptical. After all, Dennis is now a 66-year-old whose later years steering the team in the last decade were far from smooth.

There was a real danger this would be a retrograde step. Decisiveness and confidence are essential leadership qualities, but become liabilities if applied in the wrong direction.

The deposing of Martin Whitmarsh as team principal was inevitable the moment Dennis seized power. The choice of successor was always going to be far more revealing. By targeting Eric Boullier, whose move to the team has not been officially confirmed but is expected to happen, Dennis has proved that he remains as shrewd as ever.

If this is symptomatic of decisions to come, the second Dennis revolution, over 30 years after the first, is now starting to feel very compelling.

Dennis tasted success in his latter years in charge, but they were far from smooth © LAT

Superficially, Boullier is an obvious choice. He has four years as Lotus team principal under his belt and, given the state of the team, was always likely to respond positively to any approach from McLaren. So it was a no-brainer, surely?

Maybe so. But there's a difference between choosing the right person for the right reasons, and choosing the right person because they are obvious. The fact is, Boullier ticks all of the boxes required of a team principal for a team like McLaren.

First and foremost, he is what is often lazily dubbed 'a racer'. His career has been all about motorsport and his background is in race engineering. He ran single-seater teams with distinction, notably DAMS, before taking over at Lotus in January 2010.

Such a background is not a pre-requisite for a team principal, but it is perfect for one of the size and structure of McLaren.

This is not a modest, standalone F1 team. It is the centrepiece of a group of companies with significant resources being poured into tangential areas such as legal, commercial, promotional, human resources, etc.

The team principal does not need to be a jack of all trades, they must be ruthlessly focused on the racing operation itself.

At Lotus, Boullier was dealt increasingly poor hands, which he played with distinction. On track, the team overachieved, but off it he was faced with a nervous workforce too often wondering where their next paycheque was coming from.

As he was public-facing, Boullier was often left struggling to explain goings on that he had limited influence over. While you can legitimately hold him partly responsible for the team's failure to land big-bucks sponsorship, he should not shoulder the blame for the failure to pay Kimi Raikkonen on time.

Boullier shouldn't be blamed for the Raikkonen pay saga © XPB

The Finn isn't the only costly departure. Technical director James Allison rejected plenty of other offers in the past, but eventually felt he had no choice but to accept a move to Ferrari.

Once there, it was an obvious move to bring in Lotus's highly-rated head of aero Dirk de Beer. And if he hadn't, de Beer was off to Williams anyway.

On top of these headline-grabbing departures, no team has lost more high-quality personnel than Lotus in recent years. There has been another flurry over this winter.

That things held together as effectively as they did for as long as they did is thanks in large part to Boullier's efforts in insulating his personnel from off-track worries.

"He is very good at that and does shield us from that side of things," explained Lotus's trackside operations director Alan Permane in an interview at Interlagos last November.

"People read stuff, but there has been so much written about us this year that people largely switch off and get on and do their jobs!

"People aren't buzzing around the internet looking at stories, Eric is very good at keeping these things at arm's length."

At McLaren Boullier can be plugged in and allowed to run the race team as it should be run. Whitmarsh played a key role in making the team what it is, introducing what were for F1 some bold new structures, but things still were not quite right at Woking.

The other key area where Boullier can make a key difference is by ensuring that the various technical groups within McLaren are interacting correctly.

F1 cars today are a consequence of countless hours of work from a vast number of people, there is no one individual designer (not even Adrian Newey) but they are not modular. Front wing a plus nose b plus sidepod c added to rear wing d will not equal a competitive car no matter how brilliantly-conceived the individual parts might be.

These processes worked well at Enstone and Boullier will have a clear idea of how to improve matters at McLaren. What's more, he will have the motorsport engineering background to understand enough of what is going on to cut through any politics that might muddy the waters.

Grosjean shone in 2013, having been backed by Boullier following earlier troubles © XPB

He is also a shrewd judge of a driver.

He put himself on the line both to put Romain Grosjean in at Lotus for 2012 and then to retain him for 2013.

Why? Some say it's because he was his manager, but that was to misinterpret his status (Boullier also ran Lotus owner Genii Capital's Gravity management scheme, which employed Grosjean).

The reality is that he recognised just how good Grosjean could be if he could convert his prodigious speed into consistent results. Many pilloried him for this, but Grosjean was one of the stars of the second half of 2013.

By contrast, one senior technical figure at McLaren pushed for Grosjean to be recruited for last season when the decision to sign Sergio Perez was being taken but was laughed out of town.

Boullier understands cars, he understands drivers and he understands racing. After his experiences with Lotus, having been thrown in at the deep end in 2010, he has also shown he can deal with the corporate side of the job when things get difficult.

There were some who considered him a little 'green' when he took over the role at Lotus, and he probably was, but the Frenchman is a fast learner.

Dennis can take care of the big picture. What he needs is a first-rate team principal who can ensure all aspects of the race team work together and live up to Whitmarsh's oft-repeated mantra "win as a team and lose as a team".

He is in no way a quick fix and it would be idiotic to try to blame Whitmarsh alone for McLaren's underachievement. History should judge the outgoing team principal's contribution more kindly than those who scapegoat him now.

But as a key step in Dennis's promise that "there will be changes, we will win again" this is an encouraging move.

McLaren has only won one title in the past 14 seasons. But if the recruitment of Boullier is typical of the decisions to come from Dennis, that record could improve dramatically in the coming years.