The untold stories of Brawn GP: How close the fairy tale came to never happening
It was Formula One’s last great fairy-tale story. A story which nearly never started amid a global financial crisis, which saw half of a 700-strong team become redundant, and which could have been derailed by a single chassis-cracking accident at one of the first four races of the season. Never before or since has a team won both the drivers’ and constructors’ world championships at the first time of asking, but that’s what Brawn GP achieved in 2009.
Ten years on and the fairy tale is well-worn. World champion Jenson Button, team owner Ross Brawn and team CEO Nick Fry have all written books based on the experience. But those who designed the car, engineered it to victory and were behind the scenes have rarely told their stories.
Theirs are stories of redundancy notices coinciding with half-built houses and pregnant wives; stories of falling asleep on garage floors at 3 a.m.; stories of victories and a metres-long bar bill once the championship was won; ultimately, a story unlike any other in F1 history. In recent months, ESPN has tracked down engineers, mechanics, truckies, designers and back-room staff to tell their favourite stories 10 years on from Brawn GP’s victory.
It starts with the news that Honda, the previous owners of the team, were pulling out of F1 and leaving the jobs of an entire factory in the balance.
Nicole Bearne, Executive assistant to Ross Brawn
“Ross had a call from somebody high up in Honda and they said they were coming over to the U.K. and they wanted to get a meeting in the diary. I seem to recall it was a couple of days beforehand that we knew that they were coming and at that point the speculation started.
“OK, results hadn’t been brilliant, the economic situation was not great, we thought there might be some kind of change, but still, they didn’t give us any advance warning or any kind of indication as to what was happening.
“They literally flew into Heathrow and all we knew was that Ross and the senior management would need to meet them. Ross was supposed to be chairing an FIA Technical Working Group [TWG] meeting on that morning, but obviously he had to cancel.”
Andrew Moody, Manager of paint and graphics
“I was based at the factory and I guess two or three days before the news came out, you felt something was about to happen. Don’t ask me how, but something was uttered somewhere and because I had been here a long time, I knew a lot of people and I just had this feeling that something was coming. But never to the extent that it was…”
Nicole Bearne, Executive assistant to Ross Brawn
“After the TWG had finished without Ross in attendance, I drove round to the Heathrow hotel that they were meeting in and sat outside and he came out. I handed him the documents from the TWG and said, ‘How is it going?” He just said, ‘It’s looking really bad.’
“At that point I remember just thinking, ‘Oh…’ and he just basically said, ‘They want to shut the team down,’ as we stood there in the carpark of an airport hotel. I didn’t hear anything more from him for the rest of the day. I came back up to the factory and carried on doing the bits and pieces I needed to do. We had the children’s Christmas party the following day for the families of the factory staff and I remember thinking, ‘God, this could be the last one’.”
Peter Hodgkinson, Car build operations manager
“I remember when we first got a whiff that Honda was going to pull the plug, we were downstairs doing a lot of KERS work with the Honda engine in preparation for 2009. We had been working around the clock firing the car up and trying to measure currents and stuff and we recorded on the wall how many engine starts we had done: we were up to 126 engine starts as we worked through various issues.
“Then suddenly the news came out that the Honda F1 team, as we knew it, was going to end and I remember the Japanese guys from Honda crying. Sky News were outside on the truck apron the day the news broke and then we had this horrible period where we didn’t know what we were going to do or what was happening. It was really uncomfortable, and then the discussions around redundancies started…”
Derek Herbert, Truckie and tyre man on Rubens Barrichello’s car
“We had loaded all the trucks up to go to a test in early December and just as we were about to leave when we were told there was a big meeting in the factory. So we unloaded the trucks again and joined the meeting. We didn’t know exactly what was going on, but we had a feeling it wouldn’t be good.”
Andrew Moody, Manager of paint and graphics
“It was announced to the whole factory in the race bays. They got the whole company together, and by that point we knew. I think you’d be naive to think it wasn’t bad news, but the actual news that we might be shut in the next weeks was still a bit of a shock.”
