Six races in and Brawn GP and its two drivers, Jenson Button and Ruebens Barrichello, are running away with the driver’s championship and the constructor’s championship. Ferrari is struggling, McLaren is slipping backwards, BMW-Sauber is already caught in the whirlpool. Red Bull and Toyota are stronger (sans Monaco for Toyota) than ever before. Even Scuderia Toro Rosso is consistently scoring a point here and there. My only wish for this dream is for Barrichello to be able to take the fight to Button a lot stronger and beat him fair and square for a while. If not long enough to take the driver’s championship at the conclusion of the final checkered flag.
Archive for the Brawn GP Category
2009 F1 Season
Posted in Brawn GP, Formula 1, motorsports on March 26, 2009 by kevinterryThe world debut of the 2009 Formula One world championship revs up this weekend in Australia. If you thought the 2008 championship was spectacular then I would suspect that the 2009 version will be just as spectacular, if not more.
How, you ask, could 2009 be better than 2008? It’s hard to consider a Ross Brawn-run team a dark horse for the championship but that is what his young outfit, Brawn GP, are this year. Now that the former shuttered Honda F1 program has been saved by Brawn and the other executives of the team they have breathed new life into the winter testing snowglobe.
Participating in only the last two sessions of winter testing before flying off to Melbourne for the opening round of the F1 championship, Brawn GP cars scorched the field with qualified speed on both short and long runs. Their drivers, as was the case in 2008, are Ruebens Barrichello and Jenson Button. Barrichello, sporting the longest tenure in F1 history, could easily place in the top three in the drivers’ championship at season’s end if the car, and team, can support this kind of speed and reliability season long.
Seen as a last grasp for his career, Barrichello has shown his usual vigor in winter testing for Brawn GP. Much speculation centered around the second Brawn seat for ‘09 as Brazilian F1 rookie Bruno Senna was thought to be in line for this drive. I’m glad Ruebens is back for another season. He spent too long in Schumacher’s shadow at Ferrari and deserves to shine in what could be his last season in F1.
Jenson Button, the likable Brit, may have just seen his ship come in. He was beginning to look a lot like Jacques Villeneuve at the BAR/Honda team. Spending so many years there you began to feel he would go nowhere else no matter how pathetically off-pace the cars were. Not that JV didn’t show a smattering of brilliance behind the wheel of a BAR Honda, especially on starts, but the cars were blowing engines like it was a contest to see whose engine explosion was the coolest. Button won at the Hungaroring a few seasons back so he has the potential to do big things if the car is great.
The fact that Ferrari drivers, Massa and Raikkonen, have mentioned Brawn GP as a serious threat to their championship ambitions bodes well for the pureness of the Brawn GP program. Ross Brawn was the brains behind many a Schumacher victory. He could very well do the same for Barrichello and Button.
Let us hope so.
