BRAWN FROM THE ASHES

Begin with a team that should not have existed. Honda’s Brackley operation — a factory holding a half-finished car and a workforce facing the unemployment line — was pulled back from the edge by a management buy-out led by Ross Brawn and chief executive Nick Fry, who took the outfit the manufacturer had abandoned and rebranded it Brawn GP.[144] It was the rarest kind of rescue in a sport built on billion-dollar budgets: not a richer owner stepping in, but the engineers themselves buying the building they worked in. The deal that made it real was completed on 5 March 2009, when Brawn closed a 100% buy-out of Honda’s stake and emerged with a controlling 54% holding in the team that now carried his name.[46]

Two drivers came with the building. Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello — Honda men since 2003 and 2006 respectively — were retained as Brawn’s 2009 line-up, their seats preserved by a sale that had nearly erased them.[36] Consider the strangeness of it. The team that lined up for the new season had a different name above its garage, the same hands inside it, and a car that had been designed by one manufacturer, finished by the underdog who had rescued it, and powered by a third. Nobody outside Brackley yet understood that this improvised survivor was carrying a weapon.

The car was a Honda before it was a Brawn. Originally drawn up as the Honda RA109, the chassis was completed by Brawn as the BGP 001, rebuilt around a Mercedes-Benz FO 108W engine and fitted with a double-decker diffuser.[195] That last detail was the whole season hiding in plain sight. A diffuser works by accelerating the airflow beneath the car until it reaches its lowest pressure at the throat — the underbody made into a vacuum that sucks the machine onto the road — and the 2009 double-decker interpretation of that idea was, in Mike Gascoyne’s reckoning, worth something close to half a second per lap.[196] In a sport routinely decided by hundredths, half a second is not an advantage. It is a different category of machine, a head start baked into the floor that no amount of rival horsepower could easily answer.

The rest of the technical landscape happened to bend in Brawn’s favour. The 2009 regulations were a deliberate reset, an attempt to strip the cars back and make them race more closely. Slick tyres returned for the first time since 1998, and a whole vocabulary of aerodynamic addenda — the barge boards, the winglets, the turning vanes that had cluttered the previous generation — was swept away.[194] Into that cleaner world the rulemakers also introduced an optional Kinetic Energy Recovery System, good for around 82 horsepower in six-second bursts each lap; yet only four teams chose to run KERS in 2009, wary of its weight and complication.[194] Brawn, light and balanced and already half a second clear where it counted, had no need to chase the gimmick. The advantage was structural, not electrical.

Underpinning all of it was a small aerodynamic department punching far above its station. Loïc Bigois led the aerodynamics with Jörg Zander as his deputy, and the finished car ran in a stark white-and-fluorescent-yellow Virgin livery — a sponsor’s colours improvised onto a machine that had been an orphan only weeks before.[195] There was no money for a marketing launch, no heritage paint scheme, nothing but speed. It turned out to be enough.

The advantage cashed out fast, and the championship was effectively decided long before the mathematics caught up. By the time the season reached its climax in Brazil, Jenson Button needed only to manage the gap — and even then he did it the hard way. A poor tyre call in wet qualifying buried him 14th on the grid, and from that compromised start he carved forward to fifth at the Brazilian Grand Prix, banking exactly enough to clinch the Drivers’ Championship with a single round still to spare.[146] A title settled from 14th, in the rain, on a recovery drive: it was precisely the kind of finish a fairy tale would write for itself, the season’s pressure discharged in one wet afternoon of overtaking.

His teammate carried his own redemption through the same year. Rubens Barrichello won at Valencia — his first victory in five years, a drought finally broken — and added a second at the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, two wins that briefly turned the title race into a genuine intramural contest between the two Brawns.[143] For a few weeks the fairy tale had a real fight inside it. And behind the silver cars, the season’s other revelation was a 21-year-old in his first full campaign with Red Bull: Sebastian Vettel finished runner-up to Button, eleven points adrift, serving notice of the rivalry that would come to define the decade after.[194] The fairy tale was crowning one era even as it introduced the next.

None of it was luck, and none of it was new. Ross Brawn arrived at his own team with a curriculum vitae that reads like a history of modern dominance: technical director at Benetton across the 1994 and 1995 title years, then the engineering mind behind Ferrari’s empire through Michael Schumacher’s five straight championships from 2000 to 2004.[46] The man who bought a doomed factory and took a controlling stake was not a chancer who had fallen into a fast car. He was the most decorated strategist of his generation, and what looked from outside like a wild gamble was, from the inside, a calculated bet on his own judgement of the car he already had. He had spent a career learning exactly how much a single technical advantage was worth across a championship, and here he had bought one outright.

