26 How did Ron Dennis come to run McLaren ?
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This article is from the Motorsport FAQ, by A H Henry bspahh@midge.bath.ac.uk with numerous contributions by others.
26 How did Ron Dennis come to run McLaren ?
Ron Dennis started out as an apprentice at Thomson Taylor's, a famous
British business in the motor trade. When it was taken over by
Chipstead in the late Sixties Ron ended up as a mechanic on the Cooper
F1 team (Chipstead had just bought Cooper), and later moved to Brabham
as head mechanic, although as Sir Jack was retiring Ron found himself
doing a lot of the work of a team manager. He left in about '71 to set
up an F2 team with Neil Trundle (Rondel racing) -- the team was
renowned for its competence in preparing cars; it ran Brabhams
successfully for a while then commissioned the Motul F2 car (with
backing from the French oil company of the same name). This was quite
successful and there was talk of a Motul F1 car designed by Ray Jessop
for 1973 but the oil crisis hit and the money evaporated. The car later
became the Token (Tony Vlassopoulo and Ken Grob backed its completion;
Ron had nothing more to do with it AFAIK); Tom Pryce made his F1 debut
in it.
Ron then set up a number of F2 teams running March chassis -- the
Marlboro Ecuador team (which wasn't successful), then Project Three
Racing (which was). Project Three gave rise to Project Four, another
successful F2 team which I think also ran F3 cars in the late 70s/early
80s and also did a lot of the build programme for the BMW M1 ProCar
series.
For more info on Ron Dennis:
http://dcpu1.cs.york.ac.uk:6666/pete/racing/rd.html
McLaren was founded by New Zealander Bruce McLaren in the sixties.
Tyler Alexander and Teddy Mayer took over McLaren after Bruce's death.
They had some success, taking the World Championship with James Hunt in
1976. However Team McLaren did horribly in 1979 and '80. Project Four
was backed by Marlboro and Ron took on John Barnard to design a
carbon-fibre F1 chassis; at the time McLaren, who were also Marlboro
backed, were deeply uncompetitive and at the insistence of Marlboro the
Project Four team merged with McLaren to form McLaren International.
Ron and McLaren's Teddy Mayer were originally joint principals of the
team but eventually Mayer went his own way, leaving Ron to take charge.
The MP4/X designation of McLaren F1 cars these days stands for
`Marlboro Project Four'.
For more info on McLaren:
http://dcpu1.cs.york.ac.uk:6666/pete/racing/mclaren.html
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