Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin has been recalling the events of the 2009 season when he was Jenson Button's race engineer at Brawn GP. The team had nearly collapsed over the previous winter after Honda had abruptly pulled the plug on its Formula 1 involvement, resulting in 300 redundancies at the works squad. Team boss Ross Brawn together with Nick Fry stepped in to keep the team running on a shoestring budget while seeking a longer term solution. Fortunately the 2009 car had already been developed, making use of a loophole in the rules to introduce a 'double diffuser' that promised a significant performance boost. But not even those at the team realised just how...
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