Interview: Ross Brawn uncut

Standing in the middle of a long gravel drive, in a secluded village deep in England's home counties, a black labradoodle - tennis ball clamped in mouth - eyes F1 Racing with suspicion before trotting back to the rambling homestead beyond. Ross Brawn, gone from Formula 1 these past three years, greets us more warmly, chuckling that familiar chuckle when we point out what a low profile he's been keeping.

"Intentionally," he says, "But I suppose when you've written a book [his new tome Total Competition, co-written with former Williams CEO Adam Parr, is out now] you've got no choice..."

How many secrets can we unlock? Let's start with the truth behind a story that's become part of Formula 1 folklore...

F1R: Is it true that one day you were working under a car at Williams, and complaining slightly too loudly about [technical director] Patrick Head, when Patrick's distinctive and stentorian voice boomed out: "MORNING, ROSS!"?

Ross Brawn: That's absolutely true. It was at the factory. Patrick was notorious for coming in late - he kept different hours to everybody else - and I was underneath one of the cars and made this rather derogatory comment about why he might have turned up so early that day. So it absolutely happened. And I survived, which was amazing.

F1R: Williams has been a hotbed of engineering talent over the years - you, Frank Dernie, Neil Oatley, Adrian Newey, Paddy Lowe and many more have worked there. What is it about that team?

RB: Because one of the senior partners was an engineer of Patrick's calibre, there was a very engineering-oriented dynamic in the company. And Patrick was very inspirational to us all. He kept very high standards, was very committed, and had great clarity about what he wanted. He ruled not because he was a great man-manager, but because we respected him so much.

People were proud to work for Williams - we strove to meet those high standards. And Williams spent money on engineering - Frank (pictured above with Head) was always totally supportive of anything Patrick wanted from an engineering perspective. Whenever there was any spare cash it went to new engineering facilities or tools.

I was halfway through my HNC [Higher National Certificate] in mechanical engineering when I saw an ad in the local paper in Reading for a machinist. I was interviewed by Patrick and I told him I could machine anything he wanted - call it the arrogance of youth - and then quite a long time later they offered me the job. I took it, and asked why it had taken them so long. Patrick said they'd given it to someone else, he'd not liked it and left, and that I was the second choice!

Frank lost that company - it was taken over by Walter Wolf - and he worked on the marketing side for a while, then he got fed up and left to set up Williams Grand Prix Engineering with Patrick in Didcot. I had a season in between working in Formula 3, then when they properly got going in Didcot I joined them - I think I was employee number 11.

Brawn ended up in charge of R&D at Williams, then hit a glass ceiling as the team expanded and "decided they needed a more academic approach", hiring Dernie to manage that department. When the opportunity arose to move - along with Oatley - to a new team founded by US racing magnate Carl Haas (no relation of Gene) and sponsored by the Beatrice supermarket chain, Brawn took it.

The experience of hands-on car design as part of a three-man team was valuable, but when the title sponsor was bought out and the new owners cancelled the contract, Beatrice-Haas shuttered its doors for good after just two years in operation.

Brawn moved on to Arrows (pictured above) and found himself in charge of car design for the first time. Money was always tight, but Arrows' drivers - Derek Warwick and Eddie Cheever - respected Brawn and when an opportunity came up at the Jaguar sportscar team they also drove for, run by Tom Walkinshaw Racing, they persuaded him to join them. Walkinshaw was well known - notorious, even - for pushing the boundaries of the rulebook.

F1R: Over the years you've bedevilled your rivals by finding and exploiting loopholes in the rules. Was that an area of your skillset you developed at TWR?

RB: I'd always been fairly competitive in that area. It's a necessity. It was interesting when we came to write the book, because Adam [Parr] is from a corporate background where there's a limit - a line - and you always operate a margin away from that. In F1 you're hard up against that limit, and sometimes you trip over it - unintentionally.

I was always mindful of that, but Tom was a good education for me. He was definitely over the limit on more than one occasion! In fact, Roger Silman - the team manager - and I had to haul him back over it once or twice, and Roger was quite relieved when I joined, because I believe in taking it to the limit rather than going over it, and Roger had been the lone voice at times.

Tom generated that thought process of taking a very competitive interpretation of the regulations, and then very importantly of backing it up. Because it's no use having that competitive interpretation if it then falls apart the first time it's challenged by a fellow competitor or the FIA.

You need to have done your preparation, even to the point of taking the FIA through it so they understand the interpretation. If someone complains, and they come at you thinking it's wrong and you have to convince them it's right, that's a more difficult task.

In sportscar racing most competitors seemed to be following what they thought was the intention of the regulations rather than what the regulations actually said. So to give you an example, the Jaguar XJR-14 didn't have doors - it had ejector-type windows. That meant the sides of the chassis could be full height, giving a better structure, and the drivers could still get in and out through the windows, like they do in NASCAR.

