It is a Friday at the headquarters of Mercedes GP Petronas – and that makes Ross Brawn even busier than usual. As team principal and shareholder for the Northamptonshire-based Formula One team, the last day of the working week in between fortnightly races is characterised by a string of strategy meetings. Then there’s the small matter of an all-staff address to be slotted in. No wonder he seems to exist in a world of perpetual motion.
But if you sit him down and get him talking about engineering, all the distractions suddenly melt away. Brawn might be the brains behind some of the biggest successes in the rarefied world of motor racing, but he remains an engineer at heart. Race tactics or commercial strategy might take up much of his time these days but it is engineering that remains his true passion.
It is when talk turns to the importance of engineering in Formula One that Brawn becomes truly animated. “F1 is essentially an engineering competition, the sporting side is just added on top,” he insists. “If you have a bad car that you take to a race, there is not much you can do to make it a good car. Sometimes the drivers and the team can swing it a bit either way. But the difference you see between the guys at the front and those at the back of the grid is mostly engineering. It is critical to everything we do.”
Brawn’s recognition of the importance of technical prowess in an industry enshrined in glamour can be explained by his background. As a child growing up near Reading in the early 1960s, he was encouraged by his father to indulge in a passion for Meccano. That interest in how things were made grew steadily, and developed into a love of building and racing slot-cars. That’s where Brawn first learned skills such as fabrication.
Although he did well in his science-based O-levels, Brawn chose not to follow a purely academic route into engineering – opting instead to take a mechanical engineering apprenticeship with the UK Atomic Energy Authority at Harwell in Oxfordshire. Looking back, he says that was one of the best decisions he ever made, because it was the practical skills acquired at UKAEA that got him his break in the world of motor racing.
Flexible friends
“My apprenticeship was invaluable as it was that engineering education and training that gave me my opportunity,” he says. “Frank Williams offered me a job with his F1 team because I could make things – I had the skills and understanding of engineering that was needed. It was my foot in the door.
“Back in those days Williams was a small team so you needed to be flexible and have a range of skills. I could fabricate, I could machine, I could use a mig welder – do all the sorts of things that were needed by a small F1 team in those days. When I joined there were two designers, and a group of technicians, mechanics, fabricators who put the cars together. They did everything, even down to driving the trucks.”
Those early days at Williams were the foundation for Brawn’s career in motorsport. He moved quickly through the ranks, working in the research and development department and as an aerodynamicist in the team’s wind tunnel. Stints at Haas Lola, Arrows F1 and Jaguar followed, before he joined Benetton as technical director. It was at Benetton that Brawn joined forces with Michael Schumacher to clinch his first Drivers’ World Championship in 1994, and then again in 1995. Then came a spell at Ferrari as technical director where Brawn again teamed up with Schumacher to stunning effect, with the German winning five consecutive Drivers’ titles.
But perhaps the most dramatic period of Brawn’s career came after he joined Honda as team principal in 2007. One year later Honda announced its withdrawal from F1, effectively leaving Brawn and the team out of the sport unless a buyer could be found. His response was to complete a management buy-out of Honda F1, re-entering the team into the World Championship under the name Brawn GP. In their first season Brawn GP driver Jenson Button won the Drivers’ title with the team winning the Constructors’ title.
Following this success, Daimler bought into the team at the end of 2009, with Brawn remaining as team principal in the newly named Mercedes GP Petronas. Now his time is split between racing and commercial strategy, but he does his utmost to stay involved with engineering. “I do still enjoy that side of the business,” he says. “It’s rare that I can contribute these days in terms of specifically solving a technical problem but I can still point people in the right direction. We have a lot of reviews and technical discussions and meetings about engineering philosophy and direction, and the concept of the car. I’m still very much involved in those types of processes.”
He tries to be a supportive boss, setting clear leadership goals. “It’s important to provide our engineering team with clarity in terms of what is expected of them and their objectives,” he says. “I try to support them strongly and help to remove any obstacles that stop us achieving what we want to achieve. F1 is a team-orientated engineering project. It’s my job to make sure all the engineers are working in harmony and they all know what’s going on.”