Amid a global economic crisis, Honda announced to the world on December 5, 2008 that it would be pulling out of Formula One. Initially the Japanese company wanted to exit in the fastest way possible, but Brawn and Fry managed to convince the board that finding a buyer would be a more cost-effective and PR-friendly method of walking away. Several suitors toured the factory, but none had what it took to buy and run the team.
Simon Cole, Trackside engineer
“When Honda pulled out there was a massive reset. We were just thinking, ‘Right, now we have got a major problem’ because we had nothing — not even an engine to power the car! Honda just wanted the whole F1 programme to go away, they didn’t want to pay everyone off, they just wanted to hand it over to somebody and make it go away as a problem.”
James Vowles, Chief strategist
“It really hurts you to the core when something you love suddenly gets pulled from under your feet. It’s very difficult to explain, but that’s how I felt at the time. I remember that whole process, I was fortunate enough to be involved in bits of it because I have languages and there were a number of people calling to try and buy the team — a huge number. “So with my Spanish I had to speak to a number of Mexican investors – shamsters, all of them! But you still had to listen to them saying they would fly over the next day in their helicopter, which sometimes never showed up.”
Nicole Bearne, Executive assistant to Ross Brawn
“All the supposed investors were slightly seedy. I remember we had a Russian that came over and I think he had bought a football club or shares in a football club and suddenly decided he was an oligarch. So he came out at one point and brought his wife and his son with him and we had to do a factory tour for them. Nothing came of it. “And then we had Richard Branson [of Virgin] hovering on the edges of it all as well, possibly coming in with some money and possibly looking at buying shares in the team. We were just exploring all the options, but rapidly trying to weed out the ones that were just too dodgy. Some of them, they got quite far down the line, and we discovered through due diligence that these people had criminal records!”
Peter Hodgkinson, Car build operations manager
“We had this horrible period where we didn’t know what we were going to do. It was really uncomfortable and then the discussions around redundancies started and you had to elect a representative for the department in the process.
“It was around the time of a presidential election in the U.S., so we took American election posters and put people’s faces on them! So I remember Richard Moody, who looked after stores, we put his face on top of Barack Obama’s body! Gordon Vacher, who was an ex-serviceman, we put his head on John McCain’s body!
“We did all these things to try to brighten the mood and lift the tension, because there was a lot of tension and a lot of anxiety. You simply didn’t know how the redundancy thing was going to go.”
Rob Chant, Trackside electronics
“It was an emotional time, and Jenson talked about it the media at the time saying ‘I’m out of a drive’ and we were all thinking the same because we were all out of jobs! It was tough to deal with that, especially when you are committed to mortgages and so on or have just got married.
“So you are sat there with all these commitments in your own life and the company you work for is effectively going out of business.”
Andrew Shovlin, Jenson Button’s race engineer
“I had another job lined up at BMW-Sauber but in the end I had to turn down that job. It was a real job with real pay, but I turned it down on the premise that there might be a job at Brawn.
“That was all before we had even run the car yet, and at that stage I had a half-finished house and a fully-pregnant wife! It all just felt like a bit of a battle.”
James Vowles, Chief strategist
“Ross did a really good speech at one point on the steps downstairs in the race bays where he riled the team up to make them realise we have a chance here. He said that we were talking to people, but let’s be honest about it wasn’t working out — none of those guys were really serious about investing and he explained that he had started looking at other options.
“He didn’t explain there was a management buyout on the table and what the deals were, but he really riled the team up to understand that you would have to fight for it if you want this and that we would need to dig deep to make it happen.
“It was one of the turning points for me because I saw for the first time that the team was not flat, they just didn’t know what was going on. Suddenly they realised that we had a chance at this and, however small it was, it was worth working every day and every night to do it.”
Nicole Bearne, Executive assistant to Ross Brawn
“I think Ross held the torch for everybody. He had a poster in his office, which kind of alluded to that. It was actually a quote from Honda, Mr Honda, which said: ‘You can only lead if you hold the torch’ and I think he did that. He became very much the person we looked to, Ross very much became the person we all took our cues from.
