McLaren swoop to sign up Alonso

MOTOR SPORT / Formula one: When Ron Dennis, the McLaren chairman, escorted the Queen at the official opening of his team's £250 million technical centre in the summer of 2004 it seemed to some of his rivals the team were taking their eyes off the ball.

Formula One responded in mocking tones, deriding the lavish new factory as an indication of how much McLaren had gone soft, how they had forgotten how to win world championships.

What, critics asked, was the point of this reflective glass monolith with its heated lakes, landscaped gardens and swish interior? How was that going to help win races, let alone world championships? After all, McLaren's last title was in 1999 when Mika Hakkinen won the second of his back-to-back titles. They last won the constructors' title a year earlier.

Yesterday Dennis fired an impressive salvo at his detractors by proving that McLaren are alive and kicking and hungry for success when he signed Fernando Alonso on a long-term contract from the start of 2007. It was the best-kept secret of the season in a business where other people's affairs usually spill out into the gossip shop of the paddock.

Observers were left asking what could have tempted Alonso to leave the Renault squad, a team where he is loved by the entire workforce and whose entire efforts had been exclusively crafted round his ambitions for the past four years. That he has decided to make the move to McLaren is seen as a tribute to Dennis's ability to read the way the tide is running and to take decisions ahead of the game.

It is clear that Alonso has been persuaded that McLaren's record of 10 grand prix wins in 2005 is the bedrock on which they can build title challenges in the years to come. McLaren have traditionally played the long game, investing heavily in technology and personnel to ensure they have a consistently competitive presence at the front of the grid.

They have never lacked the financial wherewithal and Alonso will have concluded that they have been astute in securing a long-term sponsorship deal with Vodafone, also from the start of the 2007 season.

There are now 1,000 McLaren employees devoted entirely to Formula One at their base near Woking, a level of staff and investment which the relatively frugal Renault team have been hard-pressed to match in recent years. With the 2006 season marking the start of the 2.4-litre V8 engine regulations, Alonso has judged that McLaren's Mercedes engine is likely to be among the most competitive over the next few years and has made his plans accordingly.

Dennis is a great admirer of Alonso. "Credit where credit is due," he said. "Fernando and the Renault team did a great job in 2005. They brought a good package which was reliable for the first race and did the job while our drivers [ Kimi Raikkonen and Juan Pablo Montoya] psychologically overreacted to problems at the first round of the world championships and definitely didn't respond to the pressure. It was all a bit frustrating for us because in most seasons 10 race wins would have been good enough to clinch the world championship quite early in the season. The trouble was this time there was no other team taking points off Fernando and Renault when our cars failed to finish."

Dennis has now resolved that issue, at least in part, by plucking Alonso from under his rivals' noses while sending a signal to Raikkonen and Montoya that no one is indispensable, a reality which will keep them both on edge throughout the forthcoming season.