For as long as I can remember, I've had a fascination with racing,
and I'm going to share a story that barely seems believable.
In a world of fierce competition, politics, money and power,
at the highest level of global motor sport,
a small, underfinanced team drew on every ounce of determination
to overcome the biggest names in motor racing.
This is the story of Brawn GP.
How low will it go?
The stock market slide continued today.
The credit crunch has brought Formula 1
crashing back down to earth.
The economic situation was dire.
Motor giant Honda pulled the plug on Formula 1.
Why do people say that you were the one pound Formula 1 team?
Well, I gave a pound to the Honda executive to formalise the deal.
We did not have a plan B for anything.
No way that this car doesn't make Melbourne.
Even if we arrive like that.
Didn't they tell you, you couldn't crash?
Jenson Button will be romping clear now.
You couldn't come up with a Hollywood script.
No, I'd never believe you.
We're lucky bastards.
We were lucky bastards indeed.
Jenson Button crosses the line, takes the chequered flag.
This opportunity doesn't come around for many people.
For the first time in five years,
Rubens Barrichello is a winner in Formula 1.
This season is made for me.
I'm gonna win the championship.
Tell us what you said to your drivers?
Yeah, just don't hit each other.
People believe in him,
because he looks innocent, and he wouldn't hurt anybody.
Yet, really, behind the scenes, a smiling assassin.
- I think you're all smiling assassins.
Oh, you have built me a monster of a car.
They went too far.
All of us were aware there was something against the rules.
Suddenly, this team that everybody just wanted to survive, is killing us.
Formula 1 has been thrown into chaos.
The biggest crisis to hit motor sport in 50 years.
...whether his car is legal.
This was the start of the war.
It is still with the blood.
That's the piece that came out of your car.
- The knives were out,
and they were after us.
The problem was, collectively, they didn't have any balls.
You're seriously on fire, Rubens.
Complete despair on the Brawn pit wall.
Now, this is about survival.
The pack had caught up.
The emotions were starting to show.
I wish I can get on the plane and go back home right now.
Everyone's in Formula 1 to win. We're not all friends.
Jenson Button P14.
- Where are you now?
I felt that the whole world was watching me fail.
This is the perfect way to throw it away. Jesus fucking Christ.
It's ten past midnight. Cinderella's gone.
It's like the best in the world fighting for, like, this.
One of the greatest seasons in Formula 1 history.
Just don't give up until you can't go any further.
Because if we'd given up, we wouldn't be telling the story.
March the 4th, 1986.
Britain is still in the grip of a miserable winter.
Aerodynamicist Ross Brawn is in the Cranfield Aeronautics wind tunnel.
All Formula 1 aerodynamicists are locked in an endless quest for more downforce.
Formula 1 is such a unique blend of technology and sport.
Once it gets into your blood, it will never let go.
Everything people do in Formula 1 is competitive.
Where is Michael Schumacher?
He's stuck in traffic. I want him in this lap.
It is technical.
It's engineering. It's strategy.
What an absolutely phenomenal drive by Michael Schumacher.
I had an unbelievable spell at Ferrari.
We won six World Constructors' Championships.
Michael won five Drivers' Championships there.
And I really didn't imagine anything else could ever follow that.
I thought a decade at Ferrari was perfect.
I'd decided I wanted a year out.
This was historical era for Ferrari.
When he left, I accepted, because he say to me, "I want to fish."
If he say to me, "I leave because I want to go in another team"...
For me, it was a disaster for my heart.
Can you speak a little bit about Honda?
You were CEO.
You know, fundamentally, we lacked experience in Formula 1.
My background is big companies.
I know how they operate.
In many ways, we had too much money.
We ended up working on a whole bunch of stuff which really was distracting
and didn't give us much in the way of results on the track.
We needed a top-class technical director.
Those, in Formula 1, are few and far between.
I set about ringing Ross, about once a month.
Nick was relentless.
It would just be, uh, a friendly chat.
He'd just keep reminding me he was there.
Ferrari really wanted me to come back
doing the same thing that I'd been doing before, which I wasn't interested in.
And Nick and Honda were offering up another step in my career.
So it was as team principal.
In charge of everything.
Ross Brawn, the most successful technical director in recent years,
has joined Honda as team principal.
Ross, welcome to the team.
Thank you. I'm very pleased to be here.
This was a big deal.
And this was also, I think, a big deal within Formula 1.
I remember being at Brackley,
and we had the whole factory there. We're all sat on the floor.
And it gets announced that Ross is part of the team.
Before he opens his mouth, I think, it lifts the team,
because of what he's achieved.
2005, you're with Ferrari.
You make a jump for new opportunities.
Your former technical director,
Ross Brawn, leaves Ferrari to join Honda.
