10 years on - How Ross Brawn rescued his F1 team

On March 29 2009, 10 years ago today, Jenson Button led Rubens Barrichello across the line in Melbourne to register a one-two finish on the debut of the Brawn GP Formula 1 team.

A few months earlier, both drivers and the entire Brackley team staff appeared to be on the verge of losing their jobs after Honda's sudden decision to pull the plug and close down its F1 operation. Initially, all seemed lost.

It was only the fortitude shown by Honda team principal Ross Brawn and his management colleagues that kept the outfit alive through the winter of 2008/09. They sourced an alternative engine from Mercedes and the funds with which to complete the car that was supposed to have been the Honda R109, but became the Brawn 001.

Rather than just survive, the team made history. It utilised a package that would dominate the first half of the 2009 season and remain competitive enough to eventually secure the drivers' world championship for Button, along with the constructors' title.

Even at the time it seemed like a fairytale. Now, 10 years on, in an era where those outside the established big three teams struggle to even register a single podium, that season seems even more remarkable.

Brawn arrived at Honda having taken a break after leaving Ferrari. The team had been struggling for direction, and Honda had targeted Brawn as the man to turn an average operation into a good one, just as Red Bull had headhunted Adrian Newey a couple of years earlier.

Brawn arrived too late to influence the 2008 car, and with new downforce-restricting aerodynamic rules coming for '09, he insisted that the team devote its resources to the longer term.

"I joined Honda at the end of 2007, and I made it clear that I wouldn't be able to contribute much in '08," he recalls. "And given the new rule changes that were coming in '09, said we should focus on that. And they all agreed, so that was the strategy.

"It got a bit bumpy in 2008, it was a bit up and down, but we scored some points that year. We had one or two highlights, and Rubens was on the podium at Silverstone. But the focus was very much on '09.

"We had a political battle with the other teams to get the engine unfrozen, because the engines were homologated at that stage, and ourselves and Renault finally managed to get the other teams to agree to give us some opportunity to get closer to the reference, which was Mercedes at the time. So, everything was coming together well."

The Honda bosses initially had no intention of finding a way for the team to survive

Brawn and his right-hand man Nick Fry were confident that the pieces were falling into place for 2009, with a strong chassis tuned to the new regulations, and a more competitive engine.

Then on Friday November 28 they were called to Honda's UK headquarters for what they thought was a routine meeting.

"I'm sure a few days beforehand we were talking about the future," says Brawn. "In fact when Nick and I got invited to the meeting in Slough we just assumed that it was another review, because the [Honda] F1 executive used to come over occasionally. It was a little bit unusual because it was in Slough, but we had no expectation that they were going to pull the rug from under us.

"The Japanese executive was in tears. We were in a small room, and it was clear that he was emotionally upset when we moved in, and we thought 'this is a bit odd'. Then he stuttered out what was going to happen.

"They had the economic crisis - shutting factories, making people redundant - which was pretty unusual for a Japanese company. They just decided that they couldn't be seen to be in F1 when they were making such draconian decisions in their main business. It did come completely as a surprise, there were no indications at all.

"Then he said, 'Can you come with me?' and we walked into a much bigger room, a board room, and in that room were all the specialists who were going to shut the factory down - the lawyers, human resources, the redundancy specialists. They were lined up round the table.

"The first thing we said was 'we can't deal with this ourselves - you have to wait until we get the rest of the management team up here'. So we called Caroline McGrory [Honda F1's legal expert], John Marsden [HR], and Nigel Kerr [finance], and we said weren't going to do anything until they arrived."

Initially, the Honda bosses had no intention of finding a way for the team to survive.

"They literally wanted us to go back and tell everyone to go home, that was their assumption," explains Brawn. "And we refused to do it. What stopped them in their tracks a bit was when John and Caroline said, 'You can't do that in the UK, you have to have a consultation with the staff that lasts three months'. You can't just turf everyone out on the street and shut the factory, because of the number of employees we had.

"It was kind of strange that they hadn't expected that. So, immediately they had to change tack and say 'let's do that - let's go into the consultation period'."

