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Ron Dennis meant to retire at 65 but, like so many workaholics, that date rather slipped.
It was not until five years later in June 2017 that he actually drove away from McLaren headquarters with no intention of returning. He was a millionaire many times over, and had worked in F1 since the age of 18. He could have sailed off into the sunset, never spoken to anyone again, worked on his golf handicap and seen away the years quite happily.
Dennis though does not know how to stop. The only thing he did know was that he did not want someone else “banging the drum” any more. He was going to dance to his own tune.
The easiest thing to do, he says, would have been to write a cheque to a charity of his choosing, or take up some of the non-executive positions he was offered. But that would not be enough.
“My mindset was: I want to do things that make a difference, I want to find them myself, and I want to be able to use my expertise,” Dennis tells i.
Charity is not a new endeavour for Dennis, and he had appreciated how rewarding doing something other than trying to win races on a Sunday could be when he helped found Tommy’s, a charity that set out to reduce the rates of prematurity and miscarriage, after he and his then-wife Lisa lost a child. He later learned that one in four children conceived never make it to full term.
“Horrifying,” he says. Equally horrifiying was that they then worked for 10 years and felt they hadn’t saved a single life, despite the money raised and spent on research around the country.
Then there was a breakthrough. Tommy’s has now saved thousands of babies’ lives.
“You just get an overwhelming sense of achievement,” Dennis adds.
“No matter how little you’ve [done], or whatever your role has been, you’ve made a difference.
“I’m in a position to make a difference and I seek nothing from it, other than to have a moment in a few years’ time, where something as tangible as thousands of babies’ lives saved materialises out of this initiative.”
His latest movement aims to impact children later in life, between the ages of 11 and 18. His new company, Podium Analytics, will analyse data from hundreds of thousands of kids with the hope of reducing the incidence of sports injuries in young people.
It is a mammoth project, with due backing: it was launched at 10 Downing Street with two Government departments on board, as well as the support of the national governing bodies of rugby union and hockey, CVC Capital Partners (part-owners of the Six Nations and former proprietors of Formula One) and the University of Oxford, where the newly formed institute that will run the long-term study will be based. The 10-year project will be the longest study of its kind and aims to record every single sporting injury in the chosen schools, which will cover up to 200,000 children – with data anonymised at source. Schools and grassroots sports clubs will be offered free use of and training on a digital platform for logging injuries. After a pilot in 20 schools last summer, the goal is to reach 200 by September 2022.
Eventually, Dennis hopes to have the whole country submitting injury data to the institute.
“If you’re lost, the first thing you have to do is determine where you are,” he says, having discovered a startling lack of data in the area when he first became aware of the frequency of injuries while working as a governor at Wellington College.
“A child can run down the corridor at school, fall over and cut their knee, and that goes into an accident report, but they can go on to a football pitch, run into another child and suffer a concussion, and nothing happens.
“They might go to A&E [half of all sports-related attendances relate to people aged under 20], but there’s nothing recorded – and something like concussion, which is very much under the spotlight, is a cumulative injury and it can occur in a variety of venues: at school, then in an academy, and then amateur sport.
“Yet there’s no link up between those three places.”
Yet there are links between traumatic injuries like concussion or serious musculoskeletal injuries and problems in later life – although the data in the area is scant.
When Dennis first started in F1 in 1966, the data was there for everyone to see, albeit in simplistic and even more stark form: barely a year went by when the paddock did not lose at least one driver to a fatal accident.
Deaths in Formula One are now thankfully far rarer, partly because it is a sport that deals with huge amounts of data, understands how to use it and is constantly modifying its safety measures, which is where Dennis’ experience comes in. Not that he will be doing the nitty gritty modelling and shaping of the artificial intelligence involved himself, but it was he who helped build the team and will help implement its work – as well as taking responsibility for raising the money. He has already put together £40m, a significant chunk of which has come from his own family’s charitable foundation, as well as CVC and several “ultra-high net worth individuals”.
“That is a pretty good start to what will become a much, much bigger project than people realise – and I say with certainty. Because when I set my mind to something, I do it.”
No one who has encountered Dennis in the last eight decades would disagree with that.
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