Everybody in Formula 1 knew of the background of Ross.
So, for sure, I was happy.
Did you talk to him?
Did you wish him luck at Honda?
Did you have a...
I think Honda made a very good offer to him.
And, uh, they were very, very smart to have a person like him.
I've always found Ross to be a very polite guy, a very nice guy to communicate with,
but a ferocious competitor.
And, uh, you know, a smiling assassin.
- I think you're all smiling assassins.
I mean, Ross was perceived as a tactical genius.
As a wonderful manager of people.
I think that's what he was good at.
People believe in him,
because he looks innocent, and he wouldn't hurt anybody,
and, therefore, people sort of...
...trusted him completely.
I feel like there's a but.
No, maybe there's a most.
And what does that mean?
Most people trusted him.
It was a big, big risk by Ross
to go from a very comfortable dominant environment in Ferrari to take a punt.
Uh, and Honda wasn't a small team.
Honda had one of the biggest budgets in Formula 1,
but they were under-delivering.
You know, the sleeping giant that needed waking.
Was it ambition?
Do you feel like he wanted to maybe...
Prove that he can win also with somebody else. Yes.
With the 2008 car,
the first thing Ross said was, "Let's cut the bullshit.
This is a shit box. You're not gonna win anything with this."
This would be a year where once the car was racing,
we're not gonna pay any attention to it.
'Cause there was these new regulations coming,
and it was vital that we put all our resource into these new regulations,
'cause it was such a great opportunity.
And that was a strategic decision that I don't think anyone else made.
Every few years, there are rule changes in F1.
Almost all of them with the goal of improving safety,
so the cars don't keep getting faster and faster.
These rule changes clip the wings of car designers,
and all the teams essentially start from scratch.
Teams start to look at the design of the cars,
they see problems with the regulations, or they see opportunities.
Formula 1 cars are the pinnacle of motor racing.
The fastest cars on the planet,
because they're so efficient in terms of downforce,
creating incredible grip and incredible cornering speeds.
The new 2009 rules restricted the cars' aerodynamics,
giving them less downforce:
The airflow around and through the car that pushes it to the ground.
The idea was to make the racing closer, with more overtaking.
It was a pretty big meeting on the strategy for the new car,
where a very junior Japanese aerodynamicist
put up his hand and said, you know, he'd got this idea
fundamental to giving us more downforce at the back of the car
than the rules had originally intended.
It's like the opposite of this famous movie Lost in Translation.
It's found in translation,
because they found something an English guy cannot read.
You take word by word, line by line, and say, "Ah, why we are not doing that?"
The purpose of regulation is to reduce downforce.
The diffuser are very important aerodynamics part.
What is a diffuser?
So it's the bodywork around the rear wheels that faces the ground.
Under your car, you are trying to generate low pressure,
and this low pressure will bring your car down.
There was a controlled set of dimensions, but it wasn't controlled well enough.
There was an opportunity to have another diffuser,
and then to couple these two together.
And, so, the double diffuser was born.
A loophole design that got around the new regulations.
The double diffuser gave the car way more downforce
than the rules had originally intended, effectively, giving it more grip,
which allowed for more speed in the corners.
More speed in the corners meant they would be faster on the straights.
The penny dropped.
Hang on a minute, you know, he's onto something here.
This is a new opportunity,
and the more we got into it, the more we realised the potential.
I know that any advantage you have in Formula 1 is only temporary,
but we had this opportunity,
and we were on the path to achieve our ambitions.
We had no idea what was about to happen.
Wait, who is he?
How low will it go?
The stock market slide continued today.
Two financial giants, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers,
buckled under the real estate and credit crises.
A record $3.7 trillion in market value has been lost this year.
Capitalism itself looks like it's on the brink.
Lehman Brothers crashed down.
After that, for Honda, car order, it stopped.
So, we must shut down our production line.
We got a call to meet with one of the Honda executives.
Oshima-san.
Oshima-san was someone I'd worked with for several years.
We didn't know he was in the country.
And we had assumed,
you know, we just need to save some money here.
We went into a small room with Oshima-san,
who was clearly very distressed, which was worrying.
And what did he say?
Well, it wasn't what he said, initially, it was the fact that he was crying.
And he announced that Honda was stopping.
It was all coming to an end.
While the economy crashed down...
It's not necessary to do motor sports in that situation,
so our management decide to quit F1.
He said, "Tell the staff that this is it,"
and, you know, "Turn out the lights."
I mean, was there a moment where you're in the hallways,
and you look at each other, and you're like, I don't know, like...
...Ross turns to Nick Fry and says, "What the fuck?"
And Nick turns to Ross and goes, "What the fuck?"
Well, it would definitely have been a "we weren't expecting that" moment.
