(While writing TEAMWORK, The Biography Of The McLaren F1 Team (published 1996), I was given unprecedented access to its inner workings.
Some senior personnel worried that the hefty tome might serve as a handbook to help rival teams become winners. But none of them had McLaren's main ingredient for success: the most successful team boss in F1 history, Ron Dennis.)
In 1966, the year Bruce McLaren first entered a car bearing his name in F1 racing, Ron Dennis was beginning his career in motorsport. Two years later, when Bruce won McLaren's first Grand Prix, Ron was a mechanic on an opposing team. In 1970, the year Bruce was killed, Ron took the decision that would eventually merge his own destiny with that of McLaren. Born in Woking in 1947 Ron left school after taking his O-levels and in 1965 began an apprenticeship with an automotive engineering company based at the old Brooklands race circuit in nearby Byfleet. Following a take-over the premises became the headquarters for the Cooper Car Company and Ron began working for the race car manufacturer. After a period on the production line building cars for F2 and F3 racing, Ron was transferred to the Cooper F1 team, where, in 1966 and still in his teens he went to his first race as a mechanic on the Cooper driven by the Austrian Jochen Rindt in the Mexican Grand Prix. When Rindt moved to Brabham for the 1968 season Ron went with him as his personal mechanic. In 1969 Rindt left Brabham for Lotus (and was killed at the 1970 Italian Grand Prix), but Ron stayed at Brabham, where he became Chief Mechanic and where the flash of inspiration occurred that set him on course for the position he holds today.
While the Brabham cars were being shipped from the US Grand Prix to the last race of the 1970 season, in Mexico, Ron had a rare few days holiday in Acapulco. There, lying beside a pool in the Mexican sun, he contemplated his future. Though just 23 years old, he was in charge of preparing the Brabham cars, looking after much of the team's business affairs, even handling the prize money. Despite feeling somewhat over-awed by the responsibility Ron suddenly realised he was doing everything necessary to run a team. And so, he thought, why not run my own team?
Once his mind was made up the several characteristics that became his trademark were applied to forming his team. Among them was an obsession with cleanliness. As a mechanic, Ron hated getting his clothes soiled and his hands dirty and within half an hour of going home at night he had scrubbed himself spotlessly clean. He treated racing cars similarly. With his conviction that just because something was mechanical, it didn't have to be dirty, after each race Ron had what he called a 'Dirty Day,' when he would spend hours taking a car apart, meticulously cleaning every single component, then re-assembling them. The cleaning up process he disliked, but systematically putting the car back together again gave him great satisfaction, as did the pleasure of admiring the gleaming finished product. Top quality presentation became a cornerstone of his team-building philosophy, as did the pursuit of excellence, which he approached with the same zeal lavished on his racing cars. Brought into play was a passion for precision and an almost fanatical attention to detail. There were also intense powers of concentration, an unwavering determination to succeed and a relentless ambition to push that success beyond established frontiers. Any high profile authority figure possessed with such a combination of potentially aggressive personality traits risks being labelled something rather less than lovelable. His steely resolve can be intimidating and outsiders having occasional contact with his self-admitted often stern presence have called him cold, abrasive, egotistical, aloof, arrogant - characteristics that have also been attributed to his team.
Yet throughout McLaren scarcely a disparaging word can be heard about Ron Dennis. Instead, there is universal admiration and respect. Within the team he is regarded, at worst, as a benevolent dictator and, by those who know him best, as a caring and sensitive man. Rather than abusing his position of power he has taken advantage of it on numerous occasions to help employees, friends, even F1 rivals, sort out personal difficulties. Most of all, the McLaren people say, he is an inspirational leader and a motivator of the highest order. Just where all of this comes from, the man himself is not sure.
"You see, I have always believed that if you really want to do something, you can do it. It's like climbing a mountain of ambition. If things out of your control have an influence on the path you take, you can fall off. Some people get catapulted up the mountain by an amazing stroke of good fortune. But by and large, if you've climbed up the mountain in a sure-footed way and reached the summit, the path you have taken brings into your character one essential ingredient which allows you to stay on top: which is a wealth of experience. With that experience you can build on your successes and go beyond previous limits. I just don't think you have a limit. The possibilities are limitless."
