James Vowles offered a compelling behind-the-scenes insight into Brawn GP – the ultimate F1 underdog story – which included their electrician doubling up as their grand prix refueler. 

From the ashes of Honda’s abrupt Formula 1 exit rose the Brawn GP team, which wrote itself into the Formula 1 history books by sensationally winning the 2009 Drivers’ and Constructors’ titles. That proved to be the only year of existence for Brawn GP, with Mercedes completing a buyout to form the trophy-laden team racing in F1 to this day.

James Vowles narrates incredible Brawn GP F1 story

With Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello at the wheel, Brawn GP was a story that Vowles doubts “will ever exist again” in Formula 1 as Button clinched his sole World Championship that year, Vowles having served as chief strategist, staying with the Mercedes incarnation which followed all the way through until departing to become Williams team principal from 2023.

And Vowles, speaking in a Wall Street Journal interview, would offer a fascinating insight into the Brawn GP story, which involved rocking up for Barcelona testing and blitzing the field on 60-lap old tyres, cutting 450 members of staff, flying their electrician out to be their pit-stop refueler and more.

“Brawn GP was a fairy tale, story. I don’t think it will ever exist again in our sport,” Vowles began.

“We were a team without a manufacturer behind us, with no money, and I really do mean no money at all, and we won the Formula One World Championship against the greats at the time.

“And it really was what you read, is what was happening. So a little bit of background to it. We were Honda, in 2008, it came into the financial crisis, and Honda, not just Honda, Honda, Toyota, a number of other manufacturers, pulled all of their funding. So overnight, about 910 people lost their job. I was one of those people.

“The following day, 910 people were in the factory. The following week, 910 people in the factory, we had no job.

“We kept working on a car that we believed in so much that we wanted it to get going. And I was very fortunate to be part of a senior management team who were desperately trying to effectively find either a buyer or way of us moving forward.

“And several things happened. First and foremost, we got a little bit of funding from Honda. Instead of closing the doors, effectively, they gave us a pool of money and said, ‘Here you go. We have no responsibility anymore’.

“Mercedes, we managed to convince them to put an engine in the back of it. But the chassis is a big carbon lump. It’s basically a big hinge that connects the engine to the wheels. We actually had to cut off the back 50 millimeters of it to fit the engine in. We couldn’t fit any of the hybrid unit in at all. All we could fit in was the engine that year.

“But, and there was a but to it, why were we all doing this? That car had been developed by all of us for 12 months in three different wind tunnels. I could tell you, hands down, that was going to be the quickest car out there, because that’s what we invested in, we put all of our effort in.

“You can sort of see why in Williams, I’m doing something similar. You just basically forward link to a future performance state.

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“Probably the saddest moment of that year was that, as I got on an airplane to go to Melbourne, we made 450 people redundant. So if you had an airplane ticket, you knew you were safe, that was pretty much how it worked at that point, which is sad, but we couldn’t survive with a large organisation. We had to effectively shrink right down to what the bare bones were.

“We didn’t have enough money to go testing. So we actually went testing at Silverstone, there’s a tiny little track, it’s not the big track, it’s a tiny little track. And we did 50 laps around it. The car seemed to work. Put it inside a truck, transported it to Barcelona, where everyone had been testing already for three weeks, took it out the truck, same tyres, rolled it out, went out and did basically just the six timed-lap runs, so that Jensen Button got used to it.

“He came back in and he said, ‘I’m so sorry, the car’s terrible. It’s not handling very well at all’. ‘Okay, tell us what’s wrong. Right, we’ll fix this’. Just too much understeer in the car. Fixed it. He went back out, same tyres we ran for Silverstone, so they’re now 60 laps old, came back in and said, ‘I’m so sorry. I thought this was our year, but the car doesn’t feel good’.

“We walked into the timing page where we were three-and-a-half seconds faster than anyone else, and he went, ‘Actually, the car’s fine, as it turns out’.

“So that day, we loaded it with fuel and ballast and just made it as heavy as we possibly could. They kept deleting our lap times because they thought we were cutting the chicane.

“It was just the strangest thing. All the teams would come up to us and go, ‘I know you’re having to run it illegal to get sponsors’. ‘Yeah, okay’.

“Anyway, turned up at the first race, and we were missing so many people that even… Back then you had to do refuelling. The people that did the refuelling, they actually wanted to leave, so we let them go. So we had no team that had ever done a live refuelling before.

“And if you look back at Melbourne, you’ll see each pit stop took about 20 seconds longer than it should have done, and yet we finished one-two.

“By the way, the refueler, he became an electrician. We actually paid him just to fly out at weekends to do refuelling, and then we flew him back home, and he did electrician back home.

“But it was an incredible year where everything just went right. We only had two chassis, two front wings, two rear wings the first six races, which we won, all of them. If anyone had hit us once or we made a mistake, our championship would have been over. It was a fascinating year and a lovely year.”

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