21/10/2007
NEWS STORY
McLaren boss Ron Dennis has revealed that it was a gearbox problem that caused Lewis Hamilton's car to slow on the eighth lap of today's race, thereby ending the Englishman's championship hopes and breaking millions of race fans hearts in the process.
"There was an incorrect command given to the system," Dennis told reporters. "That fault, why did the system get an incorrect command, we don't know yet. It could be a sensor."
Dennis was quick to absolve his driver, who had started the race as red-hot favourite.
"In many ways Lewis was trying to stay out of problems," he said. "Maybe if he was just going for it, things would have been slightly different. But he didn't. He's trying to be careful, let people past.
"We had the pace that was required to win the world championship," he continued. "The only reason that we did not win the world championship was the gearbox problem. That cost us 30 seconds and it was too much time to make up against cars that were relatively competitive. There was nothing that Lewis did that had any relevance to the gearbox."
Summing up his feelings, Dennis, who has already seen his team thrown out of the constructors' Championship this year following its role in the spy saga, said: "A kick in the teeth is the wrong expression. That imparts a belief that someone did something to us and no-one's done anything to us. We basically did it to ourselves.
"In the end, Ferrari suffered their reliability problems at the beginning of the season and we've had some today. We didn't have the perfection we were striving for.
"I'm a fighter and I'm here to win," he added, "and so is the whole team, so it's not easy to have failed to win a championship that was so close to our grasp in the last two races."