The benefit of being involved in F1 is that the team has a clear measurement of its performance – on the track every couple of weeks during the race season. This year Mercedes GP Petronas has struggled to recapture the successes of Brawn GP, currently lying fourth in the Constructors’ table behind RBR-Renault, McLaren-Mercedes and Ferrari. Brawn remains upbeat, however, and thinks the team he has assembled has all the requisites for success.
“We’ve got quite a young team and their creativity, hopefully balanced with my experience, will be where we are strong in the future,” he says. “It’s a very dedicated team. We’ve got a couple of very innovative groups of people and individuals within the set-up here who I am very excited about.”
Gender balance
The technical team includes a good percentage of women, and Brawn thinks that’s a positive. One of the chief vehicle engineers is female, and there are women employed in important roles on chassis ride and aerodynamics. He is an advocate for greater gender balance within engineering in general, and believes that more needs to be done to encourage women into the sector.
The same goes for encouraging young people into engineering. Brawn is keenly aware that organisations such as Mercedes GP Petronas can act as powerful recruiters for the industry as a whole, and he is a regular supporter of academic initiatives. He has also played a major role in the IMechE’s Formula Student event, acting as its patron.
“We have to use F1 as a means of getting more young people interested in engineering,” he says.
Brawn is also a huge advocate for apprenticeships, believing they help to sow the seeds of future skills and resources. Without apprenticeships, he argues, the manufacturing industry and related sectors will not be able to attract the numbers of craftspeople and technicians they need. He believes that following a vocational route into the profession can produce a better engineer.
“When I am looking for engineers, someone who has come through a practical apprenticeship scheme and then moved on to higher education is often more attractive to me than someone who has a purely academic background. That’s not bias because of my own background, it’s just a practical reality.
“If you’ve got two people with equal academic qualifications, but one has previously done an apprenticeship, that person tends to be much more useful because they have a much more rounded skill-set.”
It’s clear that Brawn’s passion for engineering remains undiminished. Having been awarded an OBE earlier this year, and widely recognised as the man with the Midas touch in F1, Brawn has achieved a status unmatched by many of his peers. But he remains loyal to the discipline that has helped him to achieve so many of his aims. “Engineering still fascinates me and I will always be very enthusiastic about it,” he says.
Inspiring icons: Schumacher, Williams, Head and Byrne
After such a lengthy career in motorsport, it comes as no surprise to find that Ross Brawn has worked with some talented and flamboyant characters along the way. And some of his contemporaries have acted as real inspirations.
Frank Williams, as the man who gave him his break in motor racing, comes high on that list. But Brawn says it was Patrick Head, co-founder of the Williams F1 team, who really helped drive him on to success. “Frank was an inspiration, yes, but probably more so was Patrick Head who was the chief engineer. Patrick set very high standards. He was a very pragmatic, solid and precise engineer, both in his engineering solutions and in his approach.”
Rory Byrne, chief designer at Ferrari, is cited as another major influence on his career. Brawn and Byrne worked together for the best part of a decade at the Italian F1 team and that partnership was instrumental in helping Michael Schumacher to deliver five consecutive Drivers’ titles.
“Byrne was a hugely creative person but he wasn’t the most practical,” recalls Brawn. “He and I worked well together because I often brought a practical bias to what we were doing.
“Most of my reference points come from within motor racing and I’ve met some hugely creative but perhaps not so practical people, while others are hugely practical and not so creative. I’ve always been fascinated by how the chemistry of that works to build a group of people.”
It’s no surprise to find that, of all the drivers Brawn has worked with during his long career, it is Schumacher who has made the biggest impact on him. The pair won their first F1 race and their first championship together. Brawn says that it has been a truly special working relationship.
“He’s a very determined person,” says Brawn. “He’s very focused on what he’s doing. He also has a very good understanding of engineering. His father supported him through his early racing career but Michael had to look after the car himself and was used to getting grease under his fingernails.
“He still loves to do that. His son is racing and Michael mechanics his car for him.
“He enjoys that side of things and I believe that empathy with engineering helps you become a topline driver.”