Success in motorsport is about the constant push towards perfection, in terms of motorsport gears, driving philosophy, aerodynamics and racing principles.
However, in practice, one team will not win every single championship they enter, because so many challengers are vying for the same role.
There is, of course, an exception to this in one of the most unique years in the history of the world’s most prestigious motorsport, where a team lucky to make the grid won 100 per cent of the championships it was entered for, a feat never done before and likely will never be done again.
Of course, the team in question is not a typical debutante but was in fact Brawn GP, named after team principal and owner Ross Brawn, himself the mastermind behind seven world constructor’s championship wins and an increasingly competitive Honda F1 entry.
However, Honda, having bought the BAR team which itself bought Tyrrell, pulled out of Formula One at the close of the 2008 World Championship, citing the global financial crisis as a cause.
This left Mr Brawn and a lot of engineers out of a job but convinced that the car that they had built was capable of winning at least one race, bought the company himself for a pound and modified the car to fit a Mercedes engine, chosen because it needed the fewest alterations.
Initially, given that the car’s centre of gravity was ruined by the change in engine as well as being generally too heavy, few gave the car a chance in a brand new set of technical regulations.
However, they had a secret weapon in the form of the “double-decker diffuser”, which was a part of the aerodynamics and allowed the car far more downforce than was expected, making it a very fast car for the first half of the season.
After a long argument about its legality that lasted long after the first race in Melbourne, it was ruled legal and the car managed to gain enough of an advantage in the first part of the season that even the upgrades to the Red Bull and McLaren cars that made them the class of the field could not catch up.
Ultimately, after winning the Constructors and Drivers championships, the team was bought by Mercedes and became their works team, eventually becoming the class of the 2010s.
