Why the Brawn GP story was no fairytale

"This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

The punchline of the classic western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance aptly sums up the theme of a film that meditates upon the enduring power of myth on the human psyche: a quarter of a century after a celebrated shoot-out, a newspaperman learns the truth about what happened but burns his story rather than publish it.

Formula 1 history is redolent with powerful myths treasured by fans, and few in recent years have proved so potently alluring - intoxicating, even - as the underdog narrative of Brawn GP, the team that came from virtually nowhere to snatch the 2009 world championship. Just over ten years have passed since Jenson Button swept to victory in the season-opening Australian GP, which is why you'll have seen plenty of features celebrating the anniversary in recent weeks.

Trouble is, the hard facts don't tally with the fairytale.

The Brawn BGP001 was comfortably one of the most expensive F1 cars of all time, the fruit of three separate windtunnel programmes, two design teams working in parallel, and considerably more secondary resources than most teams would lavish upon "next year's car" mid-way through a season.

If anything, it could best be described as a money-no-object exercise for which money belatedly, and almost terminally, became an object.

Ross Brawn was an accomplished technical director of great repute, but his ambitions ranged higher still: he wanted to run an entire team, not just its engineering function. When it became clear that wasn't going to happen at Ferrari, even when Jean Todt announced his departure as team principal late in 2006, Ross decided to take a sabbatical and indulge his passion for fly fishing until a suitable offer turned up.

While he was touring the world in search of brown trout during the opening months of 2007, Honda was growing increasingly disenchanted with the humiliating underperformance of its works F1 team... and Brawn duly accepted an offer to step in and rescue it.

He arrived too late to influence work on the 2008 car (which proved to be every bit as bad as its predecessor) but with enough of a run-up to reorganise operations ahead of the major rule changes coming for '09.

Some of the dramas stemmed from the Japanese (engine) and British (chassis) ends of the business blaming each other for the car's wretched performance - a refrain that will be familiar to McLaren fans in recent years - and Ross duly needed to bang a few heads together.

He also dodged the potential trap of the sunk cost fallacy: rather than waste any more investment on the dead end that was the '08 car, he set his reorganised design team to work on '09 early, probing for potential loopholes in the regulations. This was a methodology he'd followed to great effect almost two decades earlier, at Jaguar, when he oversaw the genre-defyingly extreme XJR-14 sportscar.

At its peak, this operation was using both of Honda's windtunnels at Brackley, designers from the recently defunct Super Aguri F1 team, engineers at Honda's R&D facility in Sakura, and a third windtunnel in Japan. Considering the spend this must have involved - in effect pursuing three different whole-car aero concepts and junking the two that didn't work - there's little wonder that Honda shuttered the team at the end of the year as the global recession bit.

Photographs exist of the Japanese windtunnel model and, ostensibly, no visual elements of its design went through in the finished BGP001.

What you can't see is the element that did. One of the Japanese engineers had identified the loophole in the wording of the regulations enabling the downforce-boosting double diffuser to be created.

Brawn's money-no-object programme had not only spotted that loophole, the UK-based end of the project was much further down the road than rivals in exploring and exploiting the outwash potential of the new, wider front wings. That accounts for why, when it eventually saw action, the BGP001 was so much faster 'out of the box' than the Williams and Toyota, which also had double diffusers.

Despite the long period of uncertainty between Honda announcing its withdrawal at the beginning of December 2008 and Brawn pulling together a financial rescue package, the car was already in a mature enough state to be far ahead of its rivals - simply because so much effort and investment had been lavished upon it.

Compare and contrast with McLaren and Ferrari, who spent the final races of '08 locked in a battle for the championship; their '09 cars emerged weak and underdeveloped, starved of focus.

The BGP001 remained the car to beat for several months despite carrying a wildly compromised rear end, which featured a shoehorned-in Mercedes engine. A mismatch in crank heights between the Merc and Honda V8s meant the gearbox had to be mounted higher then had originally been envisaged, enforcing a number of other detail changes that cost performance.

Whether the car should have been competing at all is another matter to consider.

There are those - Adrian Newey included - who continue to believe that the double diffuser was illegal, and that it was only permitted as a spoiler tactic in a wider powerplay between Bernie Ecclestone, the FIA and the newly instituted Formula One Teams Association.

One part of the underdog yarn is fair enough, though: the team might not have survived without the entrepreneurial zeal of Brawn himself.

It spent three months in the ether as potential purchasers - sundry disaster capitalists, distressed-asset shysters and other chancers - threw their hats into the ring. Such folk were circling - later in 2009 Russell King, a convicted fraudster, almost bought Sauber from BMW for a song - so Brawn obtained backing from Bernie Ecclestone and a parachute payment from Honda and set up shop himself.

It would prove to be a nice little earner when he sold the team on to Mercedes at season's end. As John Wayne says in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, "Out here a man settles his own problems..."