How McLaren’s triumph proves Dennis’s ‘customer teams cannot win’ claims were right

There is a hint of the Mandela effect to the famous declaration of former McLaren team boss Ron Dennis that a customer team would never win the Formula 1 world championship again.

As his remarks came to mind amid the joy of his former squad’s constructors’ championship triumph last weekend as a Mercedes customer, it is important to be reminded that there were some specifics to what Dennis actually said a decade ago. His remarks were not about customer teams per se – they were about how big the differences in performances were back then between works engines and those that were supplied to customers.