Brawn leaves Mercedes in fine fettle

Remember Mercedes as it was? Heading into 2013, the Brackley-based operation was Formula 1's great underachiever. Since taking over the title-winning Brawn squad at the end of 2009 amid a wave of high expectations, it had finished fourth, fourth and fifth in the constructors' championship and won a grand total of one race. This was, quite simply, not good enough for a marque of such a grand stature.

While the trajectory that threatened to make it a title contender heading into the August break did not continue in 2013 as Red Bull asserted itself and dominated the second half of the season, Mercedes' season was a huge step forward. Three victories, two for Nico Rosberg and one for newcomer Lewis Hamilton, and second in the world championship made Mercedes the biggest improver of this season.

With hopes high that the introduction of the 1.6-litre turbocharged V6 engines next year will allow Mercedes to mount a serious title challenge, the progress made in 2013 was hugely significant.

Team principal Ross Brawn, who sails off into the sunset at the end of this month, was the architect of this turnaround. While he was never able to deliver a title to follow up his success at Brackley in 2009, Brawn has built the foundations that should allow Mercedes to hit the ground running at the start of F1's new era. Make no mistake, this was a big step that established Merc as a credible frontrunning force in grand prix racing for the first time since 1955.

"We were two seconds behind at the end of last year, and over this year we were about half a second behind where we wanted to be," says Brawn. "To close that gap is a great achievement."

Naturally, Brawn would talk up his team's achievements, but bear in mind Mercedes managed a pathetic six points in the final six races of last year. A haul of 142 last year became 360 in 2013, a massive leap forward. He credits it to the significant technical strengthening at the team undertaken in late 2011. At the time, Brawn told AUTOSPORT that the changes would start to pay off as early as 2013 and the results have proved him absolutely right.

Rosberg's win in Monaco was the highlight of the year © LAT

In the 10 races before the August break, a Mercedes was on pole position for seven of them. Tyre degradation problems meant that the team struggled to convert its lofty grid positions into results. Wins for Rosberg in Monaco and Britain, and for Hamilton in Hungary, were the high points, although after the break things got harder.

"In the second half of the year we saw the true performance of Red Bull," says Brawn. "They got on top of their tyre situation, they found some useful improvements in the car.

"The first half of the year was probably a distorted position because we were performing pretty well and Red Bull were underperforming. For us to find that much time and to have overtaken Red Bull would have been optimistic, but it's pretty encouraging for the future.

"It's a reflection of the changes that we made at the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012. We brought in a much strong engineering team under Bob Bell. Bob recruited Aldo Costa and Geoff Willis, and we got Mike Elliot in charge of the aero, so we made some fundamental changes, and improved the facilities. Those things have come through now.

"In 2014 we are going to see the next result of that process so 2013 is a very encouraging sign. One of the good things I have seen this year is that we've been able to consistently improve the car the whole year. Not by enough yet, but it has been improved all year whereas last year we faltered midway and really were quite poor by the end of the season. This year, we haven't dropped the ball, we have kept it going. There have been a lot of encouraging signs."

Brawn stresses that the extra investment made once it was realised F1's resource-restriction agreement was not having the anticipated effect helped the team to realise its potential.

"We ran out of steam last year in terms of ideas, in terms of capacity," he adds. "We had to start the new car. We increased the capacity of the team, we increased the budget of the team, we persuaded our board that we needed to be more committed. We had fallen into that trap that the RRA was going to solve all the problems and everybody was going to come down to a certain level and we planned around that.

"It wasn't the correct plan because it just didn't happen. So once we woke up to that, we put the resources in that we needed to have a chance of competing. In 2012 we had the fourth or fifth biggest budget in F1 and we finished fifth so it's no big surprise."

While the car was quick, the big challenge was tyre management. In both Bahrain and Spain, Rosberg's pole positions prefaced a race battling degradation and he finished ninth and sixth respectively. Things improved after that and victories in Monaco and Britain for Rosberg, then Hamilton's maiden Mercedes triumph in Hungary meant Mercedes went into the August break with three wins in five races. Talk was of having to dial back single-lap performance to improve race pace, but, as Brawn explains, it wasn't that simple.

"The reality was we didn't know what to do to improve the race performance," he says. "It wasn't as though we were focusing on qualifying and compromising the races, that was just the way the car was. It did produce very good performance over one lap, less so over distance.

Rosberg led at the start in Spain, but it didn't last © LAT

"Barcelona was one of the worst examples. We were on pole and disappeared down the field as the tyres degraded. We had to discover what needed to be done. I'm not sure we sacrificed one-lap performance for that. There is maybe a slight element of that but, over one lap, Red Bull also improved. But we were still able to fight for pole positions - in Abu Dhabi Lewis, without his [suspension] problem, would have given Vettel a run for pole position."

