Ross Brawn: Big Fish in New Water

The ex-Ferrari wizard has joined Honda - via a global angling adventure. Bet the new RA108 will be quick through Maggotts. By STEVE COOPER

If you're a fisherman, then you'll regularly hear about 'the one that got away'. But Ross Brawn, perhaps Formula 1's keenest angler, has put a neat twist on the saying. For it was he who slipped the net, unheaped the multiple burdens from his shoulders and escaped the strong gravitational pull of the F1 paddock.

Everybody knows that Brawn left F1 for a year, casting the net wide as he travelled the world, an eye on resting his soul and freeing up his mind while weighing up the options for a potential return. Far fewer know that his sabbatical was almost solely devoted to trawling the globe to find the greatest fishing spots known to man.

Emergency on Planet Earth: Brawn oversees Button © LAT

It's a journey that took in stints in Argentina's icy Tierra del Fuego ("fantastic brown trout"), New Zealand ("fishing with my sons-in-law") and northern Russia ("where all our supplies were confiscated by customs officials") and, finally, to Brackley - the base of Honda's UK F1 operation.

After a year's repose, and with a line drawn under informal talks with Ferrari team principal Jean Todt about a return to the Scuderia, Brawn once again set his eyes on pastures new. "When I left Ferrari, I looked at the teams I felt could give me the things I wanted and where I'd want to be a part of," he says. "And Honda was the first team I went to speak to - I just felt they were more in line with my way of thinking.

"When you look at the major manufacturers involved in F1, Honda is the only company that has a racing heritage: racing is in its DNA. And that was very important because a lot of the decisions we make don't just relate to budgets or commercial concerns, but to racing."

Doubtless, too, there were certain personal factors urging him to join a team with more than its fair share of cracks. Picking up the tiller at an established team would have made for an easier ride, but would probably have been less satisfying for a man with an acute ability for problem solving.

"I'm going into an environment where people are more receptive to change," he adds. "And I feel I can be part of that process. But in going to a team that's not doing so well you've got to be convinced the attitudes and resources are in place to achieve what's needed. And I don't think we'll be short of resources and commitment."

Perversely, however, it was an overabundance of these very qualities that steered Honda off the rails 18 months ago. Flush with its first wave of genuine success, the team's Japanese paymasters flung money and resources at the team in a bid to catapult it forwards. In hindsight, maybe their contribution was too enthusiastic: by the middle of '06, the factory was overpopulated and over-resourced, and had crucially lost focus.

Chatting with Button's engineer, Andy Shovlin © LAT

The chief victim of this profligacy was former technical director Geoff Willis, who was unceremoniously dumped in July 2006. His successor, Shuhei Nakamoto, Honda Japan's appointed man, arrived with little F1 experience and took over the reins of an engineering department sloshing with naked ambition but lacking singular vision.

Although the RA106 sneaked a fine first victory at a wet Hungaroring, its competitiveness waxed and waned as the team threw a number of ill-thought-through solutions at the chassis. Lacking any firm conclusions at the end of the season, the team soldiered on into the new year with the RA107, an even-more-unpromising chassis that proved to be the least competitive car in Honda's recent history.

It was a perfect example of just what happens when good F1 teams go bad. Ploughing a lone furrow, the 107 exploited ideas many teams had long since dismissed in the vain hope that Honda alone was right and the others were wrong. Well before mid-season, the RA107 finally reached the dead-end in a long, empty, blind alley.

And it is from this position that managing director Nick Fry has been reversing for the past eight months. Brawn's arrival must not only speed up the backtrack, but also apply a swift handbrake turn back in the right direction and a right foot firmly planted on the gas in order to catch up with the likes of Ferrari and McLaren.

For Brawn, such a potentially tricky about turn doesn't seem too significant a task. "I've joined the team at a great time," he says. "It's had a difficult period recently, but Nick and his people have made some wise moves in terms of restructuring. They have put a very good team together and identified the areas where it wasn't working properly and put the people in place who will improve that enormously."

Indeed, Fry has done an admirable job of weeding out the problem areas and reseeding the design office with additional talent. Former aero boss Mariano Alperin-Bruvera has departed and ex-Williams chief aerodynamicist Loic Bigois drafted in to head up and reorganise the aero department. It's been a bigger task than expected, given that the team was later than most in fully exploiting the resources available from investing heavily in computational fluid dynamics technology.

Honda only fully shored up its CFD department in January this year, and has spent much of the past 12 months bolstering the department to enable it to complement the findings of the recently completed Brackley windtunnel.

It's unclear whether Brawn will be Honda strategy guru © LAT

Adding that final coat of paint to the aero department will be Bigois' objective - and Brawn will ensure that the renewed competence from that department will merge seamlessly with the rest of the team. "I don't think I need to even touch the manufacturing and engineering base for a long time," he says. "It's very solid and is working well, so that won't be a priority. Where we've got to improve is in knitting all the technical areas together: aero, chassis design and chassis dynamics. And the fantastic potential support from Honda also needs to be dovetailed into that. It's going to be my primary objective - to make that work as effectively as we can.

"Naturally, when I first arrived I was concerned about what I might find, but there are some great people at the factory, they just weren't knitted together at the top very well. But the core and quality of the organisation is comparable to anything I've seen. There is still a huge amount to do - it's a tough business, Formula 1. Nothing's an easy pushover, but I see lots of reasons to be optimistic. There are lots of areas where we can make tangible improvements over the next few years."