At first the FIA said, 'Those aren't doors.' We said 'The drivers can get in and out through them.' So they then said, 'What happens if the car turns over and they can't get out?' And we replied, 'Well, if any other sportscar turns over, the doors won't open, whereas with ours the driver can remove the window and crawl out.' We had an answer for every objection they had, and eventually wore them down.

The other good thing I learned from my period at TWR was race strategy. Before then, in F1 race strategy amounted to a bit of tyre management. In sportscar racing you had refuelling, and you had to think about how to make the most of a given amount of fuel as well as maximising the tyres. So when I came back into F1 after that, and strategy was just beginning to become a factor, that experience was a great help.

Brawn's return to F1 came sooner than he'd expected, even as the XJR-14 was sweeping all before it in the soon-to-be-moribund World Sportscar Championship during 1991. The renaissance of the Benetton team under Flavio Briatore's management and John Barnard's technical direction had descended into chaos - Barnard departed before his B191 design actually won a race, in Canada - and Briatore needed to shore up his organisation, fast.

F1R: There was a perception at the time that Bernie Ecclestone was getting fed up with manufacturers such as Jaguar spending money in sportscar racing rather than F1, and was doing whatever he could to kill it off. Was that why you went back to F1 so quickly, with Benetton?

RB: I think John felt that they didn't commit to what they said they were going to do. It ended a bit fractiously. So Flavio was in trouble, and he turned to Bernie, who said, 'Well, Tom Walkinshaw is looking to get into a team, why don't you have him on board as engineering director, then he can bring his crew of people?'

Bernie wanted to screw Jaguar. He wanted Tom out of sportscar racing as much as anything else. So from 1992 I was fully involved with Benetton, and Rory Byrne and Pat Symonds came back [they had left to work on the stillborn Reynard F1 project], and we started to get the team back into shape with clarity as to what was needed, because it had become quite disparate under John with different teams in Witney and Godalming. And of course, we'd become aware of Michael Schumacher.

F1R: Michael really raised the bar for what was expected of drivers, both in his tactical awareness and his physical fitness. Was this era the making of him as a competitive beast?

RB: It was like that for both of us, really. Benetton was where it got serious for me, because they were a big team, with a good budget, and they'd had some success. Michael and I grew quite quickly in that period - we were growing together.

Michael is an intelligent person so he took an interest in those areas. More than that, he was enthusiastic about them - he didn't just do it because he had to, and that added to his competitiveness and all-round performance. He knew that if he was fitter than everybody else, he could put the hammer down - as we now have to describe it - at a point where he knew, from observation, that other drivers were fading. He analysed everything and was very astute. In that part of his career he had a very open, inquisitive, receptive mind.

Mental agility enabled Brawn to beat his rivals on and off the track in this era. Off-track, once he'd brought discipline to the design office, Brawn hived off an engineering group under Rory Byrne early in 1993 to work on a car to suit the major technical changes coming in 1994 - other teams underestimated the effect the removal of driver aids would have that year, to their competitive detriment.

On-track, Brawn brought sportscar-bred tactical savvy to the new era of refuelling, pioneering among other things a piece of sleight-of-hand we now call 'the undercut'.

F1R: You mentioned strategy earlier, using refuelling to gain track position. You were very effective at this and for a long time your rivals took the view that it just wasn't cricket...

RB: I know. This is something I haven't shared with that many people, but when we had the refuelling period, when refuelling was quite slow, it didn't take a genius to work out that if you came in with some fuel still on board, you could put in less fuel and have a shorter stop.

As an example, when you had to start the race with the fuel you'd qualified with [from 2003], we [Ferrari] accepted that while our race pace was very good we couldn't beat Williams in qualifying. So we'd put more fuel in for qualifying, knowing that we would likely be second or third on the grid unless the circumstances were exceptional. Then we'd race around, and at the pitstops we didn't have to put as much fuel in because we'd started with more.

The flow rate was quite slow - about eight litres per second - so it seemed like we'd only put half as much in, and we'd overtake them in the pits but still be able to go just as long to the next stop. It was a very elementary thing but it took Williams a long time to catch on [during battles with Benetton in the 1990s] - to the point where we had our fuel system ripped out of the car several times because Williams were convinced we were doing something dodgy.

F1R: After the pitlane fire in Germany in 1994, the FIA found out that the fuel rig had been modified to increase the flow rate.

RB: That didn't help, yeah. But there were a lot more aspects to it [Benetton's strategy] than that. We had a proper strategy department, models being done, and from what I understand nobody else was doing that.

