The McLaren-Mercedes team are enduring their worst start to a Formula One season in decades, having scored just five points in the first four races of the year. Kimi Raikkonen scored his first point of the season last Sunday, but only after suffering yet another engine failure during the weekend. Atlas F1's Karl Ludvigsen reviews McLaren's situation and looks at how it can be improved

I was having some problems with a fellow who worked for me. Problems like poor timekeeping, getting stories done on time, that sort of thing. When I was talking to Steve, urging him to pull his socks up, he took a different tack. "Why can't you listen to what I say I'm going to do," he pleaded, "not what I'm actually doing?"

I was reminded of this reaction when I read Ron Dennis's remarks at the end of his revealing Atlas F1 interview about Ayrton Senna. "There seems to be a particular level of aggression, and almost delight, in someone's failure to perform," the boss of McLaren said about the way the press has treated him and his team this year. "Now I don't mind admitting we aren't doing right now a particularly good job, but do you really feel, guys, do you really think that we're happy with what we're doing, happy with our performance? But could you give us a bit of a break? We came away from the last race [of 2003] narrowly losing the World Championship, and we're three races in and suddenly we're an absolute waste of time, the perception is we've lost the plot as a team. And that is very... that's quite difficult, no matter how strong you are, and I'm quite a strong person... You know, it's difficult to come to grips with."

McLaren is now four races in, and their performance is looking worse, not better. There is simply no way to put a positive PR gloss on their achievements so far in 2004. If Dennis and McLaren are being criticized - and they are - they deserve it. Faces in Stuttgart must have turned redder than red when Germany's leading car magazine, Auto, Motor & Sport, put Raikkonen's flaming departure from the Bahrain race in second place in its latest list of Top Ten Flops with the curt comment: "Mercedes-Brenz", referring to the brennend or burning engine of his car. That dramatic photo has come to symbolize the state of the McLaren-Mercedes campaign.

If Dennis wants to turn things around, he's going at it in exactly the wrong way. An organization chart has been published that purports to show how McLaren will be restructured as of May 3. Dennis is at the top, with Martin Whitmarsh under him and in charge of both McLaren Racing and Mercedes-Ilmor. Each of these, in turn, has its own managing director over the technical chiefs, Adrian Newey and Mario Illien. Not shown is the new setup that DaimlerChrysler has mandated at Ilmor, which grants Hans-Ullrich Maik and Hans-Peter Kollmeier equal stature to company co-founder Mario Illien.

In only one respect does this make sense: it puts Dennis and Whitmarsh in charge of both the engine and chassis operations. You'll recall that last year Renault did exactly the same thing, eliminating the barrier between their engine and chassis operations by putting Flavio Briatore in charge of both. This had the potential to prevent the flourishing of a blame culture between the two organizations. Judging by the results, it was the right thing to do. Instead of the arguments that must be raging between Woking and Brixworth, Viry and Enstone are cooperating with sensationally good results.

So why am I not happy with the new McLaren-Mercedes setup? Because Racer Ron is too far from the action. He's kicked himself upstairs, isolated from the shop floor by layers of aerospace time-servers. I agree with Dennis that he's a tough customer. His grit and determination made McLaren the powerhouse it was in the 1980s and 1990s. What McLaren-Mercedes needs is a structure that puts Ron Dennis as close to the company's racers as his counterparts are at Ferrari, Renault and Williams. People like Whitmarsh and Jonathan Neale can get other industry jobs tomorrow - and they will. But only a hard-core racer like Ron can motivate his team to make the technical and strategic decisions that will bring it out of this appalling slump, its worst since the Peugeot year of 1994.

Dennis may feel that he's done enough at the coalface, that he'd like to step back from the day-to-day running of the complex quarter-billion-dollar business that McLaren has become. But the fact is that he can't. His skills are uniquely required at the operational level of the engine and chassis companies. I've already mentioned the Renault example. Not so long ago Eddie Jordan stripped out the suits he'd brought in to run his company and retook personal control. Had he not done so, Jordan might have disappeared altogether. And when David Richards moved into BAR, instead of begging for more money he slashed the budget by 25 percent and cut the staffing, restructuring the business to focus on the essentials in a more organized way. And look at the results!

Each possessing 30 percent of the shares of Tag McLaren Holdings Ltd., Ron Dennis and Mansour Ojjeh are facing some tough decisions. It's been rumored that they're considering selling their shares to DaimlerChrysler, holder of the remaining 40 percent. DaimlerChrysler is also the dominant shareholder in Mercedes-Ilmor. Thanks to their company's performance so far this year, Ojjeh and Dennis have seen a dramatic drop in the potential value of their shares to the German automaker. The blame culture must be flourishing big time.

With DaimlerChrysler and its management deep in the soup after waiving any further interest in Mitsubishi Cars, some executives there must be wondering if buying into racing-car and -engine builders was such a good idea. A split of their interests would be the best solution. DaimlerChrysler would take over the McLaren Car road-car operations while Dennis and Ojjeh would keep the racing side.

Above all, it's essential that the racers remain independent. Ron Dennis has made no secret of his admiration for the business acumen and racing know-how of Roger Penske. It's time to remind Ron of the decision that Penske made at the end of 1999 after several winless CART seasons. Even though he was a founding shareholder of Ilmor, he ditched its Mercedes engines and signed up with Honda instead. He stopped using his own chassis and bought Reynards. The result? In 2000 Penske Racing was CART champion again. For Penske's image and reputation, success in racing was essential. Nothing else mattered. Roger took the necessary steps and so must Ron.

My point? McLaren International must be free to choose the engine that it thinks is the best to power its racing cars. If Mercedes-Ilmor isn't getting the job done, it should look elsewhere. Either that, or it should become the sole owner of its own engine supplier, in the Ferrari/Renault/Toyota mold, so that it can staff and control the operation to its own standards. In fact, that's the way that McLaren started in Formula One in 1966. It didn't work out then, but it could work out now.

The McLaren people must seize control of their destiny now or risk the loss of what they've achieved and the value that it represents. If they don't, they're in danger of being drawn into what Smokey Yunick called the "black hole". "It's there all the time, every race, at every place in the world," wrote ace mechanic Smokey. "You have to be extremely careful not to get too close to it. It has a tremendous vacuum, and can suck you into it, and you disappear forever. All racers, drivers, mechanics and owners are rated by the public and by sponsors, and by your fellow racers. Sometimes a racer is unfairly pushed into the black hole. Also, if your luck is running bad, and your line of bullshit is not too good, or if your desire to win gets a little wobbly, in the black hole you go. Chances of crawling back out some day are slim to none."

Even McLaren - yes, McLaren - could be swallowed up by racing's black hole.

About the author:
Long time columnist at Atlas F1, Karl Ludvigsen is an award-winning author and historian who managed racing programs for Fiat in America in the late 1970s and Ford of Europe in the early 1980s. He is the author of seven books about racing drivers and numerous books about classic racing cars and engines, all of which draw extensively on the many images in his Ludvigsen Library in Suffolk, England.

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