Inevitably, the tyres played a big part in the Mercedes story. Not only was there the controversial Pirelli test at Barcelona using a 2013 car that contravened the test ban, which led to the team being banned from July's young-driver test at Silverstone, but there was the change in rubber after the British GP that removed a limiting factor from Red Bull.

Brawn says he has an "open mind" on whether Mercedes would have been in better shape had the tyres not changed and certainly would have preferred things to stay the same. Whatever happened, it seems unlikely the Red Bull juggernaut could have been slowed.

Nonetheless, the performance of Mercedes was still good enough after the break to beat Ferrari and Lotus to runner-up spot, even if challenging Vettel proved difficult.

"We were a little bit disappointed and questioned whether we had taken the right direction," says Brawn of what happened after the break. "But when I look now at analysis of the season, our performance compared with Lotus, Ferrari and other references has been pretty good. We managed to keep pace with those teams and, if anything, pull away slightly. What we haven't been able to do is match Red Bull.

"We did improve the car, but not as much as they did. They seemed to find some significant improvements, perhaps relating to the tyres."

Aside from the performance of the team itself, that of its drivers was also a major talking point. Rosberg shaded it in terms of wins, with two, although Hamilton scored 18 more points. The battle was a fascinating one, with Rosberg arguably more consistent but Hamilton enjoying greater highs and lows.

"It's a great fight," says Brawn. "The battle is good for the team. They desperately want to beat each other and they desperately want the team to do well so you have got to marry those two things and that's not always easy. I'd say they both go about it in the right spirit.

"The great thing is Nico has demonstrated - and we already knew it - that he is a top-class driver. That means we have two of the top drivers in F1, which is a great situation for the team.

"Lewis's performances are absolutely typical of a first season with a team, learning how to operate, build relationships, discover each other. It has been a very tough year technically, dealing with these tyres and I think that sometimes makes a consistent performance more difficult.

"When you have been with a team [McLaren] as long as he was, you develop a style or you get used to certain things. His comments on our car were stronger in some areas and not so strong in others. The areas where we were not strong were not areas where we had particular focus in the past, they are areas we became more focused on and found solutions.

Wolff, Lauda and Brawn celebrate in Monaco © LAT

"We have improved, perhaps not to where Lewis wants to be but we've gone a long way and we've got some things we want to do with the car over the winter to try to take another step."

Rosberg's high point came in Monaco, where he had to take a very conservative approach and soak up pressure given the team's tyre degradation problems.

"We had nothing to gain from pushing the car or tyres any harder than we had to. Nico drove a very intelligent race and was perfect," says Brawn. "He did push at various times, just to get the right gaps and he drove the perfect race. Monaco is definitely a track where you don't have to have the fastest car to win.

"Nico met the challenge of Michael Schumacher exceptionally well. He was a little difficult to judge because no one really knew what level Michael was at when he came back but I think Nico's performance against Lewis has given people fresh references again. He's had a great year and I've said it before: either one of them could win a world championship for us."

It remains to be seen whether either will be in a position to bid for the title next year. But Mercedes came good in 2013 and, with expectations high going into the new rules set, it is at the front of the queue to challenge Red Bull.

MERC'S POST-BRAWN POWERPLAY

Next year is win/win for Brawn as far as his contribution to Mercedes is concerned. If the team thrives, it will be credited to the foundations he laid. If it flops, it might just be attributed to his departure. But there is little doubt his departure is a loss, much as some at Mercedes were keen for it to happen.

He is replaced not by a single team principal, but by two executive directors who effectively split the abolished role. Paddy Lowe, who joined Mercedes from McLaren as executive director (technical), is a hugely intelligent, accomplished engineer recruited ahead of last season for this task. Toto Wolff, Lowe's equivalent on the commercial side, is the other half of the new leadership, both working with high-profile non-executive chairman Niki Lauda.

Inevitably, they will be judged by performances on track. In that regard, the die is already cast, with the Mercedes 2014 engine only six weeks away from hitting the track for serious testing and the design of the car itself long since underway. But what will be fascinating is how well Mercedes conducts itself in off-track political manoeuvrings. That is an area where, on the technical side, Brawn has excelled over the years.

Lowe and Wolff will lead the team now © LAT

It's almost inevitable that there will be politics. There always are at the start of a rules cycle as teams try to exploit loopholes and clever interpretations of the rules. Even if the engines are relatively evenly matched - no foregone conclusion - there are bound to be battles over car design.

But Lowe is no fool and has been around long enough to know how the game is played. What's more, the structure and personnel Brawn put in place now appear to be paying dividends, meaning that he and Wolff take full control of a team built on solid foundations.

Whatever happens after Brawn's departure, it won't be easy to fill his shoes.

This article also appears in AUTOSPORT's comprehensive Formula 1 2013 season review magazine - available in shops and digitally now