His hard climb to the top was not without its pitfalls. In 1972, while operating Rondel Racing with his partner Neil Trundle, Ron worked himself into a state of exhaustion preparing the cars for a F2 race and fell asleep at the wheel while driving his E-type Jaguar. In the crash he received severe facial lacerations (repaired by plastic surgery) and a serious eye injury that put him out of commission for two months. Typically, he turned this negative into a positive. "In fact, it was probably the most positive thing that ever happened to me because it pulled me into management. We employed another mechanic to do my job and I ran the team. That was the big starting point." For Ron, there is no finishing point because, as he is fond of saying, "To stand still in motor racing is to go backwards."
To make rapid progress - from Rondel through his Project Two, Three and Four teams - he concentrated on developing comprehensive professionalism, highlighted by immaculate preparation and presentation. The factory floors were painted frequently, the teams brought a signwriter to the circuits to touch up the paintwork on the complex colour schemes of the cars and the truck driver was instructed to park in the paddock so that the names on the tyres were all pointing precisely in the same direction. At that time, when the commercial potential of motor racing was in its infancy, the Dennis-run teams were well ahead of the competition and Ron's reputation escalated accordingly. Among those impressed was McLaren's then main sponsor Philip Morris, which arranged a merger with Project Four as a cure for the doldrums in which Marlboro McLaren had floundered for several years. Thus, at the age of 34, Ron joined McLaren to start the 1981 season and the record of success that followed is a direct result of the goals he set.
McLaren's stated goal is to win every F1 race. It hasn't achieved that, but it has come closer than most. In terms of Grand Prix victories only the team founded by Enzo Ferrari has more, albeit benefitting from having a 16-year head start on McLaren. To date the legendary Italian team has 221 Grand Prix wins versus 182 for McLaren (Williams ranks third with 114 wins). 158 of McLaren's wins - and 17 of the team's 20 Constructors' and Drivers' Championships - have come under the leadership of Ron Dennis. And while the team has occasionally faltered during his tenure it has seldom looked anything less than a potential winner. Even during the team's winless periods frontrunning rivals watched their mirrors expectantly for McLaren's inevitable return to the forefront.
According to Ron, a main reason why Mclaren is such a perennial powerhouse is: "Our attention to detail. Every single detail is important. You break down the whole Grand Prix scenario into the tiniest details. Individually, you might barely perceive them, hardly measure them. But you look at each of these facets and try to improve them. Those little improvements add up to considerable improvement. "You have to start with the really fundamental basics. When someone walks into a room I notice straightaway such details as fingernails, whether they are cleaned and manicured, how the person is dressed, whether they're scruffy or neat and tidy. If you don't have respect for your own body then I think you tend to lack personal discipline."
Ron's legendary personal discipline (which includes a steady regimen of 14-hour days in his office, interrupted by travels to the races, (where he goes to "relax") is matched by a continual quest for self-improvement, especially for the acquisition of knowledge. While at school he was not a diligent student, though his subsequent development of his intellect and the eloquence with which he can express it - through 'Ronspeak,' which is sometimes ridiculed for its complexity, but seldom for the profundity of its content - would now easily enable him to stand tall in the halls of academe. Certainly, he could write the definitive textbook on how to create and run a successful F1 team. Listening to him talk is like being persuasively lectured on the art of winning.