Brawn had bought some time. He was at least able to tell Button and Barrichello and the rest of his employees that he was trying to salvage something out of a potentially disastrous situation.

"It gave us breathing space, but of course they didn't expect us to do anything in that three months," he says. "So, the next phase was to persuade them to give us enough money to keep the thing operational. They gave us a few million to be able to do the essential things to keep the project alive.

"They were paying wages of course, but we had to buy some things to have any chance. And they were good enough to do that, because we persuaded them to try to sell the company, and it was worth putting a couple of million in to keep it alive, and have something to sell - because if we didn't have a car design, or a car half built, we wouldn't have anything to sell.

"And they were prepared to go along with that, and that's when the next phase started, of trying to find a rescue plan."

Securing an engine was a key move for Brawn to make.

"The double diffuser was an interpretation of the regulations that was raised initially by a Japanese engineer, because we had parallel programmes going on" Ross Brawn

"The easiest option would be to carry on with the Honda, because the car was designed for it," he says. "But they quickly came back and said, 'No that would effectively be a continuity, and we're not prepared to give the engine to anyone else to look after'. So, the engine definitely wasn't available.

"There was a sense of solidarity in F1 at that stage. We were all in the middle of this dispute with Bernie, and we had FOTA, which was pretty strong. Nick and I went to a FOTA meeting and announced what was going to happen, and almost simultaneously both Mercedes and Ferrari said they would supply an engine if we wanted it.

"We got the drawings of both of them quite quickly, and laid out the car with the Ferrari and the Mercedes, and the Mercedes was much better suited to the layout we'd already got. [Illustrated below by Giorgio Piola]

"And it was local [in Brixworth], and at that stage we knew Ferrari were supplying last year's engine as a customer engine, whereas Mercedes were not - they were going to supply us with the same engine as McLaren. McLaren had a veto right, so had to approve it, which Martin Whitmarsh did."

In the meantime, work continued on the 2009 car. History relates that the double-diffuser concept, also pursued by Williams and Toyota, was key to its stunning success. But Brawn insists that it wasn't initially regarded as the magical ingredient, and was just one element in the aerodynamic package that was coming through the system when Honda was still bankrolling extensive R&D.

"It wasn't a night and day situation, and anyone who was in the team at the time will agree," he suggests. "It was an interpretation of the regulations that was raised initially by a Japanese engineer, because we had parallel programmes going on.

"Honda had a windtunnel and they had a load of people there, so we thought we may as well try and use it, and utilise that resource, because they were doing their own thing, which was completely useless.

"So we got some of our people to have reviews with them, set some direction, and look at advanced concepts. It was one of their engineers who came back to us and said 'What do you think about this?'

"Once we'd been through it, and looked at all the angles and interpretations, we thought 'Yeah, you can actually do that'. But there was this question about when is a hole not a hole, and when is there a break in the vertical surface?

"We were out of the loop for a while, fighting for survival, and not having an awful lot to do with other teams. I remember I had a call from Nikolas Tombazis, who was at Ferrari at the time, asking if I had seen the FIA clarification that had come out about what Williams and Toyota were doing. He thought it was wrong, and asked if we would support the objections to it.

"I genuinely didn't know what he was talking about, but I went to see some of the guys, and they said, 'Actually, we're doing that'. So, it was that sort of level, it wasn't like there was a eureka moment where there was some massive breakthrough.

"But the car had been good all along. We had a pretty poor 2008 car, but in the tunnel the '09 car with the new regulations, and I think even before we had the double diffuser, was not far behind what we were racing in '08."

Brawn insists that the decision to abandon development of the 2008 Honda was the key to the success of '09 car.

"It was the fact that we just devoted ourselves to it," he says. "There's an interesting phenomenon that I've observed several times, and that is when you get a new set of regulations and whoever starts them first is the one who asks the questions for clarifications, because they meet the areas where there's a lack of clarity.

"We had all sorts of weird names. Pure Racing was one, which I hated" Ross Brawn

"We had that at Mercedes with the hybrid engine, I remember Andy Cowell asking a lot of questions when we were doing it, and nobody else was asking those questions, and we knew we were a long way ahead with it. It was the same with the 2009 Brawn, because McLaren and Ferrari were tearing lumps out of each other in '08 - they were fighting like mad for a championship, and putting all their effort into that.

