Ron Dennis: How broken friendship led to McLaren exit after 35 years as boss

Undoubtedly a brilliant man, he is also an intensely complex personality: generous and loyal on the one hand, gauche and arrogant on the other. He can also be disarmingly charming, amusing and self-deprecating.

Asked about the merit of the Norman Foster-designed McLaren Technology Centre, which opened in 2003 and cost hundreds of millions of pounds, he once offered: “Have I built myself a pyramid, you mean?”

And 20 years or so ago, he told a very funny story about his own well-known obsessive-compulsive tendencies.

It was about the new house he and then-wife Lisa had bought, in which fountains had been installed in the rose gardens. When these were first turned on, Dennis said, he was horrified to see that they came on row by row, instead of all at the same time.

This wouldn’t do, he told the garden designer. They had to come on all at once. “But Mr Dennis,” responded the designer, “it will cost thousands to start again, install all the necessary pumps and so on.” Dennis said he didn’t care. It had to be done. He couldn’t look at it the way it was.

Yet his condescension and patronising attitude could take your breath away and he has made a lot of enemies along the way.

To journalists, he would publicly pride himself on his oft-repeated claim that he would be economical with the truth but not actually lie to you. Yet sometimes he did.

In the late 1990s, I had found out that Mercedes were about to buy a significant but still minority shareholding in McLaren and went to Dennis to verify it. “Who’s your source?” he asked me. When I told him I would not reveal it, he said I should get a new one because this one was wide of the mark.

Two weeks later, he stood up at Silverstone and announced that Mercedes had bought a 40% shareholding in McLaren.

When he was challenged about it, he initially tried to claim I had asked the wrong question, before eventually conceding that, yes, he had lied. “I had to,” he said.

At Silverstone last year, I asked him what would happen when his contract ran out in mid-January 2017. He said: “Oh, don’t worry about that. I’ve signed for another two years.”