Infighting among McLaren drivers Hamilton and Alonso offers plenty of intrigue, but asks Justin Hynes, does the sport need it?
Formula One is on holiday, smack bang in the middle of its mid-season three-week breather. For Ron Dennis, the break couldn't have arrived at a better time.
Assailed by spy scandals and court hearings, his team have delivered their best car in almost a decade, but Dennis is being forced to watch it being driven by two hothead super-talents busy turning an internal fight for the title into a feud of gargantuan proportions. Oh, and he's accusing Ferrari of running an illegal car in Australia.
Truly the best of times, the worst of times.
The question is, could he have avoided all of this? Is the mess McLaren currently finds itself in an inevitable consequence of being in the championship hot seat, or has the team principal, like a football manager facing the sack, lost the dressing room.
If so, the confidence gap starts with the players. The pitlane-gate story in a nutshell: Alonso and Hamilton are on final qualifying runs, Alonso holds Hamilton up in the pits by enough time to scupper the youngster's final run. It later transpires that Hamilton ignored orders to let Alonso past for strategic reasons, and an apparently foul-mouthed exchange (denied by the team) takes place between Dennis and Hamilton.
Everybody's day gets worse. All three offer differing excuses, and the result is that the officials believe no one. McLaren get docked any constructors' championship points they may win, and Alonso is dropped five places on the starting grid. McLaren appeal. The drivers sulk - again.
What does it all say about Dennis? Only that within his hastily assembled excuse that it was part of team strategy to hold Alonso in the pits, there is an inexorable desire to control information and circumstance.
When Kimi Raikkonen left the team for Ferrari, one of the reasons he cited for his departure was that Dennis is a "control freak" who wishes everything to be done just so, for the world to work in a certain way. When events upset that world order, then the reflex is to contain the situation.
No shame there, all managers do it, from Alex Ferguson's clampdown on media attention towards his players, to over-protective tennis parents controlling their offspring with Svengali-like rings of steel. The difficulty lies in the fact that the drivers he has at his disposal are not willing to toe that line in their furious pursuit of glory.
The title they want is the drivers' one, the individual is all. It is not a team matter, to them it's personal.
Control of information and circumstance is lost, along with any respect the duo may have for their boss, who can be said to have mishandled driver strategy.
When Alonso signed for McLaren at the beginning of 2006, the team's two drivers, Kimi Raikkonen and Juan Pablo Montoya were on their way out.
Alonso, one imagines, saw himself as joining McLaren as a double-champion superstar with Schumacher-like golden child privileges. Hamilton? He was a dot on the horizon. Alonso was expecting countryman Pedro de la Rosa to be the easy mark he could dominate.
McLaren surely expected Hamilton to slow burn too. Yes, he had won the GP2 title, but he would not match Alonso in his debut season? He couldn't, could he? But he did and the handling of that amazing rise has been flawed.
Dennis, a scrupulously fair-minded individual, believes that favouring one driver over another is wrong, and does not serve the team well. When Hamilton scored well, it was, in Dennis' mind, up to Alonso to respond.
And he did - by suggesting that he was not being treated fairly and that the team was favouring the English driver.
The simpler and more peacefully defined situation would have been to relegate Hamilton to willing servant of Alonso's double-champion seniority, and claim the title with the Spaniard and the constructors' via his willing understudy. The Ferrari model, if you will.
IT HASN'T WORKED THAT WAY and we now have the most bitter (and thrilling) intra-team title battle since Senna and Prost - Dennis' duo - ended up driving each other off the track in the final race of an impossibly bitter season in 1991.
The spying scandal is a different matter entirely. Did Dennis know of any nefarious dealings? Did he condone them if done? Impossible to know, as the whole sorry episode has been polluted by slur, counter-slur, fuzzy inaction by the FIA and the feeling that everyone's has been lied to.
The real thing to ponder, though, is why, just when the matter appeared to have been dealt with in his favour by the bumbling FIA, did Dennis suddenly accuse Ferrari of cheating by running a car with an illegal part, which he claimed to know about because he was party to information about the offending article. How? Via the 780-page Ferrari document his team was judged to be in possession of by the FIA?
In the end, in what was supposed to be his retirement year (if he could ever contemplate such) Dennis has become embroiled in a series of unseemly brawls. How fans and journalists judge that matters little - if he wins the titles that is all that counts.
What does matter, however, is how his partners, Mercedes-Benz, judge him. Does it damage the image of a company trying to sell C-Classes to executives and A-Classes for the school run? Can they countenance having a $400 million budget (and that's nearly €293 million) in the hands of someone who cannot control two feisty 20-somethings, and whose underlings are accused of industrial espionage? A team principal who has spent most of what should have been an outstanding season defending his team in courts and stewards' hearings.
It is not the image of corporate perfection McLaren or Mercedes regularly like to promote.
Speculation has already suggested that Hamilton might leave the team if things carry on as they are. Faced with the prospect of losing the best marketing tool they have had in years, or of ousting the bar to that tool's happiness and progress, there would seem to be no contest.