“The fact that he was calm and pragmatic and measured and just methodically worked his way through the problem, I think we all sensed that and took that lead and did the same. So there was no sense of panic that you could have in that kind of situation. People were worried about jobs and things, but it was a sort of calm reassurance that he gave to the organisation.”
After failing to find a buyer, Brawn and Fry convinced Honda to agree to a management buyout. They took control of the team and secured a 2009 budget equal to the money Honda would have saved in redundancies by not closing the whole thing down: £92.5 million. However, roughly 350 redundancies still needed to be made.
Nicole Bearne, Executive assistant to Ross Brawn
“The redundancies were a big deal. I think it was a big deal for all of the management committee, but I think the bigger deal would have been to have shut the whole thing down –that was the last thing they wanted to do. That was the absolute worst scenario.
“So anything was better than that and it was a brave decision to go through with the management buyout. Ross and Nick put a lot of their own collateral in and took the step to sure up whatever was there, but I think the overriding thing behind it — and it was kind of in the back of our minds — was that we all thought we had a good car.”
Andrew Moody, Manager of paint and graphics
“We were well aware there was going to be some trimming. The difficulty with that was that we needed to build the cars first, so from the announcement that we were Brawn to getting to Australia, it became very obvious that a large amount of staff would be going and that could only happen once the cars were built and the trucks had gone down the road to Heathrow for the first race.
“So everyone was in that painful state of not knowing if you would be the one staying or going. And in the management it was the same: you knew you had to do a job to thin the numbers but you could also be the next one to have that done to you having done it to your staff.
Rob Chant, trackside electronics
“We had meetings throughout the whole period because there was a consultancy process you go into effectively. In trackside electronics, where I work, we had a meeting and everyone was in the same room and they made a decision about who would be travelling and who wouldn’t.
“Some people were quite vocal about not wanting to travel because they had families and wanted to be here, but they knew by saying those words that they were putting themselves at risk for redundancy, because when you are a downsized team, everyone has to travel because there is no work to be done back at the factory. They knew by saying that they want to be back here with their families that they were probably out of a job.”
Derek Herbert, Truckie and tyre man on Rubens Barrichello’s car
“It was an awkward moment. We got to the point when we realised some would be made redundant and some would be kept on, and all of our department, which was at the time 14 guys, were gathered together.
“Our team manager, Ron Meadows, came into the office and went around the room, saying ‘you’re going to Australia, you’re going to Australia … you’re not, you’re not’. And then we knew where we stood.”
Simon Cole, Trackside engineer
“There was a feeling that everyone wanted it to work. The whole organisation was distilled down to a smaller and more streamlined and determined organisation. I have to be careful what I say, but some of the people we lost were perhaps a bit ambivalent about the success of the team and maybe thought, ‘This isn’t going very well, I’ll just go somewhere else’.
“But there was a handful of us left who were more tied to the success of the organisation, either geographically or because we had been there a long time. We knew we had to make it work because we knew we would only get one go at it and it would be a disaster if it didn’t go well. We were thinking maybe we can get a top three or top five car, but then when we made it and ran it, it was unbelievable!”
James Vowles, Chief strategist
“As we progressed through and things became clearer, if I could have invested my house in our success, I would have done. The deal Ross got was the deal I would have taken as well: £1 effectively to buy the team plus cash input to equal what Honda would have paid to close it down.
“I would have done the same thing because you knew you had a car that would be very, very quick. You also knew you had an entity at the end of it that would then be worth a lot.”
With redundancies hanging over half the factory, the team continued to work towards getting two cars ready for the first race of the season. The first point of order was finding an engine. Honda’s V8 was recognised as the worst on the grid in 2008, but would leave the team along with the Japanese manufacturer. Engines from Ferrari and Mercedes were both options, but one soon became the favourite….
Simon Cole, Trackside engineer
“Initially there was a lot of consideration about a Ferrari customer engine, which we rapidly concluded wouldn’t be a good idea. If we’d gone that route, Ferrari would always be in control of our performance and, our feeling was, in control of where we finish because they weren’t going to let a customer team beat them.
