Ron Dennis, the chairman and driving force behind McLaren Mercedes, is expected to announce today that he is standing down from all involvement with Formula One operations as part of a deal to keep Lewis Hamilton with the team.
Dennis will address a press conference at the McLaren headquarters outside Woking, Surrey, this morning, where it is thought he will say that he is to remain chairman of the McLaren Group but will busy himself with the company’s road car manufacturing operations and leave Martin Whitmarsh, who replaced him as team principal last month, in total charge of Formula One activities.
Dennis’s expected move comes in the wake of mounting speculation that he may have played a key role in the background to events at the Australian and Malaysian Grands Prix, where Hamilton and Dave Ryan, the McLaren sporting director who has since been sacked, were exposed as having tried to deceive the stewards.
The key question was whether Dennis had spoken to Ryan between the two hearings, when Ryan and Hamilton lied about the circumstances in which Jarno Trulli, the Toyota driver, had passed Hamilton in Melbourne.
Relations between Dennis and Hamilton, particularly with his father Anthony, who acts as his manager, are at an all-time low and with the FIA axe swinging over the team he started his career with as a mechanic, Dennis is prepared to sacrifice himself to ease the punishment.
Dennis and FIA president Max Mosley detest each other famously, but as the team was fined £50million for their role in an industrial espionage episode involving Ferrari documents just 18 months ago, he is alarmed at the prospect of what might happen in two weeks when the disrepute charge is heard.
Dennis’s ‘second’ departure, which follows his decision to hand over the role of team principal to long-serving lieutenant Martin Whitmarsh on March 1 after three decades of hands-on control, will be seen as a pre-emptive strike ahead of the FIA’s hearing on April 29 into why McLaren lied to race stewards after last month’s Australian Grand Prix.
He will move from the shadows to obscurity. It remains to be seen if he will even attend races, though it is unlikely that he will have any role calling the shots from the pit wall.
McLaren will probably try to spin this morning’s announcement as Dennis opting to devote himself to the road-car side of the company, but in truth his speech is a coded attempt to defuse the controversy raging over Hamilton, who will today avoid all media engagements ahead of Sunday’s Chinese Grand Prix - which could again put him in breach of the regulations.
FIA president Max Mosley is known to dislike Dennis - and that, in part, explains the zealous approach the FIA are applying to their investigations. Dennis, under pressure from sponsors, is aware that should he offer himself up as a sacrifice the sting will be taken out of the tail.
It is understood that Hamilton Snr and Mosley have been in contact over the last few days, with both keen to see Dennis leave the sport. The Hamiltons have sided with Whitmarsh since the scandal broke prior to the Malaysian Grand Prix a fortnight ago.
| 
|