Why McLaren might no longer need F1

This is not how our celebration of the McLaren Formula 1 team's magnificent history should wrap up. But the reality is brutal. This final chapter is the first in our six-part series to feature not a single grand prix victory, never mind a tilt for a world title. It is a sorry tale of a team in decline, of monumentally wasted opportunity and the ultimate estrangement of the man who was the spark for some of the sport's greatest happenings.

But does it also represent a possible ending for one of the greatest of F1 epics? This we cannot know.

Flick back 10 years and nobody could have predicted how hard McLaren's F1 fall would be. At the start of 2009, the team's mercurial young star Lewis Hamilton was riding high off the back of his first world championship. Sure, he'd needed a huge dose of Timo Glock-flavoured luck to secure it, but after all his team had been through this was vindication.

McLaren had ploughed through its darkest chapter since the death of founder Bruce nearly 40 years earlier. The 2007 'Spygate' saga involving confidential Ferrari documents, an eye-watering $100million fine from a stern governing body, further financial loss from humiliating championship disqualification and the mental scars of Fernando Alonso's turbulent single year partnering the rookie Hamilton... Ron Dennis and his team had triumphed through it all.

Yet by 2013, the wheels had come off - and six years later they still haven't been found. Hamilton, disenchanted, left at the end of 2012, choosing to forge new partnerships with old faces at Mercedes. It would prove the best decision of his life. At McLaren, engines badged by the three-pointed star still powered its F1 cars (for now), but as mere supplier. The process of their mutual devolution was in full swing.

Dennis had abdicated at the start of 2009, but still kept a grip on the wider group and formed McLaren Automotive to build ambitious road cars. To the outside world, Dennis had placed his trust in loyal lieutenant Martin Whitmarsh to take the F1 helm. The reality was increasing pressure, both internally and less directly from Max Mosley's FIA regime, had forced his hand. For the good of the team, Ron stepped aside - but to Whitmarsh's frustration and disappointment poked, prodded and undermined behind his back. It hardly helped that McLaren's knack for building great F1 cars had also slipped.

Good old Jenson Button had emerged from his three-year stint as Hamilton's team-mate with his reputation enhanced, and now called on all his vast experience to lead the team through a choppy 2013.

He was joined by Mexican Sergio Perez, fresh from his Sauber apprenticeship and seemingly ready to grab his chance at a top team. Except his timing was off. This was now anything but a top team.

Button finished the season ninth in the points, a fourth in Brazil his best score, with Perez down in 12th (so much for the graduation: he'd finished two places higher with Sauber in 2012).

Not only was McLaren winless for the first time since 2006, it had also failed to place a driver on a podium for the first time since the last desperate days of Teddy Mayer back in 1980. At the sharp end, Sebastian Vettel and Red Bull - to think, a team owned by some tacky energy drinks company - romped to four consecutive titles masterminded by, of all people, Adrian Newey. Once of McLaren, he was relishing a new-found freedom at a team that empowered rather than subdued him.

Newey's former employer languished in fifth in the constructors' standings, 474 points adrift. Worse was to come. Following Vodafone's withdrawal at the end of 2013, 2014 was the first season in the commercial era that the team was without a title sponsor, and that remains the case.

Whitmarsh ultimately paid the price. Under his watch, McLaren had regained its composure, run by a decent, conciliatory man who the board - now dominated by the Bahrain Mumtalakat Holding Company - could trust and relate to. But in F1 only results count.

Dennis took his opportunity and convinced the board that he should regain control. It helped that the wider F1 landscape had by now changed dramatically since his departure five years earlier. Under Jean Todt, the old Mosley-FIA antagonism towards McLaren (and specifically Dennis) was ancient history. It was safe for Dennis to get back in the water, but Whitmarsh deserved better.

Not that results improved. Dennis's first move had been to draft Eric Boullier in to run the team day to day. The Frenchman's reputation had blossomed during his time as the boss of Enstone-based Lotus (now Renault) and he seemed the man to call the shots in 2014, as a new era of hybrid turbo power was ushered in.

That year, McLaren benefited from the same 1.6-litre hybrid turbo thrust that catapulted Hamilton to his second world title, as Mercedes nailed the new regs to a degree that embarrassed rivals Ferrari and Renault.

For Button and new team-mate Kevin Magnussen, it started well, the son of (brief) 1990s McLaren old boy Jan heading his team leader to a two-three podium double behind Hamilton in Australia (after Daniel Ricciardo's disqualification). But these are the only podium finishes of this chapter's timeframe.

By season's end, Button was eighth and Magnussen 11th in the points, with McLaren once again fifth in the teams' standings.

Mick Jagger once said: "You can't reheat a souffle." The truth is you can, as The Rolling Stones still strive to prove - although it rarely tastes as good. At least the Stones still have their moments when 'Mick 'n' Keef' shine a light on their old alchemy; for Dennis and McLaren, they barely stoked the dimmest of glows this time around - even when reviving an engine partnership from the team's most celebrated period.

