“I consider Formula One a family, and families live in villages. And villages always have a village idiot. He (Eddie Jordan) fits the bill perfectly,” McLaren boss Ron Dennis said of former F1 team owner and now television commentator Eddie Jordan.
Dennis was ‘returning serve’ after Jordan told his TV audience during the British Grand Prix telecast that McLaren should not be apportioning all of the blame for its current “mess” to engine supplier Honda.
But insiders point to in-car cameras and data to show there is a lot to like about McLaren’s current chassis and aerodynamic package (a point of view endorsed by Fernando Alonso’s point-scoring result at Silverstone on Sunday).
So that leaves the engine and F1 media suggest McLaren has told Honda it needs help and the best and fastest way to do that would be to hire or contract some engineering specialists from outside the company.
Clearly McLaren is in a deep hole – unprecedented really in the history of the supreme team based in Woking, Surrey.
We suspect the frustration is boiling over and it’s no wonder tempers are short.
But anyone with even the smallest knowledge of F1 history isn’t dismissing Dennis or his team.
