McLaren had Settled for Montoya Win

Montoya was running ahead of teammate Kimi Raikkonen when race leader Fernando Alonso retired after brushing the wall. Switching positions would have guaranteed Raikkonen the 10 points for his World Championship bid.

But Dennis has admitted that the team had decided that their drivers should hold position and allow Montoya to head Raikkonen across the finish line.

The decision to not allow the two drivers to battle each other was not conveyed to either driver during the race however - because the team did not want to cause any unnecessary frustration.

"We decided to slow the pace of both cars after the Renault went out and they were driving to a 1-2 and not racing each other," said Dennis. "Managing that is not as simple as you might think, because you've got two guys who want to race and that puts a bit more tension on the pit wall."

The decision to allow Montoya to take the victory was fuelled in part by the fact that Raikkonen was suffering from a steering problem, which effectively meant that he would have struggled to overtake a fired up Montoya for the win.

Dennis said, however, that the team did not inform Montoya of Raikkonen's problem, partly to avoid other teams finding out about the drama. This factor caused some initial reluctance from the Colombian to slow his pace once Alonso was out.

"Juan Pablo is calm and struggled initially to understand why we were slowing him down," explained Dennis. "Although we speak in code on the radio we didn't feel it was appropriate to tell him Kimi was not in good enough shape to challenge him.

"We definitively put the decision to come 1-2 first and there was no way Kimi would have been permitted to race."