In this week’s Autosport Ron Dennis is quoted as saying some quite damaging things about the current drivers on the F1 grid. He is trying to justify his selection of Hamilton and says ‘We reviewed the whole grid and when we looked at the drivers other than the top three we felt that they had pretty much reached a plateau in their careers and there was no one that really shone’. So who does this hurt? Button I think especially, but also Webber, Fisichella and Barrichello.

He went on to say ‘I am distinctly unimpressed with the majority of drivers involved in F1’. Perhaps he is right to not be excited about some of them, but these remarks seem to be quite desperate, and quite deliberately ignorant of some of the great drivers around. Obviously, first off, he is still annoyed at losing Raikkonen. Then he fails to mention Kubica, Kovalainen, Rosberg and (coming soon!) Piquet (all of whom are wrapped up in other teams). Ron, it turns out, might have had no choice but to hire Hamilton – he might have walked to another team if he wasn’t given a race seat at McLaren.