It’s a Cinderella Story

C

A. Brawn GP’s sprint onto the F1 stage was more than miracle; it was impossible. B. Every story needs a hero, and this story has a hero as improbable as any. C. Early Brawn pit stops were a mess, completed seconds after their better-drilled competition. THE 2009 FORMULA 1 SEASON is the most miraculous, sensational, improbable coup in motorsport history. It’s a fable wherein the gutter-ball team upends the establishment and blindsides the grid with engineering genius and a driver built to embody the moment.

As unlikely as Buster Douglas, Brawn GP rose from the mat to become one of racing’s all-time victorious underdogs. It’s still the only team to win an F1 constructors’ title in its first year. Anyone who claims they saw it coming is lying— except British driver Jenson Button.

“We knew the car was good, ” he says.

From the outside, Button’s career was in free fall. In 2008, he scored just three championship points. His team didn’t fare better. Honda finished ninth out of 11 that year, despite pouring hundreds of millions into the venture. The vultures circled.

Yet all was going quietly to plan. The Honda team buzzed in the months leading up to the 2009 season, Button relates. Their simulators spat out hypothetical lap times on par with 2008’s leading cars. It was a confounding, exciting discovery, given the rulebook had been hugely reconfigured after the 2008 season. At the time, legendary F1 designer Adrian Newey called 2009’s regs “the biggest rule changes since 1983. ” Shakeups like these almost always stunt lap times as teams chase new ideas.

“We heard rumors of people being one-and-ahalf seconds slower than they were the previous year, if not a bit more, ” Button confides. Honda sat well ahead of the curve.

But hope could not drown out the shocking present. Three weeks before the season, Honda’s situation devolved. The Great Recession buckled the world’s knees, and Honda corporate cut bait on its F1 program in a panic. The snap decision left Button and the entire Honda F1 staff in limbo.

Honda technical director Ross Brawn, who’d spurred on Ferrari’s dominance in the early Aughts, swooped in. He purchased the Honda team and its assets for a single British pound. Honda forked over 100 million pounds, allowing them to step away immediately instead of sinking the money into bankruptcy proceedings. Brawn renamed the enterprise Brawn GP, scraped together some advertising cash, then loaned the team more money from his own pocket to carry on. It was a brash move—one you’d never make without expecting a tidal change in the sport.

“It gave us at least a bit of direction and a bit of leadership, ” Button recounts. “Everyone within the team was a lot more confident that things were gonna turn around. ”

But survival is different from success. To stem the bleeding from Honda’s collapse, Brawn cut 350 jobs, creating tension within the team as the enterprise hung by a thread.

In the scramble, Brawn GP’s preseason testing for 2009 fell short. They showed up days late to the first test of the season with a car that had only been proved on paper. Simple items like team-branded sweatshirts were in such short supply, many staff braced against cold mornings at the track in simple tees, the only Brawn swag available.

But the Brawn BGP 001 had arrived. Finally. Button wheeled the car onto the track at Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya and relayed complaints back to pit lane. Understeer at high speed, he said, and the low ride height in the rear caused stability issues. It unsettled his confidence. He returned to the pits, mind buzzing with feedback.

“After the first run, we got back in the pits, and my engineer just sat there smiling, ” he recalls. “‘You’re six- or seven-tenths quicker than anyone here who’s been testing for six days. ’” Button laughs. “And that was on old tires. ”

The car was fast. More important, it was reliable. Brawn had ditched the Honda power unit, wedging in a Mercedes engine that needed crude spacers to mate with the Brawn chassis.

“We were all excited after the first test because nothing went wrong. We’ve got this new engine in the back that doesn’t really fit the chassis properly, but nothing went wrong, ” Button enthuses.

B

A. The Brawn BGP 001.

By today’s standards, it looks elegant. In 2009, it debuted a wild front wing and rear aero package. B. A diffuser inlet on

BGP 001’s underbody.

One portion of the key “double diffuser. ” C. A smooth, expansive underbody channeled air into and over the double diffuser. D. Brawn swapped out

Honda power for

Mercedes, which required cumbersome spacers to get the fit right. E. The cleverly packaged second diffuser.

Once competitors caught up to Brawn’s idea, the title was practically over. C

D

E

Brawn GP’s disarray and Honda’s failures in the two previous seasons were an effective smokescreen. When Brawn took the reins at Honda in 2007, he opted to limp along that year, then sacrificed the 2008 season preparing for 2009. What Brawn and his team achieved on the drawing board would dictate the 2009 championship.

The BGP 001 owed its quantum-leap pace to an infamous innovation called the double diffuser. The 2009 technical regulations sought to limit the effect of rear diffusers by paring their dimensions. But Brawn quietly recognized a hole in the regulations. He leveraged channels in the car’s underbody to route air above the rules-compliant rear diffuser to a second diffuser. Two other teams had similar ideas, but Brawn’s worked best.

Brawn’s clever interpretation of the rules was so effective that his competitors initiated a lawsuit in protest. That suit loomed over the first half of the season, threatening to undo years of inspired work, first at Honda and then Brawn.

No matter: Button qualified the Brawn on the pole for the F1’s season opener in Australia, defying speculation that Brawn had run low-fuel during testing to overstate its pace. Then Button won the opener in decisive fashion. His teammate, Rubens Barichello, took second.