"Built into my management approach is a commitment to many philosophies that I believe are important to maintaining and perpetuating a successful company. My knowledge comes from a commitment excellence, to learn and understand those elements which can contribute to the process of success. That can range from attending management and motivational seminars, reading management books and magazines (such as The Harvard Business Week and The Economist), wrestling with the concept of lateral thinking (influenced by the concept's inventor, Edward de Bono) and working hard to understand people. "I think the software of the company, its human resources, is absolutely vital to success. So we put a great emphasis on keeping our human resource quotient in its optimum frame of mind. We go into great detail to create the right working environment. This includes such things as carefully choosing the colour scheme for our offices and factory, maintaining the correct temperature and humidity, cleanliness, lighting, even the smell - we have used fragrances in our working environment. If you go into a room smelling of dirty coffee cups, with dirty windows and wilting flowers your mindset is completely different from going into a clean, well-lit and pleasant-smelling room."
Ron is a sore loser and has admitted feeling physical pain on the Monday morning after not winning a Grand Prix. Failure to succeed only inspires him to try harder and at the start of every day he hits the ground running. "There is a very brief period, that lasts from the moment I wake up to the moment my feet hit the floor at the side of the bed, that is just about the only amount of time I have where I could not be motivated. When things aren't working and you want them to work you either allow it to demotivate or motivate yourself. If I'm not motivated there is absolutely no possibility of motivating the rest of the people in the company.
"So, a fundamental requirement of being the head of the company is to be the prime motivating force. What you hope to do with all the people around you is develop a good positive attitude so that you're not alone in the process. And we've got people who have been with us for years and years who have a conviction that when things go wrong everything will eventually come right. We've had problems in the past and worked them out. Motivation is a strange but essential ingredient in the process of winning. You would think that it struggles in adversity, but it's the opposite. When you are winning everything, then motivation becomes a major issue. Whether you're winning or not winning, there is no solution other than hard work. Not just the physical, but also the thought processes."
Ron has developed his thinking powers to a very high degree and to illustrate the mindset necessary to think productively he draws an analogy to a sprinter preparing for a 100 meter race. "He has total concentration on what he is about to do. And just think of the kind of advantage you can have if you train yourself to apply that level of concentration on an hour-to-hour basis. Thinking is a very cheap commodity. The only thing it's costing you is time, but in the end well-considered creative thought processes will save you time. So, you train yourself to think in a disciplined way, playing a kind of mental three-dimensional chess to make sure you've covered all the options to solve the many complex issues there are in this business. You really have to keep your mind focussed and watch that everything functions in an optimum way. It can be very wearing, very fatiguing, and take all emotion out of me."
In Ron's mind there is no room for negative thoughts, because they are non-productive and a waste of energy. He has become a master at positive thinking, and also at controlling his emotions, in the belief that the extremes at either end of the emotional scale are obstacles on the route to success. He has developed enough mental strength to if not eliminate any feeling of depression, at least keep it at bay, and he also thinks it necessary to keep a careful check on "non-productive and non-professional" displays of elation. "When you see a doctor delivering a baby you don't see him jumping up and down. He has a professional approach to something which is an emotional moment. That's the way we want to be. The moment you stop being professional is the moment you start the downward spiral to failure.
"If people say we look sterile and unemotional from the outside, I do think there is a level of warmth and commitment to each other that you can only feel on the inside. We have a personality that I hope reflects honesty, integrity, focus. We are also seen as predatory, a word I quite like. We carefully stalk and systematically approach our prey - which is winning a race. That aggressive approach to our goal is tempered by values within the company where we are caring, supportive, loyal to our employees.
"I think the thing that makes McLaren successful is that it is a very successful team, and team is the key word. My role in that team is to put it together, making sure that all the political, promotional and organisational considerations marry. I have to package the elements and make it a team effort. It's a knitting together of egos, likes, dislikes, motivating forces, things that destabilise, things that harmonise. Having the ability to try and dissect all these things and then getting them to mesh together, I'd like to think that's what I'm reasonably competent at."
In his career to date Ron Dennis has come a long way and brought a lot of people with him. He has become a very wealthy man and he shares the wealth - the McLaren employees are probably the best paid in the business. He is a racer and also a businessman and when discussing the relative satisfaction he gets from both pursuits there is no question where his heart lies...
"The driving force has got to be a desire to be the best, not just to make money. I've often said I would prefer to be recognised as a successful businessman, before a successful motorsport director. But if it came to a choice, I would most certainly choose winning a Grand Prix over making a million dollars."