Our minds were racing, 'cause you're suddenly faced with...
And I know my mind was racing, "What can we do?"
We weren't really prepared for the ambush which followed.
It was a fait accompli.
They invite us into a much bigger boardroom
to meet lawyers and HR specialists.
And it was really the assassination squad.
They didn't see any other option
apart from to close down the company, make everyone redundant,
they would exit from Formula 1, and they would carry on their business.
Our defences went up,
and we made it clear this was not gonna be just a walk away and turn the lights off.
That wasn't gonna happen.
The magnitude of what we're talking about...
It's just not something you can turn off overnight.
It was incomprehensible they thought that could be done.
It was against the rules.
Against the law.
You know, they didn't really have an option.
And that bought us time.
That bought us time to start to think about what we could do.
Legally, Honda had to put the whole team on three months' notice
with a view to redundancy at the end of it.
But Ross and Nick convinced Honda they could sell the team.
Which would not only be cheaper than making the whole team redundant
and paying off their many contracts,
but also save 700 jobs.
We asked for a month to try and find a buyer for the team.
We went back to Brackley,
and we told everybody.
Honda has decided to discontinue their Formula 1 activity.
- Fucking hell... - They will not be competing in 2009.
What this means, is that we are all under threat of losing our jobs.
What was it like having to tell all the staff at Brackley
they were on three months' notice?
How did people handle it?
Shock. I think everyone knew the economic situation was dire.
But it was still a massive shock for everyone.
I think my first words were, "But they can't."
"They just can't pull out."
It was my job, and it was, you know, 500 other people on-site
who weren't sure how they were gonna pay the bills all of a sudden.
It's leading up to Christmas.
We had a financial crisis on our hands.
It probably wasn't going to be the best time to be out of work
and looking for another job.
I had a half-finished house, a fully pregnant wife.
It was quite a lot of emotion to deal with.
The impact of this was huge.
It was really the visible incarnation
of how bad the economic crisis was.
Spiralling costs and little success on the track
means that if a deal isn't struck soon,
the whole team will be closed down, with the loss of 800 British jobs.
Hello, Jenson.
What will you be telling people today?
Richard Goddard, the manager of Jenson, had called me to say,
"Look, we don't think we're gonna be on the grid this year.
Have you got a seat that you could offer Jenson?"
It was like, "Guys, you know, we're full.
It's ten past midnight, you know, and Cinderella's gone."
First of all, I was in shock.
After all we'd been through the last two years, I found it tough.
And he said, "I can't see there's any way out of this."
Your contract's up, and you don't know if there's a team,
and you don't know where you can drive,
and you've been in Formula 1 now for 14 years.
Is your career over?
My wife, at the time, thought I was crazy.
My friends thought I was crazy,
because I kept on thinking that I would have a job.
And I thought, "Okay, should I grab a plane and go there?"
Ross said, "Don't come here.
- It's not a good time."
So, it was a tough period.
They were out of a drive so late in the season,
they couldn't find anywhere else to go.
We knew if we could get going, we would automatically have two good drivers,
and we knew they weren't going anywhere.
I spoke to Ross, and I spoke to Richard, and a few other people.
Sure.
And there are positives, you know?
But the thing is that we need to-- we need to stay positive in ourselves.
Yeah, I think that's the feeling from all of us guys here--
Exactly. And as-- And as one team.
I remember we gave a speech to the staff.
We explained that if we gave up now, we'd have nothing to sell.
We have two choices:
Walk away with our tails between our legs.
Or we can fight.
- Are we going to fight? - Yes!
We were all at risk at that point,
but we were told to carry on.
And we were basically working for our careers.
Working for our future.
The effort we had to put in at the time was massive.
We had to all push hard for these next few months
to give ourselves the best opportunity,
and none of us must ease up in the commitment we needed.
That, I think, was one of the things that really, really impacted all of us,
was that very few people left.
Very few people chose to run for the doors.
In the back of everybody's mind, you're thinking,
"Well, Ross is still here.
We must be okay."
2008, we'd almost sacrificed
to make sure 2009 was gonna be a strong year for us.
This isn't the time to stop.
No way that this car doesn't make Melbourne.
Even if we arrive like that, and we do just one race.
We have to do it.
The spirit of those people in that adversity was fantastic.
They kept the team alive.
It gave us something to take into 2009.
The latest is that we continue to work here.
The staff will be paid by Honda for at least the next three months
and, during that time,
we're hoping to find someone who wishes to take over the team.
You kinda have a clock ticking, right?
I mean, the first race, I believe, is March 29th.
To survive, you need to get investment.
The technical side, you know, Ross went off and handled.
The finding investors was really, you know, down to me.
When these type of things happen,
you know, the world is full of opportunists.
