Jon Noble: How McLaren’s triumph proves Dennis’s ‘customer teams cannot win’ claims were right

There is a hint of the Mandela effect to the famous declaration of former McLaren team boss Ron Dennis that a customer team would never win the Formula 1 world championship again.

As his remarks came to mind amid the joy of his former squad’s constructors’ championship triumph last weekend as a Mercedes customer, it is important to be reminded that there were some specifics to what Dennis actually said a decade ago. His remarks were not about customer teams per se – they were about how big the differences in performances were back then between works engines and those that were supplied to customers.

During the first year of the turbo hybrid rules in 2014, McLaren had come off worse thanks to notable differences in the way that his Mercedes customer engines performed compared to the ones that were in the back of the Brackley cars. It was not that the physical units were second rate; it was more that the engine maps, source codes and fuel optimisation were different: meaning variances in power, energy harvesting and deployment.

This all added up to an obvious lap time deficit, which was enough for Dennis to believe that, if the rules stayed the same, then there was no chance a customer could overhaul a works squad.

Speaking back then, Dennis said: "The one thing that jumps at you, if you look at all the qualifications this year, is the time difference between the Mercedes-Benz works team and other teams. And by and large, it is always in excess of one second, putting aside the pace that they can generate in a grand prix when they are on their back foot. My opinion, and it is an opinion held by many people within our organisation, is that you have no chance of winning the world championship if you are not receiving the best engines from whoever is manufacturing your engines. And a modern grand prix engine at this moment in time is not about sheer power, it is about how you harvest the energy, it is about how you store the energy."

He added: "Effectively, if you don't have the control of that process, meaning access to source code, then you are not going to be able to stabilise your car in the entry to corners etc, and you lose lots of lap time. Even though you have the same brand of engine that does not mean you have the ability to optimise the engine."

Despite having the title-winning power unit for 2014, McLaren found a huge deficit to Mercedes when it came to optimisation

Photo by: Alastair Staley / Motorsport Images

What Dennis was really saying was that a customer team would never be able to win the title while the rules allowed such a disparity in engines between the works outfit and those it was supplying.

But the rules did change and the path to McLaren’s 2024 success was opened up by the interventions from the FIA in ensuring that there was total parity of performance between customer and works teams.

At the start of 2018, a technical directive was sent to teams explaining that the FIA would no longer deem it acceptable for there to be differences in the performance of customer units and those of works squads. The TD demanded that "all power units supplied by one manufacturer should be identical" and run with identical software and identical specifications of oil and fuel. This interpretation is also clear in F1’s Technical Regulations, where Article 2.4 of Appendix 4 now states that: "All Power Units supplied by a single Power Unit Manufacturer must also be operated in the same way." This has effectively ensured that when it comes to car performance, the one element that does not impact the final lap time is the engine in the back being a customer unit or not.

"They won because of good engineering, brave engineering, the right leadership and good drivers, two drivers that were scoring - and you have to give them credit for that" Toto Wolff

Of course, there are still minor advantages to being the works team – because you have the final say on the architecture, installation demands and mapping, but they are not something that is a game changer.

As McLaren team boss Andrea Stella said in Abu Dhabi: "We are pretty relaxed that the performance of the customer power unit is as good as the works teams. Also, we have a very good relationship with HPP [Mercedes’ engine division] and very open dialogue. And while we appreciate and acknowledge that ultimately it is always going to be Mercedes that has the final say for the layout for solutions, I think the dialogue for HPP is good and we know that they are listening to our opinions. This is good work that has happened by the FIA in protecting customer teams so that they could have opportunities to win races and championships without having to be a works team."

McLaren ending the drought of a customer team winning the championship – which goes all the way back to Brawn GP in 2009 and Red Bull-Renault in 2010 – also owes a lot to the evolution of the rules to help on the chassis front too.

Truly equal engines has played a role in aiding McLaren's rise to the top

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

The introduction of the cost cap has meant that manufacturer teams can no longer throw tens of millions of pounds more at car development than anyone else. Now, it is about being smarter, not having the biggest wallet.

There is also a bit of a handicap system in place with F1’s Aerodynamic Testing Restrictions helping close up the grid a bit with its sliding scale of wind tunnel and CFD computing power. But there is another important truth to what McLaren has pulled off this year in winning as a customer team, and that is that it simply did a better job that everyone – and most especially the works Mercedes squad which cannot hide from the fact that it has the same engine…

That is why Mercedes boss Toto Wolff admitted that being beaten by a customer team was not such a bad thing for his squad – because it acts as a reality check for what is possible.

"They have equal opportunity like we do," said Wolff, as he felt it would be wrong to suggest that rule changes were behind McLaren’s success. "When you look at cost cap, clearly that has an effect. When you look at ATR, we are fourth in the championship now, that is 20% more ATR than McLaren, which is advantageous.

"But that is not the reason why they won. They won because of good engineering, as simple as that. Good engineering, brave engineering, the right leadership and good drivers, two drivers that were scoring - and you have to give them credit for that. When you see where McLaren came from a year and a half, they weren't even making it out of Q1, to a race-winning car at the end of last year and now a winning constructor."

F1 has changed a lot since Dennis’s famous remark. And critically, customer teams are now championship players.

Can McLaren defend its title in 2025?

Photo by: Colin McMaster / Motorsport Images