Chairman adds Button had to pass several hurdles to secure seat
Thursday 11 December 2014 16:27, UK
Ron Dennis says Fernando Alonso is returning to McLaren with “unfinished business”.
Relations between the McLaren boss and the Spaniard disintegrated during their previous partnership in 2007, cumulating in Alonso leaving the team after just one tempestuous season.
Few could have envisaged the pair ever working together again after the split, but the two-time world champion will return to Woking for the 2015 campaign and Dennis has challenged Alonso to show he is a team player.
"There is one thing that hasn't changed and that is Fernando's absolute focus on winning. Of course, that fits very comfortably with our own focus and we both desperately want to win," Dennis said.
"One of the things I really respect with Fernando is that he chose to change direction, leaving one of the most successful teams in Formula 1 and really addressing what we both feel is unfinished business. We all have more to prove than ever before.
“Fernando is coming back and he is going to prove that he is a) an absolute winner – that is the easy bit - and b) that he can reintegrate with our team and really work on fulfilling our common objective.
“We are going to get lots of challenges. The media, inevitably, are going to be challenging to manage – we have an English driver in an English team with English mechanics backed up the English media and we have a Spanish driver with the Spanish media and both media groups are extremely combative understandably. We have to ensure that that doesn’t influence the team.”
While Alonso’s return become something of an open secret in the F1 paddock, the question of who would partner him remained a mystery until just hours before the official announcement. Jenson Button eventually got the nod ahead of Kevin Magnussen and Dennis says the Briton had to prove himself.
“For Jenson he has to play his own role,” he added. “He has his own hurdles to jump, some of which have been quite deliberately put in front of him from the perspective of assisting with the decision which of course I fully recognise has been quite long in coming.”
Button has agreed a two-year deal with the team which will take him past his 36th birthday, a decision Dennis says was his as he wants the Briton around for the long-term.