And everyone wanted to be in there.
And the chance of having their own team was huge.
There were people who,
when we checked their backgrounds, they were pretty iffy.
I mean, two of them went to jail after that.
Yeah, we were in the middle of the huge financial crisis.
I mean, they were opportunists in the extreme.
Everyone who came and looked at it,
were asking money from Honda to take it over.
That's why Honda thought they would just shut it,
'cause they knew no one would be able to come in and make that sort of commitment.
But there was.
In a way.
I came up with the idea of a management buyout,
in the absence of any other alternative.
For Honda, as an organisation,
the idea of the management buying in, rather than a third party,
it just wasn't a way that they would normally work,
so it wasn't easy to convince them that this was an option.
I think it was viewed from their side, quite understandably,
as rewarding failure.
I mean, we had not been successful.
But this is the only option we've got on the table.
It's this or the team gets shut down.
And I think the key thing was Ross.
I trust Ross very much.
So, if Ross is there, I can sell the team to him.
I think they felt a responsibility to me.
They felt a responsibility to the people.
And they could see that was a more honourable deal
than just shutting the whole thing down.
I spoke to my wife about it.
She said, "Financially ring-fence the house,
and then you can go and do whatever you want."
Honda's Formula 1 team looks set to be rebranded in the new season.
There were fears it would shut down altogether.
Now, a senior figure within the team has said
that they will be on the starting grid in a few weeks' time.
In a way, you persuaded Honda to change their minds and take this on board.
They would have spent a hundred million dollars to shut the company.
We said, "Don't waste that money 'cause then there is nothing left.
If you allow us to buy the team,
and you give us $90 million of close-down costs,
we could run a skeleton operation of the company.
We'll take on all the responsibilities for the people.
So, why not go racing for a year if we can do it?"
Why do people say that you were the one pound Formula 1 Team?
When we finally closed the deal, I gave a pound to the Honda executive,
to formalise the deal.
And I know he still has it.
- Do you have the pound? - Yes.
- Is it here? - Yeah.
- Do you want to check? - I wanna check.
I wanna see the pound that bought the team.
I bring-- Always, I bring this one.
Did you ever think what you were going to name this team?
There was a lot of debate about that.
That was my marketing contribution.
- The name? - The name.
I was embarrassed about the idea, but everyone seemed to like it.
And the idea stuck,
and I must admit, I was very flattered and honoured it was named after me.
The thought of the team having our family name,
my first reaction to that was, "Is there an alternative?"
I thought, "This car had never tested."
Didn't know whether it was reliable.
How quick it was.
- And it's going out with the name. - Mmm.
It was kind of like having your mate put his name on a Formula 1 car
and saying, "That's a GP team."
Okay, is it that simple?
But it is.
Ross is now a team owner.
A boss.
A colleague.
Yes, I was surprised about it.
Did you think they would be any good?
Uh, Ross is a person,
and this is one of his strengths:
Uh, very good to plan.
What I have to do this year, next year,
because in Formula 1 you cannot succeed in 12 months,
even in 24 months, unless you can have help.
There's been an enormous amount of activity behind the scenes.
Everyone on the stage here has helped us preserve our team,
and, I think, myself, Ross, and our 700 employees all thank them for that.
It's the first time in Formula 1's history, that I've been involved in,
that I've seen all the teams come collectively together
to try and keep the little guys,
and to give Ross the opportunity to salvage it or sell it.
But, of course, his big problem was gonna be,
what engine does he take?
That was not a small problem.
- That's a huge problem. - Correct.
We went to Honda initially and said,
"Look, you know, we understand you wanna pull out of this
but can you please sell us your engine?"
And we got a point-blank no.
We are sure that the former Honda team can have a future.
Everybody wanted us to survive, but we didn't have an engine.
We'd had assurances from Ferrari and Mercedes
that they would help us with the engine,
but we didn't know that much about whether a Ferrari engine
or a Mercedes engine would even fit the car.
You're not gonna beat Ferrari with a Ferrari engine,
because as you get close, you'll find that yours just gets worse and worse.
Mercedes-Benz had a 25-year history with McLaren.
McLaren had an exclusive right to the Mercedes engine,
unless they agreed otherwise.
Martin Whitmarsh was leading the Formula 1 Teams Association, FOTA.
He pushed Norbert Haug at Mercedes and the board at Mercedes to say,
"Come on. We've got to keep this team involved in the sport.
Give them an engine."
He said, "Look, I'm a little bit nervous to ask you this question,
but my board are worried you're gonna go under
and you won't have paid your bills.
So, what guarantees can we set up?"
- Pay us up front. - Yes, uh--
- Let's give you the engines. - Yes, certainly.