"We were asking questions of the regulations that clearly had a glitch and Charlie Whiting would say, 'That's interesting, no one's asked that before, you're right.' And we knew we were a long away ahead. When you've got a steep development curve and a learning curve with new regulations, if you're six months ahead of anyone else, you've got a big performance advantage.

"So the double diffuser was a factor, but it was a package, it was the whole thing. It was a bloody good car, regardless. The gearbox was higher than it should have been, because of the crankshaft centre height of the Mercedes, so we had some compromises in the layout, but it was a very good car."

Much groundwork for the team to continue carried on behind the scenes ahead of the 2009 season. It took a lot of politicking, but in the end the FIA accepted the team's entries for Button and Barrichello under the new name of Brawn GP.

"I must say everyone supported us extremely well," says Brawn. "For all F1's nature that was a period when the teams really did come together and look after each other as best they could, and without that, we wouldn't have survived.

"The way it worked - a management buyout - is pretty unusual for the Japanese. In fairness, as they are very honourable people, they felt very guilty towards me, because they brought me in, and then they closed the team. So, they were very keen to try to make amends with me, and they said 'Look we'll sell you the team, but only to you'. But it was a team effort to save it.

"We had all sorts of weird names. Pure Racing was one, which I hated, and there was always a chance that it was going to be bought [after Brawn had initially purchased the team], and therefore whoever did so would rename it. When we decided to do it ourselves I must admit it was nice to have the team named after me. It wasn't my idea, but I didn't object."

The newly christened Brawn 001 wasn't ready for the first group test of 2009, but a shakedown at Silverstone (above) alerted the team to its pace, and led to Button's mates and other insiders hurriedly placing bets at extremely generous odds. The real proof came when the car met its opposition at Barcelona on March 9, less than three weeks before the first race.

"We weren't ready for the first test but we looked at the lap times and we picked up on a bit of the information that was circulating," recalls Brawn. "We thought either we've got something wrong or they've got something wrong - not sure which. And we went to the second test, and bingo.

"We got out late morning. There was a classic moment when Jenson did three laps or something and came in and said, 'The car's rubbish.' And we said, 'You're second fastest.' He said, 'Don't be stupid, there's no balance at all'.

"And his eyes opened. We got the car dialled in a bit, and we were carrying fuel all the time, we didn't want to take the fuel out because we wanted to cause the minimum fuss, but we couldn't help it. And that was it..."

As the team headed to Melbourne there was huge anticipation about the true potential of the car, and not just in the Brawn camp. Ferrari, Renault and Red Bull were ready with protests against all three teams running double diffusers, but after a debate that ran late into the Thursday night before the race, the FIA stewards passed the cars concerned as legal.

"Talking about that era reminds me of how much support Charlie gave in the arguments that went on about the car," says Brawn. "He was very solid and very consistent, and very supportive really in terms of what he thought was right.

"He thought the interpretation of the regulation was something that was clever and correct, and he never faltered in supporting ourselves and Williams and Toyota in that whole episode. We've got many things to thank him for, and that's one in particular."

The fears of Brawn GP's rivals were realised when Button and Barrichello comfortably qualified on the front row. On race day they were utterly dominant - despite Barrichello dropping back at first with a poor start, and the event ending behind a safety car means the statistics don't show the margin of superiority. It was the first time since the Wolf squad won in Argentina in 1977 that a team was victorious in its first race, and it was just the start of what would be a remarkable season.

"You never really know where you are until you get on the track and race, and Melbourne was pretty special," says Brawn. "You've got that advantage, you've got that unique position.

"It doesn't happen very often, and you don't want to spoil it. But we'd been through the trauma of making 300 people redundant, and there were massive things still going on in the background.

"I wouldn't say my focus was on the race team at that stage. It was a relief to be there, because you could spend a few days thinking about the weekend, and as soon as we got back it was back to thinking 'how are we going to keep this alive?' There was a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes.

"It worked out well, it kept the team alive, it kept the majority of people in work, a lot of the people who were made redundant came back and worked there again. It was a very special time."