McLAREN FORMULA One boss Ron Dennis has questioned the ecological stance of Honda F1, just as the rival team announced it was quitting the sport. Speaking to The Irish Times, Dennis said: "The most important issue when presenting a green image is that it is authentic and cannot be challenged. Honda's Earth car was driven more by the perception that they [Honda] wanted the public to have of their objectives, than by their true objectives."
Honda's Earth car position was a clever marketing ploy. However, it raised pressure to make Formula One more environmentally-friendly, the costs of which Dennis described as "mind-blowing". The debate comes at a time when the sport is set for what he calls "a little recession", which is already having a big effect. Despite his team's success this year - they won the drivers' championship with Lewis Hamilton - Dennis predicted that turnover for the group would "drop from £280 million (€322 million) a year to as low as £175 million (€201 million) a year" over the course of 2010 and into 2011.
Recently, McLaren lost the backing of key sponsor Santander, the Spanish bank, which is to swap allegiances to arch-rivals Ferrari. And the merry-go-round continued as news broke that Lenovo, the computer company, was to join McLaren from Williams.
Set against the current economic turmoil, said Dennis, there is a temptation to stand still from a technological point of view. He described the process as "bouncing against the laws of diminishing returns", encouraging team owners and the manufacturers to back off spending because they can't see economic benefit.
"When you open up the technical horizon it is very difficult to do it without opening a massive area of cost," he said. "So we have to look at the short-term gains of how we are going to make the car more competitive, with the question of whether this technology is going to be saleable and have relevance to our other business interests."
The full interview with Ron Dennis appears in the next edition of The Irish Times business magazine, Innovation, available with the paper on Monday, January 5th