Yeah, I wasn't like that,
but, you know, I was politely asking for paying as soon as possible.
Would you have given you an engine?
I'd like to say yes.
But, as always, until you've faced that situation,
you don't know for sure.
When we got the Mercedes engine,
it was getting to the point whereby making the first race was a big ask.
Even to contemplate that, at that time of the year,
that's horrendous.
There was some massive challenges ahead of us,
but I think there was genuine bounce in the whole organisation.
You know, we've come through this. We've got a chance now.
We're not gonna waste it.
It brought people completely together, and it was just an amazing atmosphere.
And you felt very much part of a really unique team
that could rely on each other to do what needed to be done.
Basically, they've done a cut and shut.
You know, to get the engine and gearbox, to shoehorn it into the car.
For six days,
there were three shifts working 24 hours on the car.
Yep.
What they achieved with that, I don't think it's ever been done before.
To install a new engine in a car that's designed for a different manufacturer.
Like, mind-blowing.
In that period, before we ran the car,
people were out testing on tracks.
We knew.
And we'd had a simulation and a prediction,
which showed us what sort of lap time we could expect.
And we couldn't understand where we'd gone wrong,
because our simulation showed we would be a second, a second and a half quicker
than what the people were achieving at Barcelona.
We, of course, being very, very sceptical
about the numbers guys back at the factory, we're like,
"Well, you've clearly got your numbers wrong then, haven't you? Duh."
You know, as if we're gonna be two seconds faster than everybody.
And they're like, "Okay, we've checked the numbers.
We're still two seconds faster than everybody."
-"Really?" - And that came through the factory.
You know, have we really made a big cock-up here,
or have we got something very special on our hands?
We took the car to do a shakedown at Silverstone.
A sort of hilariously amateurish outfit that we must've appeared to be.
- It was pretty much like camping.
Before a car went testing with the other teams,
they needed to run the car privately to make sure nothing fell off
and it ran the way it was supposed to.
It fired up. I drove out.
And just seeing the smiles on everyone's faces...
It was a nice moment because, you know, seeing the thing roll on track,
that was the point where it suddenly becomes a reality.
We learned nothing about the performance of the car, frankly.
We were just driving round in circles, but it worked.
So far, so good.
That car got packed in a truck, and got packed to the Barcelona test.
The first test was the first time we saw the double diffuser on a Toyota,
and it was on the Williams.
When Ross's car finally broke cover at Silverstone on a shakedown,
from the pictures that we saw--
You saw pictures? How did you get pictures?
That got leaked...
We could see it had a double diffuser.
I'm sure they weren't that worried about us,
because why should they be, you know?
We'd thrown a car together with the wrong engine,
and we had a long history of not being desperately competitive
when we had six months to make a car, let alone six weeks.
We didn't look like a credible threat to anybody, I'm sure.
When Honda withdraws, Ross Brawn says, with Nick Fry,
"We'll put the management company together, and we're gonna keep it alive."
You... [chuckles] ...are looking at going from Ferrari to Honda,
to an independent team...
with no resources,
with no sponsorship.
But you're not at the shakedown.
Yes, I wasn't.
Why?
Because I didn't have a contract up to that time.
Jenson was always on board, I think, in our minds.
Rubens had been an option.
He didn't have a contract.
I mean, this is not a derogatory statement,
but he was a comfortable pair of slippers.
He was someone I'd worked with, and I knew exactly how he thought.
I knew I could rely on him.
But it was tempting because there were two or three guys
still hanging around with big sponsorship deals,
and they could bring quite a lot of money to the team.
But I think I managed to persuade the rest of the team
that actually Rubens would be a good investment.
I think they'd done six days of testing already, all the teams.
I remember Ross just coming over and saying,
"Be careful."
You know, we didn't-- We weren't flush with parts.
Jenson went out and did a few laps, and came in and said,
"Oh, the balance isn't good," this, that, and the other,
and we said, "Okay,
but you've just done the second fastest lap of the test, the whole test,
and we've-- we started late because we weren't ready."
And I was like, "What?"
And then when he started to get the car adjusted, then he went the fastest.
Quite clearly, the car was exceptional.
To the point, as you may know, a lot of mechanics went out and put bets on it.
They were pretty fast straight away,
and everyone, all of the other teams, including myself, we were sure that--
I mean, you know, Ross Brawn took the team on the last moment.
They have no money, so they need to find a sponsor.
So it's a time to show that the car is competitive,
so they just removed the weight of the car, just to be quick.
The inevitable publicity that surrounds test performance.
See? Some of the teams that are seeking money
actually running their cars with the objective of doing one fast lap.
Of course, one fast lap is very important when it comes to qualifying,
but it's relatively unimportant when it comes to the race.
Can this car really be that competitive?
