Glad to see the post fawning over Hamilton missing this year.

Hamilton still remains an incredible driver, it'll be interesting to see what they come up with for next year.

Ross Brawns smile could only be shown on a widescreen TV...

I'm not surprised. How cool would it be if Button won the championship this year?
I'll bet Honda are kicking themselves for selling to Braun now. He can't have had enough time since the sale to make all those changes, most of them must be Honda's

The car is actually the car Honda started designing half way through last season. When Ross Brawn joined Honda the team was in a bit of a sorry state. The car was useless and they were chasing their tales trying to make it faster. Ross Brawn convinced Honda to halt all development on the 2008 car and concentrate all their efforts on the 2009 car. So from half way on through last season Jenson Button's Honda received absolutely no development what so ever. That's why it got progressively worse and worse.

So in short, Honda pretty much already knew they had a potential world championship winning car before they pulled out of F1. However the decision had already been taken. Ross Brawn, and pretty much everyone else in the team (Nick Fry especially) also knew the car's potential, that's the main reason they committed to the purchase of the team.

There is a rumour that Ross Brawn actually paid $1 for the team, and Honda gave him £40 million (what they would have had to pay it's employees in severance pay), so he could conceivably run the team halfway through the first season without the need for a sponsor.

Honda have more to do with Brawn's success than you might think.

*edit* Here's the weights for the start. Unusually it seems the Brawns are running light.

1. Jenson Button, Brawn GP, 646kg
2. Sebastian Vettel, Red Bull, 651.5
3. Rubens Barrichello, Brawn GP, 649.5
4. Felipe Massa, Ferrari, 655
5. Mark Webber, Red Bull, 651.5
6. Timo Glock, Toyota, 646.5
7. Jarno Trulli, Toyota, 655.5
8. Fernando Alonso, Renault, 645
9. Nico Rosberg, Williams, 668
10. Robert Kubica, BMW Sauber, 660
11. Kazuki Nakajima, Williams, 676.6
12. Nelson Piquet, Renault, 677.4
13. Nick Heidfeld, BMW Sauber, 676.3
14. Lewis Hamilton, McLaren, 683
15. Sebastien Buemi, Toro Rosso, 678
16. Kimi Raikkonen, Ferrari, 673
17. Sebastien Bourdais, Toro Rosso, 669
18. Heikki Kovalainen, McLaren, 657
19. Adrian Sutil, Force India, 675
20. Giancarlo Fisichella, Force India, 656

I'm very interested in what the USA team will serve up.

Guess what, there's a chance of rain today. LOL, not again!

I think Ferrari are so depressed at the moment, a black cloud follows them around from one race meeting to the next.

And that is how they do that. Brawn and Button were peerless, fully deserved the win. As for Ferrari, well what can you say. Another DNF for Kimi and Massa had to slow down with 4 laps to go because of a refueling cockup, lost a further 2 places because of it. Didn't even have enough motion lotion to get around the cool down lap. All getting a little embarrassing for them.

Go Brawn Go

I rather enjoyed that race.

I curious about the Ferrari refuelling cockup. This story about a fuelling rig glitch reeks a bit, IMHO.

The radio traffic kept mentioning the consumption rate, so I was wondering if some the the Ferrari performance improvement is down to running a bit richer. With the lack of in season testing, is it more likely they failed to accurately calculate just how much more fuel it was using?

He came in early for his first stop, so it is hard to believe that they would not have resolved the problem by his second stop. If they had any doubts they would have switched to the reserve pump.

Indeed. Wouldn't it be great if they could go all the way and win the championship?

Yes but realistically the current Car was developed By Honda ( or at least paid for by them ) ongoing development of it and next years will have to be funded by ????????

Apparently Honda gave Brawn £40 m which is what the severance packages for the team would have been also equivalent to the running cost for half the season.

I'm just really worried that ongoing development this year will fizzle out due to lack of funds and development of next years car will really struggle.

Just hope I'm wrong !

Brawn are in the headlines almost every day, I'm sure they must be raking it in from sponsorship, that said F1 teams aren't profitable are they? They're usually just a way of a big car company showing off rather than a sucessful business?

I just think it's a shame Brawn haven't taken a more Ricky Bobby approach to the business of being the smallest, yet fastest, team on the grid.

Check out any picture of their car, then compare it to another F1 car.

They have virtually NO sponsership. 4 weeks before the F1 season started the team didn't exist. When Brawn bought the team no-one expected him to do this well, so no-one put up any sponsership money.
It looks so strange seeing a car drive round with no logos on it.
I bet they have sponsers queuing up now though. Funny, if you visit the Brawn GP website, or any website that sells motorsport memorabilia, you will find it almost impossible to buy any Brawn F1 shirts ets. Thats because they haven't released the shirts for sale, cos they don't know who the sponser will be yet, and no-one wnats a shirt that will be obsolete in 3 weeks time. You can buy one or two polo shirts, plain ones. Thats all.