Ross Brawn cashes in

How could he? Ross Brawn has sold out to a bunch of marauding Goths from Baden-Württemberg. The bastards are then going to transform a proud English racing team in the finest traditions of Lotus, Tyrrel and Brabham into a German team with German drivers called Mercedes. Is this what the war was fought for, Mr Brawn? Is this why our brave boys instilled the Dunkirk spirit into us? For you to roll over and give everything up to the impudent Germans? Shame on you!

In writing that last paragraph I am anticipating what the English tabloids are going to be screaming tomorrow morning as they express their indignation at the takeover of Brawn GP by Mercedes which was announced this morning. The Germans will own 75% of the company and take control of its premises in Brackley while changing the team’s name to “Mercedes Racing” and painting the cars silver. World champion or not, Jenson Button is not German and, therefore, not suitable to the Baden-Württemberg lot. To survive in Formula One he will now have to smile sweetly and cut a deal with an English team in Woking, Surrey which you might have heard about. It’s called McLaren. Although Mercedes own part of McLaren – and the team is officially called McLaren-Mecedes – the English shareholders will assume full control of the company in the next couple of years. The Germans have fallen out of love with their perfidious English friends, you see. While cooperating with Mercedes to race Formula One cars, McLaren were quietly building super road cars behind the scenes and seriously eating into the market for Mercedes’s own sports cars! The situation simply could not be permitted to continue. A face-saving divorce is the only way forward.

For Ross Brawn personally, the decision is typical of the man’s measured nature. When you have spent the better part of a year trying to ensure survival of your creation and then – as if a huge finger has reached down from the sky and touched your forehead and a booming voice has declared “it’s you!” – seen it propelled to the impossible heights of world champion on two levels, you must feel a bit like Alexander the Great: “when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer.” There is nothing more for Brawn to achieve; nowhere else for him to go but down. He knows this and, once again, has produced evidence of his supernatural genius. He rescued the detritus of a Formula One team from Honda for £1 and nine months later has sold it on as a successful, championship-winning product to Mercedes for £30 million while retaining a minority shareholding. For a chap who claimed to know nothing about business that is not bad at all. Now he can concentrate on doing the job he loves in the knowledge that his family’s financial security is assured. Hats off to Mr Brawn.

Meanwhile, the discussions in Woking will have chins wagging for a few days to come. The smart money is on Jenson Button accompanying Lewis Hamilton at McLaren next year. That may not be a very good thing for the new world champion. I have no doubt that Hamilton is more talented than he is and will have no qualms about showing it. Worse, whereas Button would have been able to mould the Brawn team around him had it remained independent, he will now be joining Team Hamilton which – as we saw with Fernando Alonso – can be very unsettling.

McLaren had made no secret of the fact that they have been in discussions with that other world champion who has been jettisoned by Ferrari, Kimi Raikkonen. Since Raikkonen was contracted to drive for Ferrari until the end of 2010, Ferrari are prepared to pay him $16 million to stay away. In the absence of a drive from a top team like McLaren for at least $16 million, there is little incentive for the Finn to do anything but get pissed and chase skirts around the world for a year. Most sane blokes I know would do the same, so more power to Mr Raikkonen.

Spare a thought for the Japanese chap who made the decision to quit Formula One and accepted £1 from Ross Brawn to enhance it. He must be feeling like a bloke who has been rogered rigid!

We have only just got through the 2009 season and the 2010 intrigue is already upon us. What else is about to emerge?

Gitau
16 November 2009

Vettel closes the curtains on 2009 in Abu Dhabi

The Japanese do things insidiously. While the big American car companies were swaggering about producing ludicrously large, thirsty lumps of metal in the 1960s, the Japanese quietly observed and learned how to do things differently. Before long, their largest market place was the United States of America itself. They did the same thing with cameras, televisions and even ships.

