Although his team's 2006 season wasn't all it might have been, Ron Dennis will surely allow himself a smile of satisfaction over the Christmas break, as he looks forward to the new year.

With two hot-shot talents lining up on the grid in Melbourne next March, not to mention a new title sponsor, Dennis is in a position that most of us can only dream of, his team is virtually free of debt. Well, almost.

"When I said that we would be debt-free by 10 February next year I was wrong," he admitted to David Tremayne of The Independent. "We will be entirely free of any debt by 28 January.

"We have never been as commercially healthy in our entire history," he added. "I am fiercely proud of our commercial performance."

Although, other than the hairline, one does not see an immediate comparison with (actor) Rex Harrison, Dennis sees himself as having played a similar role - with regards Lewis Hamilton - as the English actor, who played Professor Henry Higgins in the movie My Fair Lady, a musical version of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion.

"There is a My Fair Lady aspect to the story," says Dennis, referring to the fact that he has backed Hamilton since he since he was only just into his teens. "Obviously we want it to have a positive outcome. And I think it will."

Martin Whitmarsh has admitted that the Woking team still retains hope that Fernando Alonso might make his McLaren debut this year, though this seems unlikely, no matter how many bottles of Champagne the British team pours down the throat of (Renault boss) Flavio Briatore at tomorrow's FIA awards ceremony in Monaco.

Briatore, who helped shape the Spaniard's career, is still smarting from the move which saw the youngster switch teams, a move which many people still find hard to comprehend, particularly since McLaren failed to score a win this season, the first trime since 1996.

Dennis, shed light on how the deal came about: "It was after the 2005 Brazilian GP, in which he clinched his first title," the Englishman revealed. "Our drivers, Juan Pablo Montoya and Kimi Raikkonen, had just finished first and second and Fernando was third.

"We came face to face for a minute and I think I said congratulations or something like that. He said, 'The thing about you is that you develop your cars'. To which I replied, 'You should be part of it'. When he said he would like to be, I was stunned. A week later we had a meeting in Japan and three weeks later the contract was signed."

Despite having a two-time World Champion, no debts, loads of sponsors, and one of the hottest F1 bright young things in the business, Dennis refuses to make rash predictions, after all, he's been in the business far too long.

"I don't want to make any predictions about 2007," he said," but we have already achieved many of our goals. Our chassis was the first to pass its crash tests, yesterday, and we will have two of our new cars when we launch in Valencia mid-January.

"We have never had the comfort that we now have with our programme," he added.