The McLaren and Honda reunion in 2015 tapped directly into the deep well of nostalgia for the Prost and Senna era of the late 1980s.

Day-glo Marlboro McLaren-Hondas were the stuff upon which legends were built, and now two great racing companies joined forces again with the ambition to create fresh history.

And to cap it all, Fernando Alonso was back in a McLaren! Not only that, he returned to a team back in the clench of Ron Dennis, the man he came to despise during those terrible final months of 2007, and had even threatened to blackmail. How had this happened?

More pertinently, why? The answer was simple: because both needed the other, particularly so in the case of Alonso.

Between 2007 and 2015, the Spaniard's career had unravelled spectacularly as his back-to-back world titles for Renault in 2005-06 receded into history. 'Spygate' and his conduct during its revelation haunted Alonso as much as McLaren - perhaps even more.

In its aftermath, he was left to lick his wounds back at Renault for two years during which he was implicated in another scandal, the 2008 Singapore GP 'Crashgate' saga.

Ferrari offered the career reboot he so severely needed in 2010, and while his warrior reputation was restored during his eventful five seasons in red, his Maranello legacy is one of aching title near-misses.

By 2014, his stretched patience and his divisive personality led to fractures that could not be healed. Ferrari called his bluff - and then called on Red Bull's four-time world champion Sebastian Vettel to reboot again for 2015.

Alonso - to the minds of many the greatest, most complete F1 driver of his generation - was left high and dry. Red Bull didn't want him. It had heard the stories. Mercedes wouldn't touch him either, a by-association involvement in 'Spygate' too raw to be forgotten.

For all his brilliance, Alonso was judged to be damaged goods - or, more accurately, damaging goods.

Funny how circumstance and desperation can force past grievances to be put aside (if not truly forgiven by either Alonso or Dennis). But the sensational McLaren return would surely have wilted early without Boullier as a logical and reasonably minded buffer.

Still, how Alonso lasted four years second time around is remarkable in the context of his incendiary reputation. His patience was tested to new extremes.

But the great warrior almost seemed to revel in his tragedy, a Don Quixote figure tilting at windmills as he scrapped for minor points. During the three years of McLaren's disastrous Honda partnership, three fifth places were as good as it got.

But in a way, it didn't matter. How we'll remember him was enhanced anyway - although again he caused division. Comparing his Honda V6 to a GP2 engine over the radio at the company's home track of Suzuka, of all places, was the final straw for another Alonso-manufacturer relationship. Then again, could we really blame Alonso? The frustration, as Hamilton racked up victories and titles up ahead of him, must have been overwhelming.

Meanwhile, away from the shambles at the tracks Dennis wrestled to claw back control of his old empire.

Attempts to buy out the Bahrainis floundered, while his friendship with fellow shareholder Mansour Ojjeh was left in tatters by a personal falling out from which there could be no return. Ojjeh and the Bahraini shareholders pushed back - and then some.

Towards the end of 2016, as the Honda partnership trickled to a sorry end, Dennis found himself on gardening leave. By the summer of 2017 he'd resigned completely, cutting his ties with McLaren and ending a once-unbreakable association in a manner that was just plain sad. He'd lost - and the downfall was Shakespearean in its scope and bitterness.

In his place, an ambitious American marketeer arrived to revive past glories, consciously distancing the company from Dennis-era McLaren: MCL replaced MP4, papaya orange liveries returned, McLaren went back to the Indianapolis 500...

Zak Brown isn't just trying to create a distraction from McLaren's lost F1 mojo. The team is functioning in a changing world where old F1 certainties on its superiority no longer ring true.

Brown, a failed racing driver and self-made success as a sponsor hunter-gatherer, has even threatened an F1 withdrawal, unless F1's owners addresses the financial and commercial inequalities embedded by Bernie Ecclestone and Mosley.

And as blasphemous as it might seem for a team second only to Ferrari in terms of success, you could argue McLaren no longer needs F1, even if the company was hewn directly from its coalface.

The automotive arm conceived by Dennis thrives in a manner that threatens to become his most significant and lasting legacy from the near-40 years he chiselled away at McLaren in F1.


In his wake, the company is producing a range of road cars that increasingly astound. In the real world if not in F1, McLaren is now a match for Ferrari - if not superior to the Italian powerhouse. And that is remarkable.

Further expansion into technology and expertise beyond motorsport strengthens McLaren's lustre as a great British success story (funded inevitably by foreign investment).

So, as we bring this epic tale to a close, we wonder: are there new and exciting chapters still to be written for McLaren's intrepid grand prix adventure? Or is the team on the brink of what was once inconceivable? Could the end really be in sight for one of the greatest F1 stories ever told? If it isn't, the comeback that is so desperately required must be of a grade that would surpass the many accomplishments of the past 55 years.

"Life is measured in terms of achievement, not in years alone," said Bruce all those years ago.

His company has exceeded his wildest dreams, on both counts. But Lord knows what he would have made of it all.