Feature

What if ... Mercedes had never bought Brawn GP in 2009?

Mercedes was one of the top names of motor racing in the early pioneering days of the sport, but that all changed in 1955 when a devastating accident during the Le Mans 24 Hours race saw Pierre Levegh's car thrown into the main spectator area, killing the driver and 83 fans in what remains the worst accident in motor sport history. As a result of these horrific events, Mercedes withdrew from competition for decades.

It did eventually make a cautious return to F1 as an engine supplier to Swiss team Sauber in 1994 in association with Ilmor, before quickly moving on to a successful collaboration with McLaren. While the company was still wary about making a full return to the sport with a works team, all that changed in 2009 when they spied a unique once-in-a-lifetime opportunity with the Brawn GP team.

F1's biggest fairytale - and a unique opportunity

Ross Brawn had led a management buyout of the former Honda Racing F1 Team when the Japanese manufacturer made its shock decision to cut ties with F1 and leave with immediate effect at the end of 2008. The deal Brawn negotiated enabled him to keep the team running short-term with the help of engines now supplied by Mercedes, but the future still looked bleak for the orphaned outfit. Short of a miracle, it seemed the shutters would soon come down for good.

If this were a fairytale then Brawn GP would have outright won the 2009 world championship against all odds with driver Jenson Button clinching the driver's crown. Oh, wait: that's exactly what did happen. Already part of the winning effort, Mercedes went into high gear and bought the entire operation lock, stock and two smoking exhausts, retaining Brawn as principal and subsequently adding hands-on support from the likes of Niki Lauda, Paddy Lowe and Toto Wolff. A patriotically all-German driver line-up of Michael Schumacher and Nico Rosberg was installed, and the rest is history.

But what if it hadn't gone that way? What would recent F1 history look like then?

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.