It's so late. They've got no money.
But then you think this is the most developed car under these regulations.
From the moment Ross arrived,
he forgot the existing car and just focused on the future car.
The car full of fuel was quicker than the other cars with no fuel in it.
And suddenly think, "Oh, you know, okay. These guys are seriously quick."
Yes, they're chasing a sponsor,
but the pace of this car and just watching it on track,
it looked totally hooked up.
When you saw how fast they were...
Hmm.
I said, "Listen,
despite I respect Ross, despite I respect his capability,
but in such a short time, to have such a competitive car
looked, to me, very strange."
So maybe the interpretation of the rules was fantastic.
They were lucky to find the best way to be competitive,
or something that was not a hundred per cent inside the rules.
Can we put on a show for you in Melbourne?
I think we could've maybe challenged.
Nah, uh, I think we're gonna get to Q2.
Q2, yeah.
That first race...
was the launch of Brawn GP?
Yep. That's where the story really started.
We were a team that's come from nowhere. No one expected us to be here.
Do your job this weekend. Keep your head clear.
We've got a strong chance.
You know, we had missed so much of the winter of testing,
but everyone just seemed so comfortable in themselves and confident in us as a team.
It felt like a-- a family.
I think the winter that we went through together really brought us a lot closer.
As is consistent with tradition,
you're the new team, you go right at the far end of the pit lane.
Ferrari, Red Bull, all those guys, more trucks, more space,
massive motorhomes, all showing off, having a great time.
And it did really, sort of,
help us feel like we were fighting our way out of a corner.
It was an eye-opening experience for all of us,
because there were literally half as many people involved in the race operation.
Instead of having 20 guys from Honda worrying about the engine,
we got one guy who told us not to overheat it.
- And that was it.
We were the underdogs,
and it's hard to explain the emotion when you're the underdog.
We had built this car that didn't exist.
We had cut the back off a chassis and bolted an engine to it.
That simply shouldn't be done.
And yet, got it to Melbourne.
To survive, you need to get investment.
One of the investors who ultimately ended up on the car was Richard Branson.
Richard did not approach me. Far from it.
He was a competitor in lots of ways.
Richard wanted to, uh, own the team.
He didn't want to just be a sponsor.
Richard had made a proposal to Honda quite late in the day,
which, as it turns out, was nothing like as attractive as a management buyout.
I think that Brawn was obviously wanting to own the team.
He wanted us to be a sponsor, not an owner.
We needed money.
Clearly, he saw opportunity from a business point of view.
He said that for a couple of million, we were the, sort of, title sponsors.
You know, we didn't actually sign anything.
We agreed that we'd sign when we met in Australia.
I got "Fly Virgin Atlantic" stickers printed off,
and I quite liked the idea of being this, sort of, underdog brand with Ross,
taking on the giants.
You've definitely got the prettiest minders here, Richard.
- I think we're doing all right. - We're doing all right.
I think we're doing all right.
When Richard came in the paddock, it was pandemonium.
He was great. He did a great press conference for us.
The attention of the paddock was on him.
He got fantastic value
because the sponsorship package he bought was relatively modest,
but everyone thought it was Richard's team.
This Brawn GP seems to fly very fast.
Well, the Virgin car now, uh, is planning to fly.
Brilliant timing for him. Yeah.
- The saviour. - Snowballed from-- To save us, yes.
Which, um, not quite the angle we were hoping for,
but, uh, it did bring some money in at the time.
Before the race on Sunday, the cars do timed laps on Saturday
to see what position they start the race from.
The fastest car starts at the front in pole position.
The slowest, at the back.
You'll definitely need headphones.
Okay.
New season, new regulations and, who knows,
perhaps are we about to see a new order in the shootout for pole?
This is, as they always say, when the bullshit stops.
For what everybody had been through, and for what we knew we had in our hands,
our responsibility now was to make this count.
I was so over the moon to be driving such a car,
but it did give me a little bit of pressure,
because we didn't have many kilometres on the car,
and we had to look after it for the race.
Didn't they tell you you couldn't crash?
You're going to your first race in Melbourne, right?
They were like, "Uh, go quick, fellas."
- Yeah. -"But don't crash."
Make sure you win on the way, yeah, but don't crash. Yeah.
But don't crash because we don't have, what, spare parts?
That went for every lap of practice.
But as racing drivers,
you're not very good at taking it easy.
You either push to the limit, or you're nothing.
We pushed to the limit.
Here is Jenson Button.
He's on the pit straight. He knows the time to beat.
Jenson Button on pole position,
Rubens Barrichello will be alongside him on the grid.
We knew the car was quick after Barcelona, but we didn't quite know just how quick.
Everyone plays around a little bit with fuel loads,
with the age of the tyres, with the engine.