He folds his arms, leans back in his chair, and the faint ghost of a smile passes across his lips as his face settles into a poker-neutral expression. This, you imagine, is the Sphinx-like countenance that has greeted many an FIA inquisitor and rival team boss, a rock upon which countless waves of arguments have fruitlessly crashed. We'll get no further here.

Time to move on to Ferrari, where Brawn was one of the key architects of an unprecedented era of success - he rebuilt the design department from the ground up with Byrne and Aldo Costa, and engineered vital co-operation and integration between the chassis and engine departments.

F1R: At Ferrari you helped turn a pretty wretched organisation into a winning team. But once you'd built that winning culture, were you aware you were making history or were you so desperate to maintain that momentum that it all passed in a rush?

RB: Because of the personalities involved, the pressure to succeed came from ourselves. It was self-generated in that we wanted to remain successful. I never had to put any pressure on Michael. There was a fear of failure in a positive way. There wasn't a fear that somebody would lose their job if we didn't win.

Everyone was driving each other - there was no higher force saying 'you will succeed or you'll be in trouble'. What I had been able to get rid of was the blame culture that existed when I arrived. That was the most damaging thing.

I recall a meeting in the early days when we'd had a glitch, and Luca di Montezemolo was about to launch a witch hunt, and I said, 'We're not going to have a witch hunt. I'm responsible for everyone so if you want to blame anybody, blame me.' The [Italian] media was very prolific, and there was a tendency to want to hang someone out to dry if anything went wrong. Fortunately Jean Todt was very on board with the idea that if you protected people they could get on and do a better job.

Although the Todt-Brawn axis created a winning culture, it became very - to use Ross's own words - 'self-generating'. At the risk of bringing out the sphinx again, let's see what Brawn makes of our contention that the events of the 2002 Austrian Grand Prix - where Rubens Barrichello was ordered to give up the lead to Schumacher - show that the team's must-win mentality had blinded it to the big picture.

F1R: Had you created a bubble for yourselves? I'm thinking of Austria 2002, where after the race both you and Jean seemed genuinely surprised by the mass outrage.

RB: Oh, for sure. We did become very insular. I guess we became that way to protect ourselves from everything else that was going on. It was, ultimately, something we needed to adjust. Austria, on reflection... it was a mistake. The circumstances behind it were a bit more complex than people realise, in that we'd had the discussion before the race about how we would manage that situation if it occurred - that if Rubens got the jump on Michael, then at some convenient point he would let him slip past and we'd carry on.

That was all pre-agreed before the race. Then we got into the race, Rubens was ahead of Michael, and we said to him, 'OK, can you now let him past?'...[adopts wheedling tone of voice] 'No! Don't make me do that! This is my big chance to win this race! You can't do this to me!'

By this time, Michael was also on the radio, wanting to know when Rubens was going to let him past as previously agreed. How do you reconcile all of that if we don't do what we said we were going to do in the pre-meeting? And that was, ultimately, why we told Rubens he had to do it, and of course he made a big show of it, which was... unfortunate.

And then it got worse, because Michael saw the reaction of the crowd and put Rubens on the top spot of the podium, for which we were fined a million dollars by the FIA.

If I look back on it, insisting that they change places had a much worse consequence than the outcome of what would have been an internal issue of team discipline. What followed was far more damaging and distracting for the team than if we'd just left it alone and given Rubens a spanking in private.

If I could have re-run it I wouldn't have done what we did, because the consequences were more far-reaching than we could have considered. Something that should have been an internal team matter became very political.

F1R: You were very much a substance over presentation person, but when you came back after your sabbatical [at the end of 2007] to be team principal at Honda, it was a very strange time - green trousers and that sort of thing. It seemed very much presentation over substance.

RB: Well, green trousers excepted, the reason I went there was that Honda had great facilities - comparable to Ferrari and potentially bigger and stronger. The resources they had in Japan and the budget they were committing was massive. My thinking was that there was clearly something wrong with the organisation if they had those resources and weren't achieving their full potential. I wanted to be able to fix it.

What had happened was that the two sides of the organisation - powertrain in Japan and chassis in the UK - had come apart and were blaming each other. There was no conviction from either side to work together properly and produce the best car. My task was to knock some heads together. Sometimes in those situations everyone knows what's required, they just need a catalyst.

I said, 'Give me a year to sort it out, the second year we'll have some results, the third year we'll be fighting for the championship.'

F1R: Gary Anderson said that when he had a Mugen-Honda engine at Jordan, he had to commission some acoustic analysis to prove to them that it wasn't as powerful as they thought it was.

RB: There was a lot of that going on, and that was part of the problem. The advantage I had was that I knew how a Ferrari engine would perform, and how a Ferrari chassis would perform.

Granted that knowledge was a year out of date when I arrived, but it gave me some reference points in my mind for what was needed.