He did not do it alone. The buy-out was a partnership with chief executive Nick Fry, the pairing that converted Honda’s withdrawal into a going concern and kept the Brackley team’s people in their jobs through a winter that should have ended them.[144] And the drivers who delivered the two titles were not glamorous signings but survivors of the old regime — Button, with Honda since 2003, and Barrichello, since 2006 — carried over intact into the team’s only season of existence.[36] The fairy tale, on closer inspection, was staffed entirely by veterans who had simply refused to leave.

A season this lopsided does not pass without argument, and 2009 carried two disputes that defined its discourse as much as the results did. The first was the diffuser itself. Rivals branded the double-decker design a loophole — an exploitation of the new rules rather than an honest reading of them — and the quarrel simmered through the whole campaign. The multi-deck concept, pioneered by Brawn, Williams and Toyota, survived the protests of 2009 but was eventually banned outright for 2011, a delayed admission from the governing body that the trick had been too good to leave in the book.[196] Whether genius or loophole, it was legal when it mattered — and that, to the teams who had read the rules less aggressively, was the most galling verdict of all.

The second controversy belonged to the season before and detonated across 2009. The FIA’s findings held that Nelson Piquet Jr. had deliberately crashed his Renault R28 at turn 17 on lap 15 of the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix, staging an accident to trigger a safety car that handed victory to his teammate Fernando Alonso.[198] When the reckoning came, it was severe: the World Motor Sport Council suspended Renault’s disqualification, banned team principal Flavio Briatore indefinitely and engineer Pat Symonds for five years, and cleared Alonso of any involvement.[198] That a race could be decided by a crash staged on purpose was the era’s darkest admission, and it cast the clean, improbable purity of the Brawn story into sharper relief — two fables of 2009 running side by side, one of honest speed, one of deliberate deceit.

Behind the headline triumph ran a quieter human ledger. Rubens Barrichello finished the championship third on 77 points, beaten by his own teammate, and the two victories that had briefly lit up his season — Valencia and Monza — turned out to be the final wins of a career that had begun a decade and a half earlier.[143] The year that crowned Button was, for the man in the other car, a long farewell dressed up as a triumph: a last flourish from a driver the sport was already moving past.

The manufacturer that had walked away carried a long history of departures of its own. Honda first entered Formula One as a constructor back in 1964, and that first chapter closed in 1968, the company withdrawing in the wake of Jo Schlesser’s fatal accident.[144] The 2008 exit that gave birth to Brawn GP was not the first time Honda had left the sport, nor the first time it had left under the shadow of loss — a recurring rhythm of arrival and retreat that the Brackley fairy tale, for one luminous season, interrupted.

The figures Brawn GP left behind belong to no other team in the sport’s history. In its single season it won eight of the seventeen races and took both the Drivers’ and Constructors’ Championships, scoring 172 points at an average of 10.12 per Grand Prix.[36] Read that again: a team that existed for exactly one year, and that had very nearly not existed at all, retired with a flawless record — every championship it was ever eligible to win, won. No team before or since has lived so short a life and left so complete a one. It is a record that cannot be broken, only equalled, and equalling it would require a team to win everything in the only year it ever raced.

Then the deeds changed hands. Daimler AG took a 45.1% share and Aabar Investments 30% of Brawn GP, rebranding the team Mercedes GP Petronas for the 2010 season.[197] Mercedes kept the 60,000-square-metre Brackley base and the people who filled it, and assembled a new era around Nico Rosberg and a returning Michael Schumacher.[197] What looked from the outside like an ending was in fact a foundation. The same Brackley team, under its new ownership, would go on to win eight consecutive Constructors’ Championships from 2014 to 2021 — the longest dynasty the sport has known, its roots running straight back through the fluorescent-yellow underdog to the factory Honda had tried to close.[197]

The architect himself was not finished either. On 23 January 2017, Ross Brawn — the strategist who had bought a wreck and won everything there was to win with it — became managing director of Motor Sports for the Formula One Group, moving from the pit wall to the stewardship of the sport itself.[46] The fairy tale lasted a single season. The dynasty it seeded, and the man who built it, would shape Formula One for a decade and more.