It should not, therefore, be surprising that Japanese lingerie model, Jessica Michibata, was never going to be contented by being a Formula One world champion’s bit of totty. That role had already been claimed and owned by a brash American called Nicole Scherzinger aka Pussycat Doll (during qualifying on Saturday there were some superb TV pictures of the Doll being photographed standing next to a lecherous, old sheikh who seemed as excited as a three year old with a new toy car!) of whom Jessica was not particularly fond. Mindful of Jenson Button’s early years in F1 – when he was determined to recreate the image of the young F1 driver as a serial-shagging rake – Jessica swore to herself that once her man had secured the world championship, she would rather be damned than be “just a girlfriend.”

Nicole was on hand to cheer Lewis Hamilton - and he looked pretty good during qualifying on Saturday – but in a rare mechanical failure for the McLaren, he had to retire with failed brakes before the halfway point of yesterday's inaugural Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. Nicole did not look too pleased about this but I have little doubt that Jessica was sniggering behind her well manicured hand.

It is not difficult to see, then, that Mr Button has come under some heavy pressure in the past fortnight. So heavy, that in the drivers’ press conference after the race, the other chaps on the podium with him yesterday (after he managed to finish the race in third place), wanted to talk about little else than his impending nuptials . Button was repeatedly joshed by Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber about when his wedding was going to be and all the clearly embarrassed English fellow could do was sheepishly declare that he wasn’t getting married this year. Well, there are only two months left until next year, so here is an idea for a wager. I will bet anyone £50 that Button will commence the 2010 season wearing a wedding ring. Any takers?

With everyone falling over themselves to say nice things about the Yas Marina circuit – after all, if a billionaire invites you to a sumptuous dinner cooked by a Michelin starred chef and accompanied by the most toothsome wines you have ever tasted, the last thing you want to be is rude! – it falls to me to state the bleeding obvious. The Yas Marina circuit, like the others designed by Bernie Ecclestone’s mate, Hermann Tilke, is in an incredible setting but is not one which I would describe as capable of producing superb racing action. It is a bland affair that produces processional Sunday afternoons where any overtaking is done in the pits and not on the circuit. The only real “action” we saw yesterday was Jenson Button hunting down and nearly catching Mark Webber in the final two laps of the race. There was also a comedy moment when Toro Rosso driver Jaime Alguersuari mistook the livery of the Red Bull for that of his own team and placed his car in the hands of the Red Bull mechanics who were waiting for the eventual winner, Sebastion Vettel, to come in for his own pit-stop seconds later. Unsurprisingly, Alguersuari was summarily redeployed on the circuit with a flea in his ear.

Ecclestone has repeatedly complained about people having to park their cars in muddy fields and suffer the indignity of less than luxurious track-side facilities at Silverstone. But given a choice between glitzy buildings – a hotel that changes colour through the evening, luxury yachts and floodlights etc – and a bland racing circuit; or having to shiver in the rain with mud up to my knees, wolfing down a hog roast and a pint of beer in a plastic mug while watching proper wheel-to-wheel action, I know what I would prefer. I have nothing in principle against new locations for Grands Prix (for instance, the new one in Korea for next season looks interesting) but the fundamentals should never be compromised. Yas Marina seemed to me to be every bit as unexciting as the new circuit in Valencia. How many times do we have to say this? Formula. One. Is. About. Motor. Racing.

Enough. The end of the 2009 season – the most exciting in recent memory – should not be about me venting my spleen about that worm, Ecclestone. It is easy to forget that for about a decade before this year, Formula One was dominated by two large and well resourced teams, Ferrari and McLaren. This year we have had four different teams win Grands Prix – Brawn, Red Bull, McLaren and Ferrari – and throughout, the uncertainty about the ultimate identity of the world champion (and the sheer mind-blowing nature of the possibility of it being a candidate from small teams like Brawn or Red Bull) has kept us thrilled and entertained. In addition we have had entertaining side shows like the defenestration of Flavio Briatore and the Nicole/Jessica wars.

I have enjoyed this year’s racing immensely. It seems like an eternity until engines are revved up six months hence…

Gitau
02 November 2009