German Car Zone

In F1, let alone business, nothing is ever guaranteed. Despite Brawn GP's astonishing performance this year, the Honda team had a poor track record with nothing that could possibly convince anyone that the team would even be in contention for the championship. Sure initial testing can give indications but those are very premature and early -- who knows were the car will stand against the competition.

Brawn did blow all other cars off the track at the start of the season but now in the second half, they are far from the fairytale start they had in the beginning. If fellow teams would have had a speedier development Button might not have been a championship today. So by all means took a major risk putting his own money into a team with a very uncertain future.

Button is most certainly going to be driving for Brawn next year. Other drivers I predict to be watching F1 from their telly next year are Fissi and Grojean. Heidfeld is dependable and will be looked at by new teams. I'm strongly impressed by Kobayashi who delivered an unexpected result for driver who has finished 16th in two GP2 seasons. He drove the car with confidence and managed to defend very well against some very experienced drivers. I think he might be Toyota's golden nugget.

He didn't put a penny Luw, he's got the team for free, a 100 mill from the japs and the money from the sponsort that came after, besides you have to consider that the brawn BGP01 is the most expensive F1 car ever, it has been in developpement since 2007, using the biggest facilities of the paddock and overseen by the cream of the cream of the technical guys that progressively joined Honda from all teams (mainly BMW - Ferrari and Macca), i am not saying that Ross had an easy task to do, not at all, what he did remains remarkable, but let's not fall into the fairy tail of goliath versus david. What Ross really did is to make all the pieces of the puzzles stick together when he joined Honda and maintaining the core skeleton of it when he had to decrease the size during the Brawn GP era. A great job but no miracle.

Yeah the car was expensive no doubt. As a whole he saw an amazing opportunity, the seized it and won. Let see how Brawn GP will fare next year with potentially Nice Rosberg and Mercedes engine as well as branding.

Mclaren should look into starting their own engine programme as I'm sure they are a bit bummed about the lack of exclusivity running a Mercedes engine. The probably didn't mind Force India using the engine but when the underdog teams running the same engine rise, then it becomes a problem. Red Bull seem to be very interested in changing engine supplier and Mercedes look rather tempting. From a constructors point of view, the car with most or best advantages wins. And Mclaren can't possibly be too keen on losing a big one like having one of the best engines on the grid.

Of course, even Helmut marko from redbull said at Interlagos that their N1 option is the Merc engine but that Macca are still vetoing it, the redbull threat is no longer regarded as a one shot, latest rumors even says that the F2010 will be very inspired by the RB car cause unlike the Brawn it offered a much bigger scope of developpement, so Mclaren are right to block things but at the same time Mercedes has every right to be pissed about it, so what will macca do in 2013 ? the year that Merc will take control of brawn and the year that will see new concept engine arrive. I personnaly think that it's still too early to make a wise choice.

Here's a flashback taking us to the end of 2008 when Ross was in search of a buyer. It's remarkable how confident he is in the car and very much confirms what shonguiz mentioned, they began working on the car as far back as in 2007. No wonder they dominated the first races of this year's season.


BBC SPORT | Motorsport | Honda buyer would get a great team - Brawn

Actually it started even before, late 2006 when they used on super aguri car as a testing car for some mechanical parts as suspensions and aero ones such as front wing components.

BMW 2nd?! How did that happen!

It was fun watching Kimi go up in flames. I wonder how bad he puckered up when that happened?
Great day for Hami. Too bad for Rubens.

Trulli needed to be slapped.