We qualified in Melbourne with more fuel than pretty much the whole grid.
Nice work.
It was really quite emotional.
I don't say that lightly.
It was quite an emotional time, you know,
to be seeing that we can actually get this car on pole.
Hey, Richard, where's the chicks?
- I don't know. Don't know.
You realise this is, actually, the first time in 39 years
that a new team has taken pole position in its first race. That's amazing.
Uh, as I say, um, we're lucky bastards, as they say in England.
We were lucky bastards indeed.
It's special for us because we've had such a torrid winter.
You know, every day, it's been up and down, you know?
One day it looks positive and we're gonna be racing this year,
and the next day, it's not.
So, this isn't the end of it, you know? Tomorrow is the race.
Rubens, describe the roller coaster of emotions that you've had.
A few weeks ago, you weren't even sure if you had a seat,
and now you've got a front row of the grid.
Yeah, it's, uh-- it's, uh-- You know, I'm very grateful for the moment I have.
It's a good story for F1, and, um, certainly a good story for us.
Our competitors, they were all rattled.
We knew there was an awful lot of interest in the car.
"Interest", is that what you'd call it?
Yeah, I'd say-- Yeah, interest.
One of the guys from Ferrari came down with a torch,
and he sort of lays on the ground to get a look underneath the car
at the double diffuser.
And Ross just walked up to him and grabbed his belt buckle,
and picked him up off the floor,
and said something to him in Italian, and off he went.
- No? - Yeah.
The bear moved in.
Yep.
Grabbed him by the belt buckle!
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Picked him up by his belt, and picked him up off the floor,
and kindly reminded him that that's not really the way we do things.
You don't get on the floor and try and have a look at things underneath
or anything like that.
- You don't look up the skirt. - Yeah, exactly.
That's a good way of putting it, yeah.
Did you already feel that they were going to protest the cars?
Yeah.
- Look at the hole on this, huh? - Eh?
Look at the hole.
There was just a general feeling of excitement from the drivers.
They knew they had a-- for the first time in a long time,
potentially, a really good car under them. And you could sense that.
Rubens, Rubens.
Can you believe that you're standing here on the front of the grid?
Well, I mean, I wanted to believe it.
It's a lot of people...
Now that I have the drive, the season is made for me.
I'm gonna win the championship.
Can you tell us what you said to your drivers?
Yeah, just don't hit each other.
I was with Jenson for his first win in 2006,
and you knew at the time how much that meant to him,
and also how painful it was to then not win a race in '07 and '08.
So you knew what a big opportunity this was.
Jenson, well, can you do this?
Yes.
I think there's no doubt that it was unfulfilled promise
from Jenson Button up to that point.
When you qualify, well, the pressure's on on race day.
But, you know, we'd only done one test,
so our confidence in the reliability of the car and the package,
and our understanding of it, was not perfect.
You know, a race win's a whole different piece of work.
I was really nervous before the race.
And everything went through my mind of the last couple of years
and how tough they'd been.
What we'd been through as a team.
And, suddenly, I'm driving a car that I just feel like I can do nothing wrong.
Up front for the first race of this new season:
Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello.
Only one team in their debut race in the history of the sport
have been able to get pole position and then go on to win.
This opportunity doesn't come around for many people,
and I didn't want to throw it away.
We're away in Melbourne for 2009!
Jenson Button streaks forward. Vettel's there as well!
Massa's trying to come through on the outside.
Rosberg's up into third place.
But Button is absolutely streaking clear.
Looked in the mirrors, it just was a mess behind.
And I immediately had a buffer.
You are in P2.
The lights go out.
We're away in Melbourne for 2009!
It's Jenson Button! An awful start there by Rubens Barrichello.
I didn't have a good one.
No, you went into turn one in tenth, and then you're a maniac.
Dreadful start for Rubens Barrichello.
There's all sorts of mayhem at the first corner.
And, suddenly, Ross Brawn has gotta rethink the strategy,
because this is not going at all well.
You know we have a good car. You know you're losing time.
You have the pressure to win the race because you have a good car.
That, sometimes, make you lose focus.
He lost the back of the car,
and he's lost the corner of his front wing.
He just pushed his way through.
I was fighting to be on that podium.
Jenson Button started from pole here in 2006,
but it never really came together.
He finished tenth on that occasion.
But he's doing everything right,
just trading fastest laps with Sebastian Vettel.
You know, I had the team talking to me through the race,
just give me feedback of how the car feels.
Jenson Button has just set the fastest lap of the race.
Is this the hand of Ross Brawn, that master tactician?
We knew, as a team, Jenson had a chance of winning.
Some of the teams were in trouble.
McLaren had got their car completely wrong,
and they looked dreadful.