In 1966, the year Bruce McLaren first entered a car bearing his name in F1 racing, Ron Dennis was beginning his career in motorsport. Two years later, when Bruce won McLaren's first Grand Prix, Ron was a mechanic on an opposing team. In 1970, the year Bruce was killed, Ron took the decision that would eventually merge his own destiny with that of McLaren. Born in Woking in 1947 Ron left school after taking his O-levels and in 1965 began an apprenticeship with an automotive engineering company based at the old Brooklands race circuit in nearby Byfleet. Following a take-over the premises became the headquarters for the Cooper Car Company and Ron began working for the race car manufacturer. After a period on the production line building cars for F2 and F3 racing, Ron was transferred to the Cooper F1 team, where, in 1966 and still in his teens he went to his first race as a mechanic on the Cooper driven by the Austrian Jochen Rindt in the Mexican Grand Prix. When Rindt moved to Brabham for the 1968 season Ron went with him as his personal mechanic. In 1969 Rindt left Brabham for Lotus (and was killed at the 1970 Italian Grand Prix), but Ron stayed at Brabham, where he became Chief Mechanic and where the flash of inspiration occurred that set him on course for the position he holds today.
While the Brabham cars were being shipped from the US Grand Prix to the last race of the 1970 season, in Mexico, Ron had a rare few days holiday in Acapulco. There, lying beside a pool in the Mexican sun, he contemplated his future. Though just 23 years old, he was in charge of preparing the Brabham cars, looking after much of the team's business affairs, even handling the prize money. Despite feeling somewhat over-awed by the responsibility Ron suddenly realised he was doing everything necessary to run a team. And so, he thought, why not run my own team?
Once his mind was made up the several characteristics that became his trademark were applied to forming his team. Among them was an obsession with cleanliness. As a mechanic, Ron hated getting his clothes soiled and his hands dirty and within half an hour of going home at night he had scrubbed himself spotlessly clean. He treated racing cars similarly. With his conviction that just because something was mechanical, it didn't have to be dirty, after each race Ron had what he called a 'Dirty Day,' when he would spend hours taking a car apart, meticulously cleaning every single component, then re-assembling them. The cleaning up process he disliked, but systematically putting the car back together again gave him great satisfaction, as did the pleasure of admiring the gleaming finished product. Top quality presentation became a cornerstone of his team-building philosophy, as did the pursuit of excellence, which he approached with the same zeal lavished on his racing cars. Brought into play was a passion for precision and an almost fanatical attention to detail. There were also intense powers of concentration, an unwavering determination to succeed and a relentless ambition to push that success beyond established frontiers. Any high profile authority figure possessed with such a combination of potentially aggressive personality traits risks being labelled something rather less than lovelable. His steely resolve can be intimidating and outsiders having occasional contact with his self-admitted often stern presence have called him cold, abrasive, egotistical, aloof, arrogant - characteristics that have also been attributed to his team.
Yet throughout McLaren scarcely a disparaging word can be heard about Ron Dennis. Instead, there is universal admiration and respect. Within the team he is regarded, at worst, as a benevolent dictator and, by those who know him best, as a caring and sensitive man. Rather than abusing his position of power he has taken advantage of it on numerous occasions to help employees, friends, even F1 rivals, sort out personal difficulties. Most of all, the McLaren people say, he is an inspirational leader and a motivator of the highest order. Just where all of this comes from, the man himself is not sure.
"You see, I have always believed that if you really want to do something, you can do it. It's like climbing a mountain of ambition. If things out of your control have an influence on the path you take, you can fall off. Some people get catapulted up the mountain by an amazing stroke of good fortune. But by and large, if you've climbed up the mountain in a sure-footed way and reached the summit, the path you have taken brings into your character one essential ingredient which allows you to stay on top: which is a wealth of experience. With that experience you can build on your successes and go beyond previous limits. I just don't think you have a limit. The possibilities are limitless."