“We didn’t have aspirations of championships at that point, but we did want to be competitive and so, very last minute, we started looking at the Mercedes engine and amazingly managed to get it in the car in some world record amount of time. It must have been four weeks from getting the engine from Mercedes to getting it in the car!”
Andrew Moody, Manager of paint and graphics
“At the time, we didn’t have any sponsors. So Ross and Nick and the management decided the car would be white, a neutral colour, because the theory was you could attract any sponsor on to white and work with anyone. So that was the decision made on the white.
“But then it dawned on Nick Fry that we would be white, Toyota would be mainly white, BMW was going to be white and Williams could be white and, based on the assumption that we would be in the middle somewhere, we would actually have a very non-descript car in among the throng of other white cars. So then we had to come up with an idea to make it stand out.
“Of course, other teams had previously had fluorescent colours on their car — orange or red is the obvious one with McLaren — so we went down this yellow fluorescent route and that got worked into the logo and it grew from there. We just had a basic white thing and we were simply trying to figure out how we make it stick out.
“We tried to do it in a way that meant we had something identifiably bit that still left all the main areas free of anything so that we could fit pretty much any brand that came along. So it was like a 200mph billboard with blank spaces saying ‘your name here’.
“We hit on the yellow quite quickly and we manufactured the paint ourselves from a powder. Normally, you would purchase the paint, but a six kilo bag was £150 as opposed to a litre of paint, which is now about £250! That bag lasted us a season and I’ve still got three kilos left in the cupboard!”
Peter Hodgkinson, Car build operations manager
“I remember when it first fired up, it was a bit lastminute.com — as they all are when we put them together ahead of the first test. The build was kind of OK, but it was still all last-minute stuff. I remember we worked until 9am and then went to Silverstone’s tiny Stowe Circuit [in the infield of the Grand Prix circuit] for the shakedown.”
Andrew Shovlin, Jenson Button’s race engineer
“The Stowe Circuit is not a place to run a Formula One car, but it’s the only place that we could get at short notice. I think the cost of everything was a big deal as well, but it’s really not a proper track.
“As a result, we didn’t really know anything about the performance of the car from the test, only that it worked. And when you’ve changed engines at very short notice, you are mainly hoping that it functions and cools. As it happened it was our most reliable car ever — maybe not as good as this year’s Mercedes — but the design brief was very much: make it work first time and make it reliable.”
James Vowles, Chief strategist
“I remember the shakedown well. Our clothing sponsor Henry Lloyd turned up with team kit that just about had a Brawn logo on; but we didn’t quite have enough jackets, so I was freezing my arse off! But I have never seen a bunch of happier people in my life — just the emotion that you have of everything you have worked towards suddenly making it to track. And it just ran and it ran and it ran and it ran.
“I watched it, and the Stowe Circuit was a pretty shitty circuit if I’m honest, but I just remember the delight. I remember the expression on the faces of the Mercedes engine guys because we literally had one tent and one truck with the tail lift down and that was it! It was a long way from the usual standards of modern F1, but we were like, ‘Welcome to the new world!'”
In the week prior to the Silverstone shakedown, the rest of the paddock had been testing in Jerez and Brawn’s engineers had been monitoring their rivals closely. A major regulation change over the winter had forced all teams to come up with a completely new car design, but it soon became clear that very few were anywhere near as advanced as Brawn GP’s. Toro Rosso was the only team still running a 2008 car due to delays with its own build and the performance of the Red Bull junior team gave cause for serious optimism in Brackley.
Andrew Shovlin, Jenson Button’s race engineer
“We knew how we compared to that Toro Rosso because we had been racing it throughout 2008 and we could see from our numbers that we would be closer to that Toro Rosso than any of the 2009 cars, which were a lot slower. So that kind of gave us a way of linking up the two sets of rules and when we made a comparison we realised, conservatively, that we would be a second quicker than everyone! And then we thought, ‘Oh, well we must have got our maths wrong!'”
