Brawn GP: Just how miraculous was Jenson Button’s Championship triumph?

Goodwood will be celebrating the remarkable story of Brawn GP in 2009 at the 83^rd Members’ Meeting presented by Audrain Motorsport, when Button will be reunited with his Championship-winning BGP001 for a series of exhilarating laps of the historic Motor Circuit.

There were many remarkable aspects to that 2009 season, unprecedented occurrences that, to anyone simply reading them about now, would struggle to accept as truth. An F1 team, bought for a solitary British Pound just three weeks before the season got underway in Melbourne, completed one of the most remarkable feats in sporting history.

The ongoing global financial crisis had hit Honda hard, so getting rid of its costly F1 team was identified as a priority. After languishing at the back of the field for two seasons, the final gut punch for the hundreds of employees was the prospect of redundancy at Christmas.

In truth, no-one at Honda wanted the team to fold, the company simply wanted out as quickly and efficiently as possible. So when Ross Brawn, together with Nick Fry, decided to take on ownership of the entity, the deal was intended to keep the business up and running to save as many jobs as possible.

There were layoffs, and it was a hugely difficult time for everyone at the team, but Honda provided a budget of £92.8 million, equivalent to what it would have had to spend on closing the team, to help the newly renamed Brawn GP stay afloat in the immediate aftermath.

From the outside it appeared to be quite the gamble on Brawn’s behalf, he laid an awful lot on the line at great personal risk, but he and his team knew something we didn’t.

As Team Principal of Honda in 2008, Brawn made the decision to quickly divert attention to the development of the 2009 car, which was to be designed according to the biggest set of regulation changes F1 had ever seen. It was an opportunity to get ahead of the game and hit the ground running at the start of a new era, and with the substantial backing of Honda, his team invested a huge amount of time and effort into the creation of the new concept.

The results when the new Brawn GP team, with its makeshift truck and barely finished uniforms, arrived for the final pre-season test at Barcelona, caused a wave of shock and denial to wash through the paddock.

Jenson Button, who together with his team-mate Rubens Barrichello had also been brought back from the brink thanks to Brawn’s takeover, immediately set a lap time that was so quick the circuit officials deleted it on the assumption the timing was faulty. He did that on the same set of tyres he had run for 40 or so miles during the car’s original shakedown at Silverstone’s Stowe Circuit a week prior.

All of a sudden, after weeks and months of wondering whether they would still be in a job, the team at Brawn GP were met with the challenge of making sure their car didn’t look too quick. The BGP001 was one of three cars, alongside the Toyota and the Williams, that had jumped through the ‘double diffuser’ loophole in the new 2009 regulations, which gave it a huge downforce benefit.

The rest of the grid initially put the Brawn’s pace down to a ploy to garner sponsorship. The plain white bodywork was designed specifically to be a billboard for any potential suitors, and smaller teams in the past had utilised the ‘low fuel strategy’ to try and trick sponsors into thinking they had a quick car.

Reality, however, slowly dawned on the likes of Ferrari and McLaren that this was no ploy. Brawn had done a number on the lot of them, and they didn’t like it.

Ross Brawn and his team knew that the inevitable protests would be tabled in short order if they showcased their true pace, so they decided ahead of the opening round of the season in Melbourne that they would endeavour not to win by too far. After sealing pole position, Button was supposedly given an instruction to try and win by around five seconds only, controlling the pace at the front, but not embarrassing the opposition.

It was an unfathomable situation. A team that had disposed of all its printers and banned the use of colour ink in the name of saving money, had produced one of the most dominant cars in F1 history.

Even after having to cut the chassis in two to crowbar a Mercedes engine into a space originally designed for a Honda, the Brawn BGP001 was in a different league.

Of course, the actual design of the car had been carried out with the financial backing of Honda, but what the mangled remains of that powerhouse managed to achieve during the 2009 season is nothing short of extraordinary.

Even for a well-established team to break out and win the World Championship had proven virtually impossible. In the previous 37 years, only Lotus, Ferrari, McLaren, Williams and Benetton had claimed the Constructors’ title.

And yet Brawn achieved the impossible with virtually zero resources. Designing and building a car is one thing, but an F1 season is long and expensive, and the entire grid is constantly working to improve their cars, spending millions of pounds on gaining tenths of a second.

The entire grid except for Brawn, who were working with the absolute bare minimum. There wasn’t even a spare chassis, because only two had been modified to the Mercedes engine specification, so the team brought a third completely useless car to each race to make it look as though they had a spare to ward off any untoward tactics on the track.

They weren’t even repainting the cars between each round, so the Brawns became increasingly tatty with each outing. That meant the car was already losing performance compared to the rest of the grid, who arrived each weekend with bright and shiny machines with nice new paint and fresh parts.

Despite that, Button still managed to win six of the first seven races to open a big lead in the Championship. His extraordinary dominance at that point was ultimately the telling factor for the season, but eventually the team’s lack of funds told.

They were swamped by the relentless development of their competitors and suddenly Button and Barrichello were languishing in the midfield, picking up whatever points they could. Button finished on the podium only twice more in the remaining ten races and had to keep his head as those behind gradually chipped away at his Championship lead.

The fact he completed every single race with the same chassis is perhaps the most remarkable part of it all. It’s normal in F1 for teams and drivers to cycle through any number of monocoques over the course of a season. Most commonly a change is necessitated due to damage sustained, and yet Brawn was forced to carry the same car all over the world, and trust to hope that it would survive the journey unscathed.

Against all the odds, Jenson Button and Brawn GP achieved the unthinkable. The 2009 F1 season was a true fairytale, it shouldn’t have been possible, and yet Button and Brawn will go down in history as the team that proved it could be done.

The 83^rd Members' Meeting presented by Audrain Motorsport takes place on the 18^th & 19^th April 2026. Tickets are on sale now for GRRC Members and Fellows

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Images courtesy of Getty Images.