It was pretty much the same with Ferrari.
I know that any advantage you have in Formula 1 is only temporary.
And you've only got to make one mistake,
and rarely there's enough margin to cope with a mistake.
Barrichello in the pits, and it's a new front nose.
At that stage, we weren't functioning fully as a team.
It's a long stint, this. This is a lot of fuel going in.
We had no time to do pit stop practice.
Our fuel guy had never been a fuel guy before.
No, come on!
Oh, dear. That was not slick and smooth.
I lost six seconds at the first stop
and, I think, seven seconds at the second stop.
The tragedy would be if that robbed us of what we were hoping to achieve.
Well into the last quarter of this race.
Jenson doesn't look like he's got
an awful lot of speed out there at the moment on those tyres.
There was a BMW behind, of Robert Kubica,
and a Red Bull of Sebastian Vettel,
and they were quicker.
They were quite a lot quicker.
Button is only one and a half seconds ahead of Vettel.
It's gonna be a real chase to the line here.
It's Button for Brawn, Vettel for Red Bull, Kubica for BMW.
Kubica is on primes. He could be a threat.
I always said to our staff,
"Luck is preparation waiting for an opportunity."
Barrichello and Rosberg, wheel to wheel now,
as they go through on that far side of the track.
Barrichello steams through.
When those opportunities come, if you don't take them, someone else will.
Rubens Barrichello in fourth.
Kubica is third, Vettel second and Button still out in front.
But look at the gap between them. Barely one and a half seconds.
Jenson's got to push like crazy now.
Kubica is flying.
This is the battle which is going to make or break this race.
- There's a problem there. - He's been hit.
There goes Kubica and there goes Vettel.
That's the last thing they needed to do.
Jenson Button will be romping clear now.
Barrichello up into second place for a Brawn 1-2.
Jenson Button crosses the line, takes the chequered flag.
Jenson Button's a winner again.
It's a 1-2 finish. Button from Barrichello. What a result!
I've never had that emotion before, really, with team members.
You know, that connection.
And that moment, it's like, "We bloody did it.
We came here and we beat the giants."
So you come out of this car in Melbourne, the garage is going berserk, right?
Yes, absolutely.
You know, we are presenting ourselves the winner
with a car that almost didn't happen,
so it was something else.
The last garage was the top one now.
Oh, just an absolute fairy tale.
I just can't believe we've actually managed to do it.
Everything that had happened before,
you know, really, kind of, came out into the open.
And Ross was on the pit wall and he was crying.
Everything all our staff have been through, just sensational.
And, uh, I can't really put it into words.
For the big man to show that much emotion,
you know we've done something good.
Cars are coming down.
People are losing their minds.
- You're getting claps, right? - Hmm.
It was beautiful, really,
'cause all the people in the pit lane knew what we'd been through.
The tension and pressure that we'd had for so long.
They would've been sharing that joy that we had that day,
'cause it was a joy for Formula 1.
Just one of the best moments of my career.
I mean, that was magical. Just magical.
It was about everything that had gone before it.
It was about all the hard work.
You know, I believed our team was working harder than any other,
because we were fighting for survival.
- They won the race! - Yes.
They come to Australia and they win.
- Yes. - On the track, the cars are driving in.
Other teams, they're, like, clapping.
- Yes, but... - The team itself is, like,
they're crying. They're so happy.
- Yeah, but... - They did the impossible.
They put the Mercedes engine in the car.
They have the double diffuser...
You are making a list, and I answer to you, they went too far.
Suddenly, you know,
this team that everybody just wanted to survive, is killing us.
I mean, there was all this goodwill towards Brawn GP,
and everybody did their bit to help them survive.
Then Ross, he's got this outlook of the big bear, this big cuddly guy that,
you know, would never dream of doing anything questionable in any way.
Yet really, behind the scenes, he's the most cut-throat,
ruthless competitor probably that we've ever come across.
You know, he would sell his grandmother to get what he wanted.
We put in a protest because we wanted to clarify
what the FIA's, you know, position is,
because the whole new concept of these regulations
is undermined by a double-decker, you know, rear diffuser.
Are the knives out yet or are they--
- The knives are sharpened.
And the best way to become unpopular very quickly is to start winning.
I mean, we are now in a different phase.
So we've gone past the phase of helping us survive.
We are now in the phase where we don't want to be beaten by these people.
"Great to see you here, but don't embarrass us."
In 2009, was more evident.
Since the first race,
a big gap between this car with the Mercedes engine,
this car without a long tradition,
with a team manager that has never been a team manager before,
immediately competitive.
All of us, all the teams, were aware there was something against the rules.
So, the FIA said the car is fine.
Yes.
And everybody else was saying they're cheating?
Yes.