Ron doubts Mika return

Hakkinen's name has also been linked to Williams but Dennis said: "I don't honestly know if there has been dialogue between Mika and Williams. I spoke to him before Monaco and I was due to meet him there an hour after I arrived, but I was delayed and he had gone.

"But, when did speak we had a discussion about many things and I didn't sense that he'd had any thoughts about a return. Going back to Finland and then away on holiday in Africa did not seem to me to be consistent with having detailed discussions about an F1 return. I know why he chose to retire and I don't see why those reasons no longer exist."

It has been suggested that a driver away from current F1 for two years would have difficulty in coming back and being competitive, but it was Dennis who brought Niki Lauda back in 1982, two years after he had walked away from the sport at the end of 1979. Two years later the Austrian won a third world title in a McLaren.

"The first question I would always ask is why they stopped," Dennis added. "With Niki it's a distant memory and I think he was a very different kind of racing driver. Racing came before anything else in his professional or personal life. And then when he went into his airline business, he approached that in the same way. But in the case of someone like Mika, where the decisions involved relationships within a family, I think that it would be harder for him to come back.

"To suddenly be away testing everywhere and devoting the type of total commitment you need to a racing programme would not, I imagine, be easy. It is always to the detriment of private life. But for someone like Jacques Villeneuve, who's also a pretty insular individual, it would possibly be easier. I do think that Jacques will drive a Williams and it will be interesting to see how he goes."

Frank Williams, meanwhile, has denied that his team has any firm date for the anticipated Villeneuve test.