Ron Dennis: The Man Who Shaped McLaren

In 1987 Ron Dennis and Ayrton Senna were half a million dollars apart on Senna’s contract, and neither side wanted to back down. Dennis suggested to toss a coin, and explained to Senna how it worked. They practiced, and tossed, and Dennis won.

It was much later that both of them found out that the contract ran for three years. The toss appeared to be worth more than half a million, it was worth $1.5 million.

Why I am telling this. This was the only story I know about him that was not about control.

Now, the stories that are about control.

This guy ran the McLaren Formula 1 team for over 20 years, from 1981 to 2009. The results were obvious: by the time he left, the team had won 158 Grands Prix and 17 world championships.

The basics, for people who came in late

Starting on the tools

I thought he must be a university graduate at least, and only later, I learned that he left school at 16, and went to work as an apprentice at Thomson & Taylor, a garage near the old Brooklands circuit.

When he was 18 years old, he already worked as a mechanic, his working place changed to Cooper, on Jochen Rindt’s car. In 1968, Rindt moved to Brabham and took Dennis with him. Later, Rindt left, but Dennis stayed and continued working for Jack Brabham’s car instead. Now, who do you think is behind all the F1 team? No, it is not a race engineer, you know, the one who is out there on the pit wall, wearing a headset. It is someone like Dennis, someone from the garage, who builds all this, and you can see later only everything he has built.

Dennis was obsessed with clean floors and identical uniforms to that extent that people even made fun of him. But I guess, it was just a mechanic’s habit, nothing more. Rondel Racing belonged to him and Neil Trundle, another mechanic, so they habits must have been just the same. Then, the French company called Motul paid for the Formula 2 cars. They expected to build also a Formula 1 car, but 1973 was a bad year for the industry, so, it has never happened. The oil crisis hit and Motul left. Dennis went looking for Marlboro money, founded Project Three in 1975 and Project Four in 1976, and Project Four won the British Formula 3 title in 1979 and in 1980.

McLaren, by way of a merger

Williams had the champion in 1980, Alan Jones. McLaren by then had the name and not a great deal else. What it did share with Project Four was a sponsor. John Hogan at Marlboro was paying for both of them, and he pushed for the merger. The new company was McLaren International. By 1981 Dennis had bought out the other shareholders. The car was called MP4, which at the time meant Marlboro Project Four. The merger also brought in John Barnard, who wanted a chassis made of carbon fiber. The MP4/1 had one, and every Formula 1 car since has had one too. First the engines came from TAG-Porsche, and later from Honda. Lauda drove for him, then Prost, then Senna. For those who know, you understand why it is so difficult to believe that all these names belong to the history of the same team, and they all are inside one decade. McLaren lost one race in 1988. Out of sixteen. I checked all the records, so difficult to believe it was. After Senna left there was a gap, and then Mika Häkkinen won in 1998 and 1999. Dennis had also signed a young Lewis Hamilton to the team’s driver program years earlier, and he was still team principal in 2008 when Hamilton won his first title.

The championships under Dennis

Road cars

The McLaren F1 road car came out in 1992. IT was the idea of Gordon Murray, Dennis just agreed on this. Personally, I have always believed that the SLR was a strange car for McLaren to put his name on. It was a Mercedes, but when their partnership ended, many people, including me, believed that the very idea of road cars was at the end. But no, Dennis thought differently. He brought McLaren Automotive back as a proper manufacturer the following year, and already by 2011, people could literally go and buy a 12C. Dennis said later that the car had some technical problems, and they were not even solved before the car went to market. Why so? Investors wanted that. Yes, I agree that this is not the thing a chairman should have said, but it shows what kind of a person Dennis was.

The car that matters for this site is the P1 from 2013. It was McLaren’s first hybrid road car, 375 were built, and it had 903 horsepower. Nobody bought one for the fuel economy. What it did, along with the Porsche 918 and the LaFerrari, was make hybrid power respectable among people who buy very fast cars, and McLaren has stayed with it since, most obviously with the plug-in Artura, which came after Dennis was gone.

2007, and the way it ended

In 2007 a McLaren employee was found with confidential Ferrari material. The FIA fined the team $100 million, a record, and took away all of its constructors’ points for the year, though Hamilton and Fernando Alonso kept theirs. It happened during a long and very public dispute between Dennis and the FIA president, Max Mosley, and that does not make it look any better. He gave the team principal job to Martin Whitmarsh in 2009 and came back as group CEO in 2014. In November 2016 the other shareholders put him on paid leave, reportedly over his support for a Chinese takeover bid they did not want, and in June 2017 he sold his shares for a reported £275 million. That was the end of 37 years. I was married into the sport long enough to know that exits like this are common, and it still seemed like a poor way to send off the man who built most of the place.

What is left

The McLaren Technology Centre in Woking is left, which Queen Elizabeth II opened in 2004. Also, most of the existing F1 factories run more or less the way he made it. Also, a racing team selling road cars doesn’t sound strange anymore, it is also what is left.

Most of his work now is charity. He spent 15 years co-chairing Tommy’s, which funds research into pregnancy complications, and he chairs Podium Analytics, which studies injuries in sport. He showed that sometimes, industry and charity can collaborate, and I am glad his life was not only about the trophies.

What readers ask about Ron Dennis

01

Who is Ron Dennis?

A British businessman and former McLaren boss. He ran the McLaren F1 team from 1981 to 2009 and founded McLaren Automotive in 2010.

02

How old is Ron Dennis?

He was born on June 1, 1947, in Woking, England, which makes him 79 in 2026.

03

How many championships did McLaren win under Ron Dennis?

Seventeen: ten drivers’ titles and seven constructors’ titles, along with 158 Grand Prix wins between 1981 and 2016.

04

Did Ron Dennis found McLaren?

No. Bruce McLaren founded the team. Dennis merged his Project Four team with McLaren in 1980 and later founded McLaren Automotive.

05

Why did Ron Dennis leave McLaren?

Fellow shareholders removed him as CEO in November 2016 after disagreements. He sold his shares in June 2017 for a reported £275 million.

06

Is Ron Dennis a knight?

Yes. He was knighted in the 2024 New Year Honours for services to industry and charity, after being made a CBE in 2000.

Annie is an automotive writer for GreenyCars. Years around Formula 1 paddocks during her marriage to a racing driver left her with strong opinions about drivers and team bosses, and she now writes about everything from Grand Prix racing to EVs and hybrids.