So after a month or so, when I sat down in front of the board and they asked me what the problems were, I could say, 'The engine's not good enough and the chassis isn't good enough, and each group thinks it's the other one's fault. If we don't face up to the fact that both sides need to massively improve, we're not going to go anywhere.'

And they were shocked, because they'd had a lot of management-level people in Japan telling them that the engine was fabulous, and that the only reason they weren't winning was that the chassis was no good.

The title therefore happened a year ahead of Brawn's schedule - albeit with a Mercedes engine after Honda withdrew from F1 at the end of 2008, and with the team operating on a shoestring under Brawn's name. He then sold out to Mercedes, but the team then had four 'lost' seasons of achieving not very much, while Brawn's new paymasters became increasingly impatient.

F1R: Having won the championship in 2009 and been bought by Mercedes, did it come as a surprise to you that you weren't able to continue that success, or were you expecting it after having to lay so many people off?

RB: It was very predictable. Whether it was fully expected or not by Mercedes I honestly don't know.

The foundation of every year you race is the year before - maybe two years. In 2009 we weren't putting anything into the new car, we had no resources to do that. We knew winning the championship would be critical and we were putting everything into that. 2010 suffered because we didn't invest during 2009.

The other complicating factor - and it's not an excuse - was that we were in the middle of this resource restriction enterprise [the teams had proposed, and were trying to implement, a 'Resource Restriction Agreement' as a counter to outgoing FIA president Max Mosley's budget cap idea].

We were ideally sized to suit that - we were the model of what it should have been. Red Bull, Ferrari and McLaren were above that, and they were supposed to be on a glide path to come down to where we were. But in reality it didn't happen.

It was quite a painful glide path - you had to make people redundant. But then it became clear that some teams weren't interested. It was a team-policed initiative, and if the teams couldn't police themselves then it was never going to work.

When the RRA collapsed, we had to present to the board at Mercedes that the idea they'd expected to be coming into place when they bought in wasn't going to happen anymore - so they either had to stop or be prepared to invest at a sufficient level to be competitive again.

At the end of 2011 we got more investment, built up the organisation again, and the results started to come again in 2012 and 2013, and the rest is history.

F1R: 2013 was a very strange year, because you had Toto Wolff and Niki Lauda come in, and it became like an episode of Wolf Hall. How did you feel, watching from the outside in 2014, watching the system you built click into place?

RB: Slightly mixed feelings. Some frustration at the way it had gone [in his book, Brawn says he left because "People were imposed on me I couldn't trust," meaning Wolff and Lauda]. Equally, I still had a lot of friends there who'd gone through the experience of Brawn GP. I felt great for the people who were winning the championship, because they deserved it.

I think Toto himself said how lucky he was to walk into a championship-winning team just before it started winning the championship... Toto and Niki didn't make it a championship-winning team, but they did contribute to it. And, in fairness, they didn't drop the ball when they were given it.

I've never regretted my decision to leave. It became a muddle. There were too many people involved. I was tired and a bit disillusioned with F1 at that stage, I think partly because I recognised my own failings in what had gone on those few years. I should have kicked and screamed and shouted louder during 2010 and '11, and I should have seen what was going on with the RRA, that it was a waste of time.

In failing to do that, in a way I left the opportunity for people like Toto and Niki to become involved, because the board got worried about the way the team was going.

F1R: It's quite ironic that you of all people should be wrongfooted by a new arrangement.

RB: It was a funny old thing, the RRA, and it was never a regulation as such - we tried to make it a regulation, and if that had happened it would have had a chance of working. That was where we failed. We could never get all the teams or the FIA behind it - Max supported it but then he disappeared, and Jean would only support it if the teams were unanimous.

F1R: A lot of people can't leave F1 behind - they just hang on in whatever way they can. But you seemed to leave without looking back. Would you ever consider returning in some capacity?

RB: I wouldn't come back in any of the capacities I've worked in before. But as I said when I left, 'never say never', and if something came up that was very appealing, it's not beyond the realms of possibility that I could get involved.

Who knows? There are changes afoot, so we'll watch and see what happens.

But I appreciate your comment about not looking back. I didn't need to come back into F1 and not do anything.

I do watch races on TV, and I still find myself commenting about what I would or wouldn't do. But it's given me an interesting perspective, because I'm pretty educated and experienced in what should be happening in a race, and I still find it difficult to know where everyone is.

If you walked into the room halfway through a grand prix and looked at the TV, you wouldn't know what was happening with all the pitstops and variant strategies. Unless you watch it from the very beginning and understand how it's evolving, you can't follow it - whereas you can walk in halfway through a football match or a golf game and quickly pick up the dynamic.

I think F1 has to look at the race format, and the way it presents itself, so people can do that.

** Ross Brawn and Adam Parr's book Total Competition is published by Simon & Schuster