Ross Brawn realised how to play the F1 rules game, with spectacular success

As we journalists flew out of Budapest that Sunday evening, almost all we could talk about was the possibility that, finally, perhaps Ferrari and Schumacher were going to be beaten. Williams led the F1 constructors’ world championship, on 129 points, ahead of Ferrari on 121 and McLaren on 115. The F1 drivers’ world championship was closer still: Schumacher still led, on 72 points, but Juan Pablo Montoya (Williams) was second on 71 and Kimi Räikkönen (McLaren) third on 70. Alonso (Renault) was not that far behind either, on 54.

Why had Williams, McLaren, and Renault recently become so ascendant over Ferrari? The answer was tyres, for the Michelins run by the three grandee UK-based teams had been gradually developed to the point where they were generally now superior to the Bridgestones run by Ferrari, especially in warm, dry weather; and across almost all of Europe, 2003 was a warm, dry summer. The next F1 grand prix after Budapest would be Monza, where the weather forecast promised yet more sunshine and where the pressure for Ferrari folk is always intense. They simply could not risk facing another humiliation, not in front of the sometimes capricious tifosi, nor indeed at the hands of the often pugnacious Italian press.

What happened next cannot in truth be filed under the heading ‘F1’s finest hour’. Todt and Brawn invited to Ferrari’s Maranello headquarters the two most senior FIA men at the time, president Max Mosley and race director Charlie Whiting, to meet not only themselves but also, perhaps surprisingly, Schumacher. We may never know what they discussed — precisely — but the result of their confab was that the FIA swiftly issued a rule reinterpretation concerning the way that tyres would thenceforth be measured for width, and that rule reinterpretation had the effect of rendering Michelin’s front tyres suddenly non-compliant (i.e. too wide) despite the fact that they had been ruled to be fully compliant ever since their introduction at the 2001 San Marino Grand Prix.

The specifics, if you are interested, are as follows. From Monza 2003 onwards the FIA decreed that F1 tyres would now be measured after and not before each race, as they had been previously, and that race-worn front tyre treads should not exceed a maximum width of 270mm. Considering that the Michelin front tyres’ treads were 269mm wide when new, and that the unholy violence done to tyres during a grand prix might well push them past that limit, Michelin’s engineers were consequently forced to design a new front tyre in virtually no time at all, thereby potentially sacrificing a competitive edge that had previously been regarded as legitimate. Bridgestone would suffer no such problems since its front tyre treads measured only 255mm in width.

Ever the mischief maker, Mosley decided that the team principals’ official FIA press conference at Monza would feature Brawn and his three most strident critics: Patrick Head (Williams), Ron Dennis (McLaren), and Flavio Briatore (Renault). On the day, the Monza press conference room was absolutely jam-packed – there was standing room only by the time the media questioning began – but I had a seat and indeed I had arrived early so as to bag a position near the front.

As a palpably nervous Brawn launched into a carefully prepared defence of the FIA’s new rule reinterpretation, Head, who was sitting behind him, leant forward, already visibly angry, and interrupted. “Why,” he thundered, “did you wait 38 races [the period in which Williams had been running the ‘offending’ Michelin front tyre] before raising this point, if you had had this view all the time?”

“That tyre, as I understand it, Patrick, you introduced at Monaco this year,” Brawn replied.

“It’s exactly the same mould,” Head boomed. Then he added, for clarity, “It comes out of exactly the same mould that first appeared at Imola in 2001.”

Now Brawn was cross, too. “Renault use different tyres to you, Patrick,” he said icily. “There’s a range of Michelins being used in F1. We weren’t aware of the problem before Hungary [where Renault had won], so any suggestion that we’d timed it is inaccurate. The consequence was the letter [from Whiting to all teams and both tyre companies] which came out on the Wednesday after Hungary.”

“I thought the consequence was a meeting at Maranello on the Tuesday after Hungary between you and the president and race director of the FIA,” Head replied, scowling.

“Patrick, Bridgestone had what they felt was a limit on where they were prepared to go with the width of their front tyres from their interpretation of the regulation,” said Brawn – which remark brought an enraged Dennis into the argument.

“I think that’s somewhat misleading,” said the McLaren team principal. “The simple fact is that I’m well qualified, having run Bridgestone tyres for several years [before McLaren switched to Michelins in 2002], to know that Bridgestone always optimise the performance of their tyres and that there’s a constant and consistent trend to their belief in front tyre geometry, how it’s constructed, and what’s the optimal width. And a narrow tyre gives a better aerodynamic profile as well. So I think it’s misleading of Ross to say that it was a regulatory influence that determined the width of the Bridgestone front tyre. It’s extremely misleading, in fact. It wasn’t regulation-driven; it was performance-driven; and Ross knows that very well.”

I could, I assure you, go on. It was a long and remarkably fiery press conference – and, by the end of it, all four panellists were absolutely furious. My colleague and friend Alan Henry, a fine journalist and a lovely man who died in 2016, and whom I miss still, wrote a brilliant feature piece about it for the magazine of which I was then the editor, and I entitled it ‘Hung, Brawn, and quartered’. Alan and I laughed. Perhaps some of our readers did, too. Ross, I was led to believe, did not.

Let’s now fast-forward to November 2009, by which time I had joined McLaren as its comms/PR chief. On the 18th of that month we issued a press release confirming that we had hired Jenson Button, who had won for the new Brawn team the F1 drivers’ world championship exactly a month before. Remarkably – and impressively – Brawn had won the F1 constructors’ world championship that year, too. We had kept our signing of Button top-secret right up until our announcement, which consequently caught Brawn and his most senior colleague, Nick Fry, unawares.

Fry has written about that day in his autobiography, Survive, Drive, Win, and his description bears repetition: “I found out that Jenson had been announced as a McLaren driver while I was driving up the M40 motorway one morning. I was furious not because they had caught us on the hop but because neither I nor Ross — who was also away that day — were at the factory where we could quickly address the many questions we knew our staff would have. I stopped at the next services and tried to call Ron Dennis and then Martin Whitmarsh, both of whose phones went to voicemail. So instead I called the McLaren head of communications, Matt Bishop, and I know I was probably less than politically correct in what I told him about the way I believed his team had behaved. For my outburst I was subsequently admonished by Norbert Haug, our new boss at Mercedes, who undoubtedly had a point, but I needed to let off steam one way or another.” In case you are wondering, Fry used the F-word more than a couple of times during that phone call and even dropped the C-bomb at one point. But I had always got on well with him, and I still do. F1 can be extremely pressured, and we all lose our tempers from time to time. However, clearly, I had pissed off not only Nick, but also Ross, once again.

However, I had not pissed off Ross permanently, as it would turn out, for, finally, let’s fast-forward again, this time to August 2015. My husband Angel and I were in Guernsey, to attend the wedding of Button’s manager, Richard Goddard, to the lovely Caroline. On the Friday night, the eve of Richard’s and Caroline’s wedding day, there was an informal get-together in a pub in Saint Peter Port, the island’s capital. Ross was there, and I greeted him somewhat trepidatiously, since, in one way or another, I had annoyed him quite a few times over the past 20-odd years. But guess what: we ended up having a long, chummy, and enjoyable conversation, lubricated by a superfluity of good red wine, during which we ran through all the above events, and more besides, and we put the F1 world to rights in no uncertain terms. Ever since then, whenever our paths have crossed, we have always chatted warmly.

So I hereby wish Ross James Brawn OBE a very happy 70th birthday for this coming Saturday — November 23 — on which date I hope that he will crack open one or two bottles of excellent claret from his extremely well stocked cellar. Cheers!