November 16, 2009

Silver Arrows Replaces White Knights!

Not a bad year for Ross Brawn, really.  He rescues the Honda F1 team from the dead, renames it after himself, the team goes on to win seven of the first eight races, rolls on to both championships... and then Brawn goes out today and sells 75.1% of his stake in the team to German car giant Mercedes.

Which means that, for the first time since 1955, Mercedes is back as a Formula 1 team.  Let me put that in perspective here: the last time Mercedes entered their own cars in a F1 race, two of their drivers were Juan Manuel Fangio (aka St Fangio the Quick) and Sterling Moss.  And how are they getting back into it?  Buy buying the reigning Constructor's Championship team.  Not too shabby, that.

I guess we now know why BrawnGP was reluctant to re-sign Jenson Button... Mercedes wanted to choose their own drivers.  Speaking of which, they've come out and said they didn't want two German drivers, which leaves the door open for Button to come back, but... but... there are three very good prospective German pilots out there.  The obvious two are Nico Rosberg and Grizzly Nick Heidfeld.  Perhaps we now know why Rosberg was so confident that he'd be driving this season, despite his name not being linked to any team.  But what of Slappy Schumacher?  Sure, his heart is with Ferrari, but is it THAT far out of the realm of possibility that he'd hook up with MercedesGP?

But what of McLaren, or as it is correctly named, "McLaren-Mercedes"?  Doesn't Mercedes own a stake in the team themselves?  Yep, they sure do, a 40% one, as a matter of fact... which McLaren is going to buy back over the next two years.  They'll still be getting their engines from Mercedes until 2015, except now they'll have to pay for them.  There's some speculation that the reason for all of this is that Mercedes is a little peeved about McLaren's new road-car, the MP-4/12c.  It may be that Mercedes doesn't want to supply engines to what will be, essentially, a competitor to the SL-65 AMG.

So there you have it: BrawnGP is no more, taken over by MercedesGP.  Big news indeed!

Posted by: Wonderduck at 06:28 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 374 words, total size 3 kb.

1

HUGE and very exciting news!  Wow, Ross Brawn really made himself quite the deal!

I would love to see Schumey back in an F1 car.  Can't say I'm too excited about the possibility of Nico Rosberg, though. 

Posted by: Mallory at November 21, 2009 08:41 AM (WJ2qy)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Comments are disabled. Post is locked.
23kb generated in CPU 0.0199, elapsed 0.7448 seconds.
47 queries taking 0.7348 seconds, 234 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.