Brawn certain of '09 form

Ross Brawn is confident his team won’t prove to be one season wonders in 2009 and it has the capabilities to remain a front-running force into next year and beyond.

The Brackley-based squad’s remarkable start to the campaign, which has seen it win six of the opening seven races and open up big leads in both championship races, was aided by the decision it took early last year to ditch development work on its uncompetitive RA108 in favour of giving full focus to its all-new 2009 car.

However, the shock Formula 1 departure of former owner Honda over the winter has forced the team to downsize and, although it has stressed its budget is “safe” for the remainder of this year, Brawn’s squad has acknowledged it needs to build up its sponsorship roster for the future.

But although it can no longer count on being bankrolled by car giant Honda, its eponymous team owner says he has seen signs from both the ongoing work on this, and next year’s, car that it will be able to continue competing in the development race.

Asked by journalists in a conference call if he thought the team had a structure in place that would allow it to remain a competitive force, he said: “Yes, I believe so.

“We had a major restructure over the winter, but I can already see with the development of the new car that it is still progressing strongly and I see the output from what I would describe as the ‘centres of performance’ of the team is just as strong, and in some ways maybe even stronger, because of the clearer focus and structure we have put in place.



“So the areas of performance I am not concerned at all. Obviously in that restructuring we have lost some capacity for manufacturing and for design and that’s the areas we will have to be careful with to make sure that we can cope with the needs of the new car.

“But I think you can see from the way we are developing the car this year – and there are new parts on the car for Silverstone again – that we are managing to keep up.

“There will be some adjustments needed because you won’t get it right first time when you do such a restructuring, but I think we’re not far off.”

The championship leader’s bid to extend its dream start to the current campaign will resume at its home race of Silverstone this weekend, the team aiming to repeat its victory from Turkey on the similarly fast Northamptonshire track.

Brawn admits he was delighted that, given main rival Red Bull was expected to be the pacesetter at the sweeping Istanbul Park, it convincingly came out on top two weeks ago – the Briton praising the strength of his team for addressing one of the BGP 001’s previous weaknesses in faster corners.

“I think we will be at the sharp end [this weekend], but whether we can win it or not I honestly don’t know,” Brawn said.

“I was very, very pleased with Turkey because when we got back to the European season, I think the consensus was that we were going to come under huge pressure from all the steps that the big teams were going to make, so quietly we went about making steps ourselves and kept going.

“With Turkey what I was especially pleased about was we had identified that Red Bull were quicker than us in the fast corners and the whole team focused on that, the aerodynamic group and the chassis group, to find ways of setting up the car a little bit differently, to find improvements in the aero and I think in Turkey in the famous turn 8, we were one of the quickest cars, as quick as Red Bull.

“That I think shows great strength of the team that they identified a weakness and an area we needed to improve and everybody responded extremely well.

“So Turkey was very, very pleasing for me because it was a high-speed circuit and up until then [on such tracks] you’d have to say Red Bull were stronger than we were and we went there and were able to show that we can respond."

And following the introduction of a new front wing two weeks ago, the team owner says the car will feature further upgrades in Britain and the subsequent races.

“We have new front wing endplates for Silverstone and new rear wing, some different chassis settings again that have come from rig work we have done,” he added.

“We’ve got some upgrades coming over the next few races which I think will help as well.”