John Owen, Principal aerodynamicist
“We looked at the new cars and we were just shocked at how slow they were. We were aiming to be as fast, if not faster than we had been in 2008 because we now had slick tyres, and these cars were 3.5 seconds off the pace of the Toro Rosso. We were just thinking, ‘This is incredibly slow’.”
James Vowles, Chief strategist
“Yeah, it was about 3 seconds at the first stage and I remember when the other cars first ran, we looked at them and said, ‘That’s how our car looked in the wind tunnel about six months ago!’ We were never sure about our own pace because we had cut the back of the chassis off, installed an engine that we’d never used before and it was a bit of a Frankenstein, but the early signs were very positive.”
The first test against the opposition confirmed the team’s optimism. Despite running heavy fuel and the same 50-lap-old tyres used at the Stowe Circuit shakedown, Jenson Button returned from his first run as the fastest driver. But controversy over Brawn GP’s novel interpretation of the rules with its double-diffuser at the back of the car — a concept also being run by Toyota and Williams — was just around the corner…
Simon Cole, trackside engineer
“Jenson’s time appeared on the board and the circuit officials excluded it because it looked faulty and as though he had cut the chicane. Then there was a bit of discussion among the other teams because it soon became apparent that he hadn’t actually cut the chicane! “All the other teams were saying, ‘They obviously have no ballast on the car’ and it went on and on like that. Everyone was in denial and we were just simply amazed! “We weren’t being smug about it because we were still in extraordinary lucky circumstances, but everyone else was in denial and all the interviews with other team principals were saying, ‘Of course, if you don’t have any sponsors you remove all the ballast from the car to make the times look good’.
James Vowles, Chief strategist
“Every time they deleted our time, we looked at it before it was wiped off and we were a couple of seconds quicker! So immediately we put more fuel in the car to bring the times up. We should have done it before, but the problem is you are not going there thinking the car is quick you’re just thinking that we’ve got to survive and you stick to the normal procedures.
“As soon as we saw it delivering those lap times and that other people were not even close to touching it, we literally tanked it up, put more ballast on and then ran it that way for the rest of the week. The others then settled into the mindset, because humans are like this, that we were just trying to attract sponsors by running underweight early on. For them it was the only thing that made sense.
“I remember McLaren guys saying, ‘You took all the ballast off didn’t you? Well done to you guys — I know you need the sponsors and we’re just glad to see you running’. Ferrari were the same way and a lot of people just came to the conclusion that we were doing glory runs, not knowing that actually we were running every bit of metal we could on the car to slow it down!”
Nathan Divey, No.1 mechanic on Rubens Barrichello’s car
“There was lots of talk within the team that if we took out the fuel we should be this far ahead or that far ahead, but you also just thought that we can’t be — surely we couldn’t be that quick! But also there was the controversy brewing with the double diffuser, so we needed to be fast enough to win but not fast enough to show how quick the car really was!
“Because by the time we got to Australia we knew there was probably going to be a protest over the double diffuser, so it was a case of whatever you do, don’t go and win the race by a lap! I think the instruction for Jenson was win by five seconds — get to the front and stay there — but don’t humiliate everybody by disappearing off down the road because that won’t do us any favours!”
Peter Hodgkinson, Car build operations manager
“We got everything done, we got everything to Melbourne, but we were still saving money hand over fist back at the factory. You weren’t even allowed to print in colour back then — all the printers were taken away except one, which printed in black and white. That’s how it changed overnight.
“I remember the carpet in my office had worn through to the concrete, so there was a great big concrete hole there under my desk. So I said, can I at least have new carpet? The answer was always no, you can’t have new carpet until we win the championship.
“I also remember walking down the race bays with our aerodynamicist John Owen before the first race, we got to the door and he said ‘Hodg, if we do a good job with this, Mercedes will own us by the end of the season’ “I laughed and said, ‘But they’re with McLaren, John!’ He said, ‘You never know. If we kick arse and have a good season, Mercedes will own this place’. And I laughed, but at the end of the season, there it was.”