Brawn is equally confident about the state of the team's driver line-up. As with several other midfield outfits, Honda became embroiled in the bidding war for Fernando Alonso. But the team would have been ill-equipped to deal with the demands of a world champion with a short fuse, somebody who would have more likely steered the engineers away from their longer-term goals in search of short-term glory. So retaining Rubens Barrichello and Jenson Button for '08 is a wise move - one that will not only ensure strength and continuity, but carry on the team's momentum and allow it not to get sidetracked.

Additionally, Brawn is a long-time Barrichello fan and, unsurprisingly, invariably puts the Brazilian first when discussing Honda's driver line-up. "I'm very happy with the two drivers we've got," he says. "I've got no concerns with them in terms of achieving our objectives. I know Rubens very well and he was always able to push Michael [Schumacher]. Give him the right equipment and he can win races. And I feel the same about Jenson. He's been able to win a race and clearly is an exceptional driver who I've long admired from afar. He won't be the reason why we fail - we'll fail because we don't create the equipment."

The pairing may not be able to swiftly move to the front in '08, but the team has set itself modest goals for the year ahead. The belief is that it can get back to the position it occupied when the RA106 was operating at its late-'06 peak, challenging for podiums but more likely finishing solidy in fourth and fifth position.

Honda's drivers are both highly rated by Ross © LAT

But there's still cause for hope. With the sweeping changes planned for the 2009 regulations - where slick tyres will radically alter how performance is achieved - the clean sheet should allow the team to claw back much of the ground it lost over the past 18 months.

Brawn is clearly looking forward to the new challenge: "I'm confident we're going to do a better job next year, but 2009 will be a crucial step for us because the new regulations, new tyres and new aero package will reset the reference again. Naturally, with the difficulties that have happened in the last year or so, we've slipped behind and we've got a lot to make up, but by the time we get to '09, to some degree, the datum will be reset."

One of Brawn's main aims for the next year will be weighing up just what the team can achieve with its 2008 car - a design he's already labelled an "intelligent response to the problems encountered in 2007". The next 12 months will not only be spent evaluating just how the team goes racing, but how much resource needs to be weighted towards '09, when Honda could potentially make that quantum leap ahead of many of its contemporaries.

"If we're fortunate enough to have a car at a very competitive level then we'll balance our resources next year," says Brawn. "The top teams will be juggling between challenging for the championship and developing a 2009 programme. Inevitably, those teams not competing for the title will have a different perspective on things."

Still to be assessed is Brawn's contribution to the squad's strategy department. Adopting the title of team principal invariably means his hands may well be full when it comes to adopting a hands-on approach to the racing itself. Brawn famously became Ferrari's strategical lynchpin, even when his involvement devolved in recent years as he handed more responsibility to deputy Luca Baldisseri.

Still, it's difficult to imagine Brawn - stopwatch in one hand and trademark banana in the other - no longer calling the shots from the pitwall as the team tries to box itself out of a tight corner. "I don't want to get involved unless I have to," he admits. "I firstly need to see where the strengths and weaknesses of the team lie operationally at the track, but I do enjoy such things. At Ferrari, I was often the person on the pitwall with whom the buck stopped. I don't know if that will continue at Honda. The team appears to have a sensible group of people working on the strategy. But I'm happy to do it and equally happy if someone else can do it."

So, will it feel strange to not only be back in the heat of battle, but also leading the crusade against Ferrari, the team he has perhaps become most synonymous with after a decade of loyal service?

"It will be a bit odd," he smiles. "But, then again, it felt strange trying to beat Benetton back when I'd first made the switch to Ferrari. And when you're involved with one team for so long, you do develop an affinity for that organisation, so it might feel a bit awkward. But not enough to hold me back!"

Sidebar: Brawn's march to the top

When Ross brawn decided to leave his job with the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority to become a March Formula 3 engineer in 1976, it was the beginning of a remarkable career in motorsport.

With Frank Dernie (left) and Schumacher at Benetton © LAT

In 1978 he joined the Williams Formula 1 team as a machinist and became an integral part of the team's success over the next eight years. For much of that period he specialised in aerodynamics so, when the chance came to become chief aerodynamicist at Carl Haas' Beatrice/Lola team in 1985, he took it.

Although his time at the team was short-lived - it closed down in 1986 - he landed the chance to switch to Arrows. There he designed the car that earned the team its best finish in the constructors' championship - fourth in 1988 with the A10B - and he was recruited by Tom Walkinshaw Racing to work on the Jaguar sportscar project.

He brought F1-style technology into sportscars, and designed the Jaguar XJR- 14 that won the 1991 World Sportscar Championship.

With the Jaguar sportscar project winding down, TWR brought him back to the F1 fold with Benetton at the end of 1991 as technical director. There he was one of the prime architects of the team's glory years. Michael Schumacher and the team hit top form in 1994, winning the drivers' championship. A year later it did the double of drivers' and constructors' titles.

So when Schumacher left for Ferrari for 1996, it was only a matter of time before Brawn joined him. A year later he became the Scuderia's technical director. From 1997 to 2006, he was responsible for five more drivers' and six further constructors' titles.

After three decades in motorsport, Brawn has shown he still likes a challenge by taking on the role of team principal at one of F1's great underachievers of the 21st century.