His hard climb to the top was not without its pitfalls. In 1972, while operating Rondel Racing with his partner Neil Trundle, Ron worked himself into a state of exhaustion preparing the cars for a F2 race and fell asleep at the wheel while driving his E-type Jaguar. In the crash he received severe facial lacerations (repaired by plastic surgery) and a serious eye injury that put him out of commission for two months. Typically, he turned this negative into a positive. "In fact, it was probably the most positive thing that ever happened to me because it pulled me into management. We employed another mechanic to do my job and I ran the team. That was the big starting point." For Ron, there is no finishing point because, as he is fond of saying, "To stand still in motor racing is to go backwards."
To make rapid progress - from Rondel through his Project Two, Three and Four teams - he concentrated on developing comprehensive professionalism, highlighted by immaculate preparation and presentation. The factory floors were painted frequently, the teams brought a signwriter to the circuits to touch up the paintwork on the complex colour schemes of the cars and the truck driver was instructed to park in the paddock so that the names on the tyres were all pointing precisely in the same direction. At that time, when the commercial potential of motor racing was in its infancy, the Dennis-run teams were well ahead of the competition and Ron's reputation escalated accordingly. Among those impressed was McLaren's then main sponsor Philip Morris, which arranged a merger with Project Four as a cure for the doldrums in which Marlboro McLaren had floundered for several years. Thus, at the age of 34, Ron joined McLaren to start the 1981 season and the record of success that followed is a direct result of the goals he set.
McLaren's stated goal is to win every F1 race. It hasn't achieved that, but it has come closer than most. In terms of Grand Prix victories only the team founded by Enzo Ferrari has more, albeit benefitting from having a 16-year head start on McLaren. To date the legendary Italian team has 221 Grand Prix wins versus 182 for McLaren (Williams ranks third with 114 wins). 158 of McLaren's wins - and 17 of the team's 20 Constructors' and Drivers' Championships - have come under the leadership of Ron Dennis. And while the team has occasionally faltered during his tenure it has seldom looked anything less than a potential winner. Even during the team's winless periods frontrunning rivals watched their mirrors expectantly for McLaren's inevitable return to the forefront.
According to Ron, a main reason why Mclaren is such a perennial powerhouse is: "Our attention to detail. Every single detail is important. You break down the whole Grand Prix scenario into the tiniest details. Individually, you might barely perceive them, hardly measure them. But you look at each of these facets and try to improve them. Those little improvements add up to considerable improvement. "You have to start with the really fundamental basics. When someone walks into a room I notice straightaway such details as fingernails, whether they are cleaned and manicured, how the person is dressed, whether they're scruffy or neat and tidy. If you don't have respect for your own body then I think you tend to lack personal discipline."
Ron's legendary personal discipline (which includes a steady regimen of 14-hour days in his office, interrupted by travels to the races, (where he goes to "relax") is matched by a continual quest for self-improvement, especially for the acquisition of knowledge. While at school he was not a diligent student, though his subsequent development of his intellect and the eloquence with which he can express it - through 'Ronspeak,' which is sometimes ridiculed for its complexity, but seldom for the profundity of its content - would now easily enable him to stand tall in the halls of academe. Certainly, he could write the definitive textbook on how to create and run a successful F1 team. Listening to him talk is like being persuasively lectured on the art of winning.
"Built into my management approach is a commitment to many philosophies that I believe are important to maintaining and perpetuating a successful company. My knowledge comes from a commitment excellence, to learn and understand those elements which can contribute to the process of success. That can range from attending management and motivational seminars, reading management books and magazines (such as The Harvard Business Week and The Economist), wrestling with the concept of lateral thinking (influenced by the concept's inventor, Edward de Bono) and working hard to understand people. "I think the software of the company, its human resources, is absolutely vital to success. So we put a great emphasis on keeping our human resource quotient in its optimum frame of mind. We go into great detail to create the right working environment. This includes such things as carefully choosing the colour scheme for our offices and factory, maintaining the correct temperature and humidity, cleanliness, lighting, even the smell - we have used fragrances in our working environment. If you go into a room smelling of dirty coffee cups, with dirty windows and wilting flowers your mindset is completely different from going into a clean, well-lit and pleasant-smelling room."