Despite protests, the FIA declared double diffusers legal for the race while its investigation continued. The constructors’ championship became Brawn GP’s to lose, and the playboy charmer had the world drivers’ championship on a string. All he had to do was hold on tight. Easy.

Well, not quite. Even with the perfect tool on track, the team was in disarray. Owing to Honda’s late exit and the subsequent chaos, a championship-quality polish to their effort was missing.

“We’d lost our refueling guy. He’d become a plumber, ” Button says.

A. Button’s now-iconic helmet read “Push the Button” on top.

We’re still not sure what it means. B. A slew of early victories gave way to a nail-biting finish. C. Two world titles for

Cinderella. It was all just a delirious daydream, right?

C ond off the best teams on the grid.

“Being in that position, suddenly, you’re like, we’ve gotta make the best of this. You end up putting so much pressure on yourself to succeed, because you’re not sure if it’s gonna happen again. ”

It did happen. Button won the season’s second race from the pole in Malaysia. The stakes grew higher still. Rather than fighting for survival, grasping for a hold that might vault his career up the lower rungs of the F1 ladder, Button was fighting for a title, and he knew it.

After a third-place blip in Shanghai, Button stood on the top step of the podium in the next four races. At the end of this stretch, Brawn looked unstoppable. But with the lawsuit overturned, every other team on the grid had developed a double diffuser of their own. The arms race caught Brawn just before the season’s midway point.

“We had Shanghai, and I finished third. It felt like a massive disaster not winning the race, ” Button says. “And then we got to the British Grand Prix, where we didn’t win, and again it was a disaster not to win the race. We underachieved, and just the pressure keeps building. ”

Button finished sixth at Silverstone that weekend. Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel won from the pole. Button followed up his stumble with a free fall: fifth in Germany, seventh in Hungary, and seventh in Spain. In the following race, at Spa in Belgium, Romain Grosjean crunched his car into the back of Button’s, ending the Briton’s race. It was the first time Button had retired all season.

As Red Bull gathered itself, clawing at Button’s lead, problems developed under Brawn GP’s roof.

“Rubens is the nicest teammate in the world, but obviously when you’re fighting for a championship, he thought at times the team were favoring me, ” Button remembers.

Button’s engineer learned that Barichello’s car had exceeded the self-imposed rear camber limit. The limit existed for the safety of Brawn’s drivers, as high camber on the BGP 001 led to dangerous instability in fast corners. Barichello and his engineers courted danger to close the gap to Button.

“Ross went ballistic, ” Button says. “Called everyone in and said, ‘Do not ever do this again, overstep the mark. ’”

With pressure building, Button’s grip on the championship loosened. He appeared scattered. Results waned. The press turned on Button, accusing him of ditching the cavalier spirit of his early season for caution. With Button overwhelmed by the desire to avoid defeat rather than seize victory, his season now seemed set on a glide path that would end with a crash landing. Ross Brawn, ever the tactician, ran interference.

“It’s human nature, ” Brawn stated ahead of the Brazilian Grand Prix. “Someone said to me that if you’re playing a football match, and you go in at halftime 3–0 ahead, you don’t play the second half the same way. I can understand that. I wish it weren’t the case, but it creeps in. ”

Button started from 14th in Brazil, the season’s penultimate race. At the back end of the grid, he was well out of the points he needed to secure the championship for himself and Brawn GP. Caution would not do, but the universe seemed hell-bent on chaos at Interlagos that weekend. Downpours had upended qualifying, opening-lap carnage claimed three cars, and an unsafe pit release ended with Kimi Räikkönen literally on fire.

Button survived the carnage and found a rhythm. Then the shackles of caution fell off. Button sliced up the field. In a defining moment of the season, he passed Red Bull’s Mark Webber midcorner, catching a lightning snap of oversteer at the apex. Button snatched the title for good.

A little over a decade after the championship, Button slips into a conversation about “The Brawn Year” as if falling into a comfy chair. I ask Button how he contextualizes 2009’s anomaly. In our ranking-obsessed culture, we’re less likely just to stand back in awe. Legacy is subject to constant scrutiny.

I offer Vettel as an example. He won four titles with an all-conquering Red Bull car, only for his legacy to be questioned in hindsight. “It was all the car, ” the haters say. Same with Lewis Hamilton: six titles owed to a dominant Mercedes. Button rode the double-diffuser Brawn to a title, they say. It wasn’t his talent.

“Isn’t that unfair?” I wonder.

Button demurs.

“When you’re fighting just your teammate for a championship, it definitely takes away from it. Because you’ve still got to win, but your car is so superior to the rest that it doesn’t mean as much, ” Button says. He pauses to think. “But it’s lovely when you see seasons like last year where Mercedes and Red Bull are both strong. You know, those years, for me, mean a lot more. ”

It’s a befuddling nonanswer, but so was Button’s championship season. However he’s placed within the pantheon of champions, even by his own estimation, it’s less important than this: Button sat front-row to one of the greatest miracles in motorsport. After all, history is chock-full of underdogs who almost made it and favorites who accomplished the expected. Does anyone remember their stories?