Ron was always going to be succeeded, if MW had been ready he would have already replaced Ron
MW was already responsible for a huge amount of the team's day to day operation, and Ron was decreasing his involvement. My money would have been on Ron leaving at the end of the year anyway, so to suggest that a 40-something man who had spent most of his adult life in management (and a significant portion of that in F1 management) was some wort of wet-behind-the-ears rookie is absurd.
F duct was great to reduce drag and increase top speed, fantastic gadget for a car lacking downforce in corners, how easy was it for others to copy and where is this innovation now?
So you are deriding an innovative "gadget" for doing its job perfectly? It was not at all easy for other teams to copy as, to implement it properly, they would have had to homologate entirely new monocoques half way through a season. They didn't do this and we were left with the spectacle of Alonso trying to control his car by telepathy alone, as he had to take both hands off the wheel to use the Ferrari duct. That sort of innovation is exactly what F1 engineers love; the sort that other teams can't turn around and reverse engineer in a week or two. As for the car lacking downforce, you could equally argue that Newey's car had too much drag in a straight line in comparison to the McLaren, yet you don't pick him (or Christian Horner) up on this...
Yes RBR are good, Mclaren were second and chasing but are falling back and are under attack from Merc
That would be the same Mercedes that were over half a second slower in qualifying in Valencia, and were outqualified by Force India and Sauber at Silverstone then? Hmm... Woking must be quaking in their race boots. The ebb and flow of an F1 season is all part and parcel of the sport, not everyone can improve relative to the rest all the time. You have to look over a period of a number of races, and if you do that you'll see that the Red Bull-McLaren gap is pretty stable. Sure, Ferrari seem to have leap-frogged McLaren in the last couple of races, but then they have just significantly upgraded their car such that Mark Hughes reckons nothing at the back end is the same as before. Perhaps McLaren also have half a new car to play with after the summer break? Who knows.
The mistakes and bad decisions are mounting up and are more clues to the teams changing status
Funny how few of the bad decisions are affecting Jenson. As for mistakes, the wheel gun incident could have happened to anyone, and Red Bull even managed to put a completely wrong set of tyres onto Seb's car in Monaco. Yet again, though, your calls for Christian Horner's head on a platter are remarkable by their absence.
Conditioning your best driver like a dog, as an experiment, to be knocked off his pedestal, is mindboggling
Using complex psychology is absolutely part and parcel of a manager's job, and reacting to two very different personalities with the same response would be plain dim. As for the second half of that sentence, where on Earth do you get the idea that MW wants Lewis knocked off his pedestal? What I see is a thoughtful manager gently reminding a headstrong driver that what he is actually standing on is a pedestal made of the hard work and effort of the rest of the team, and the height advantage he enjoys isn't because he has miraculously learned to fly.
The reshuffling that happened when Button arrived looked like trying to optimise by creating a process where the car could be designed around a generic driver amalgamation of both. Understandable if ones going to Crufts I guess
As the car's design process was already many months down the line, and in fact most teams would already have started constructing test monocoques by the time Jenson signed for McLaren, this comment is just tosh.
Yes he has changed a lot, what's working in this touchy feely new McLaren? Apart from a Lewis and Jenson love in?
As RasputinLives has already pointed out. They are second in the Championship, both their drivers are in the top 5 (and only three points off third), and they have won two races this season in the face of a hugely quick opposition car. When you sit down and think rationally it is clear that Whitmarsh is doing a pretty good job. The only folk who don't think so are those who need to find an excuse for Lewis and the red tops who want to sell looseleaf toilet paper.
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