Ron is a sore loser and has admitted feeling physical pain on the Monday morning after not winning a Grand Prix. Failure to succeed only inspires him to try harder and at the start of every day he hits the ground running. "There is a very brief period, that lasts from the moment I wake up to the moment my feet hit the floor at the side of the bed, that is just about the only amount of time I have where I could not be motivated. When things aren't working and you want them to work you either allow it to demotivate or motivate yourself. If I'm not motivated there is absolutely no possibility of motivating the rest of the people in the company.
"So, a fundamental requirement of being the head of the company is to be the prime motivating force. What you hope to do with all the people around you is develop a good positive attitude so that you're not alone in the process. And we've got people who have been with us for years and years who have a conviction that when things go wrong everything will eventually come right. We've had problems in the past and worked them out. Motivation is a strange but essential ingredient in the process of winning. You would think that it struggles in adversity, but it's the opposite. When you are winning everything, then motivation becomes a major issue. Whether you're winning or not winning, there is no solution other than hard work. Not just the physical, but also the thought processes."
Ron has developed his thinking powers to a very high degree and to illustrate the mindset necessary to think productively he draws an analogy to a sprinter preparing for a 100 meter race. "He has total concentration on what he is about to do. And just think of the kind of advantage you can have if you train yourself to apply that level of concentration on an hour-to-hour basis. Thinking is a very cheap commodity. The only thing it's costing you is time, but in the end well-considered creative thought processes will save you time. So, you train yourself to think in a disciplined way, playing a kind of mental three-dimensional chess to make sure you've covered all the options to solve the many complex issues there are in this business. You really have to keep your mind focussed and watch that everything functions in an optimum way. It can be very wearing, very fatiguing, and take all emotion out of me."
In Ron's mind there is no room for negative thoughts, because they are non-productive and a waste of energy. He has become a master at positive thinking, and also at controlling his emotions, in the belief that the extremes at either end of the emotional scale are obstacles on the route to success. He has developed enough mental strength to if not eliminate any feeling of depression, at least keep it at bay, and he also thinks it necessary to keep a careful check on "non-productive and non-professional" displays of elation. "When you see a doctor delivering a baby you don't see him jumping up and down. He has a professional approach to something which is an emotional moment. That's the way we want to be. The moment you stop being professional is the moment you start the downward spiral to failure.
"If people say we look sterile and unemotional from the outside, I do think there is a level of warmth and commitment to each other that you can only feel on the inside. We have a personality that I hope reflects honesty, integrity, focus. We are also seen as predatory, a word I quite like. We carefully stalk and systematically approach our prey - which is winning a race. That aggressive approach to our goal is tempered by values within the company where we are caring, supportive, loyal to our employees.
"I think the thing that makes McLaren successful is that it is a very successful team, and team is the key word. My role in that team is to put it together, making sure that all the political, promotional and organisational considerations marry. I have to package the elements and make it a team effort. It's a knitting together of egos, likes, dislikes, motivating forces, things that destabilise, things that harmonise. Having the ability to try and dissect all these things and then getting them to mesh together, I'd like to think that's what I'm reasonably competent at."
In his career to date Ron Dennis has come a long way and brought a lot of people with him. He has become a very wealthy man and he shares the wealth - the McLaren employees are probably the best paid in the business. He is a racer and also a businessman and when discussing the relative satisfaction he gets from both pursuits there is no question where his heart lies...
"The driving force has got to be a desire to be the best, not just to make money. I've often said I would prefer to be recognised as a successful businessman, before a successful motorsport director. But if it came to a choice, I would most certainly choose winning a Grand Prix over making a million dollars."
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| F1speedwriter with the top team leader, Ron Dennis |
When a book about RD, Gerald?
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