Williams F1 director James Vowles has been Mercedes’ strategist previously. And before that, he participated in the brief but incredible story of Brawn GP, a beginner team and world champion in 2009. He reveals the
“Brawn GP was a fairy tale. I don’t think it will ever happen again in our sport” Vowles recalled in the Wall Street Journal. “We were a team with no manufacturers behind us, no money, and I mean no money at all, and we won the Formula 1 world championship against the big guys of the time.”
“We were Honda, in 2008 the financial crisis hit, and Honda, not just Honda, Honda, Toyota, a number of other manufacturers, withdrew all their financing. Overnight, about 910 people lost their job. I was one of those people.”
“We continued to work on a car that we believed in so much that we wanted it to get off the ground. I was fortunate to be part of a management team that was desperately trying to find a buyer or a way to move forward .”
“Several things happened. First of all, we got some funding from Honda. Instead of closing the doors, they gave us some money and said ‘we don’t have no more responsibility.”
“We managed to convince Mercedes to put an engine in the back. But the chassis is a big block of carbon. It’s basically a big hinge that connects the engine to the wheels. We had to cut 50 millimeters off the rear to bring in the engine.”
“We couldn’t get any part of the hybrid unit in. But, and there was a but, why were we all doing this? This car had been developed by all of us for 12 months in three different wind tunnels.”
“We knew without hesitation that it would be the fastest car, because that’s the car we had invested in, that we had put all our effort into. You can understand why at Williams I’m doing something similar. It’s actually about performance in the future.”
“We didn’t have enough money for tests”
But the fairy tale also had its dark side when it was necessary to let go of several hundred employees: “Probably the saddest moment of that year was when, as I was flying to Melbourne, we laid off 450 people.”
“So if you had a plane ticket you knew you were safe, that was pretty much how it worked at that time, which is sad, but we couldn’t survive on a great organization. We had to reduce ourselves to the essentials.”
“We didn’t have enough money to do testing. So we did testing at Silverstone, a very small circuit, it’s not the big circuit, it’s a very small circuit. We did 50 The car seemed to work.”
“We put it in a truck, we transported it to Barcelona, where everyone had already done testing for three weeks, we took it out of the truck, with the same tires, we made it run , we went out and basically did the six timed laps, so Jenson Button could get used to it.”
Unexpected performances on the track
With the rule change that had just taken place, Button didn’t know what to expect from the new car, and he initially thought it wasn’t working, before realizing he was very fast, says Vowles. He also describes the precarious operating conditions of the team during the season.
“He came back and said ‘I’m really sorry, the car is terrible. It doesn’t handle very well at all’. The car was understeering too much’. He left, with the same tires as at Silverstone , so 60 laps old, and he came back and said ‘I’m really sorry I thought it was our year, but the car is not good’.”
“We went to check the times and we were three and a half seconds faster than the others, and he said to us ‘actually the car is very good, like that’. That day we charged it with fuel and ballast and we made it as heavy as possible.”
“They kept erasing our lap times because they thought we were cutting the chicane. It was just strange. All the teams were coming up to us and saying ‘I know you must be driving illegally to find sponsors.”
“Anyway, we got to the first race and we were so short of people that the people doing the fueling had left, and so we didn’t have any teams that had ever done a live fueling. “
“And if you look at Melbourne, you’ll see that each pit stop took about 20 seconds longer than it should have. By the way, the fueler became an electrician. We paid him to take the “I flew on the weekend to refuel, then we took him home and he became an electrician.”
“But it was an incredible year. We only had two chassis, two front wings and two rear wings in the first six races, all of which we won. If someone had hit us just once or if we had made a mistake, our championship would have been over. It was a fascinating year and a great year.
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