FEBRUARY 20, 2007

Rumours about McLaren

There are still rumours knocking around about the future of McLaren, despite the fact that a large share of the company was recently sold to Mumtalakat, a Bahraini government-owned holding company. There is talk that there are more clauses to this than meet than the eye with the suggestion being that as part of the deal Ron Dennis and Mansour Ojjeh are going to sell their remaining shares in the team and have given DaimlerChrysler, which owns 40% of the company, a fixed deadline by which they must buy the shares or they will be sold elsewhere (presumably to Mumtalakat). If DaimlerChrysler does not take up the opportunity it will be in a minority shareholding situation, which may not appeal.

There continue to be rumours that a deal has already been done for Mercedes-Benz to supply its chassis and engines to Prodrive but that the F1 team will be owned in the future by Dennis (and perhaps Ojjeh as well?) which have agreed to buy the operation from David Richards.

We are not saying that these rumours are true but they are certainly out there.