It was the end of an era today when McLaren and Martin Whitmarsh revealed they had parted company.

Whitmarsh, who graduated from Portsmouth Polytechnic in 1980 with a degree in Mechanical Engineering, started his career with British Aerospace as a structural analysis engineer, subsequently joining the company's Advanced Composite Structures research and development team before being promoted to the role Manufacturing Director and put in charge of Hawk and Harrier airframe production.

In 1989 he left to join McLaren as Head of Operations, subsequently being promoted to the role of Managing Director, where he was responsible for managing the F1 operation and its partners and sponsors, in 1997. In 2004 he was appointed CEO of the McLaren F1 operation.

In 2009, when Ron Dennis stepped down as head of McLaren Racing to take the leading role in McLaren Automotive, Whitmarsh assumed the role of Team Principal.

Sadly, there were no tiles during Whitmarsh's reign, though the team gave a particularly good account of itself in 2010 when Lewis Hamilton took the title down to the wire.

Behind the scenes Dennis had been in dispute with Whitmarsh for a number of years and at the beginning of 2014, following the Woking outfit's worst season in living memory in 2013, the Briton retook control of the F1 team, recruiting Eric Boullier from Lotus and appointing him Team Principal, and Jonathan Neale as Group F1 CEO.

Since then Whitmarsh has been conspicuous by his total absence that is until today's admission from the team that he and McLaren "have agreed amicably to part company".