The team have come through a lot together. It was really noticeable on the day the titles were clinched in Brazil that Ross Brawn’s first thoughts were for the employees he had been forced to let go when the team downsized from 700 to 450 in April.

Equally, Button was singing “We are the champions” over the radio on the slow down lap. Both are indications of the strength of team feeling, something Brawn has always known how to create from his days at Ferrari.

But in those days no-one, especially the media, could ever drive a wedge between star driver Michael Schumacher and the team. Here there is an obvious problem and Button’s side have used the press to leverage their position, with stories this week about Button having to pay for his own laundry and of course the infamous rumours about a McLaren dream team with Lewis Hamilton.

Schumacher would never have played that game, but then the Ferrari team would never have contemplated life without him. The same is clearly not true of Brawn and Button. He did a great job for them in the first half of the season, but made heavy weather of it second half and that isn’t the ideal platform from which to drive a hard bargain.

Ross Brawn said on Sunday that he was very confident a deal would be done with the new world champion, “We want Jenson to stay in the team and I think we will find a solution.

“Jenson has a contract with us, but of course that contract is not the salary of a world champion and not the salary of a team that is now in a much stronger position than it was ten months ago.

“We are working with Jenson to find a balance between what we can afford and what he feels is fair for his status and what he can contribute in the future.

“You are never 100% but I would say 99% [certain it will happen].”

Brawn makes the point that the difference between what Button’s contract says and what he is looking for is enough to make a significant difference to the performance of the car. It’s something of the order of £5 million.

This is all taking place against the backdrop of the Resource Restriction agreement kicking in, which is a mutual agreement between teams to keep costs under control. This was what the teams came up with instead of the budget cap.

It also comes at a time when Brawn has landed sponsors and is selling a 75% stake in the business to Mercedes. In two years time, if the deal goes through, it will become the official Mercedes works team and I would put serious money on them wanting Sebastian Vettel in the car in 2012.

Things are changing an there is even talk that the Mercedes management might base themselves at Brawn’s motorhome next season, rather than McLaren. Either way the team looks really well set for the future.

For that reason, Button really needs to stay with Brawn for the next two years, but you can’t blame him for trying to squeeze a better deal.

Today was Barrichello’s third win at Monza and the first time that he has headed Button in a Brawn 1-2 finish.

It moved him to 14 points behind Button in the championship and with the Red Bull pair of Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel pretty much out of it now, it looks very much like the title fight will be between the Brawn drivers. It also looks like the team will clinch the constructors’ championship before the end of the season, possibly in Japan.

The pair started the race in 5th and 6th places on the grid, but made the most of a one-stop strategy to come through and pass pole sitter Lewis Hamilton as well as Kimi Raikkonen and Adrian Sutil, all of whom two-stopped. Hamilton was set for a third place, but crashed on the last lap while pushing hard to catch Button. This gave Raikkonen a podium.

Adrian Sutil scored his first points in F1 with fourth place, but it could have been third had Sutil not hit one of his mechanics on his second stop, losing some time in the process. He set the fastest lap, but spent the whole race behind Raikkonen’s Ferrari, who again drove a canny race, using all his skill and guile, not to mention his KERS button, to keep the faster car at bay.

Barrichello won the race again by having the edge over Button on pace when it mattered in qualifying and by his consistency in the race. He also survived a gearbox worry before the race. He made an excellent start to pass Kovalainen and move up to fourth place.

He had an extra lap of fuel compared to Button, and also he made a decision to start the race on the hard tyre, where Button started on soft. Both tyres worked well on the Brawn, but it meant that Barrichello had better pace immediately after the pit stops and was able to open a margin over Button.

“It feels great, it is a winning year whatever happens, ” said Barrichello. “We mustn’t forget that not long ago we had no jobs. We have a fantastic car, engine and the team is doing a fantastic job. We both had different tyre strategies and the car was good. I’m going to give my best it’ll be a good and healthy fight.”

“It’s nice to be back here in second position,” said Button. “Rubens did a better job. He’s my closest rival and that’s good.”

Ross Brawn was delighted with his fourth 1-2 finish of the season and says that he doesn’t mind which of his drivers wins the world title from here, “I demand they do it fairly and openly, everything has got to be fair and open. We will leave them to it. They are old enough,” he said.

“Jenson was beating him (Rubens) consistently at the start of the season but Valencia was a great race for Rubens and he has a steely look about him at the moment.”

Hamilton looked good in the early stages, but his ability to open up a big enough gap to cover the Brawns fell apart in the middle stint. By the time he pitted for the second time on lap 35 he was nothing like far enough ahead of the Brawns and they jumped him.

Heikki Kovalainen had a disappointing day. I posted yesterday that he should win the race, based on his car pace and his strategy and grid slot. He had a similar strategy to the Brawns and started ahead of them on the grid. But he lost ground at the start and faded off the pace. At the end he was 60 seconds behind Barrichello and was 57 seconds behind Hamilton on the last lap.

Team boss Martin Whitmarsh recently put the spotlight on Kovalainen’s wavering race pace and today will have been a hammer blow to his hopes of retaining his seat. He simply should have done a lot better.

It seems all the more intriguing that they should be doing this at a time when other manufacturers like Honda and now BMW are pulling out and Toyota are dramatically reducing their spend on the sport. Who knows what Renault’s next move will be after the judgement is made on the Singapore race-fixing allegations.

And yet the more you look into it, the more substance there appears to be to this story and this looks to me like a classic case of a company zagging, while everyone else zigs, which is a great attitude when dealing with an economic downturn; look for opportunity, not excuses.

Mercedes may be choosing this moment to pile into F1 in a bigger way than ever because the opportunity is there like never before to make a real impression on the sport. Up to now they have had the three pointed star on the McLaren, had some great wins, (but not as many as they should have had) and survived some painful scandals with their partner.

But this year, with Brawn, they have spread the net wider, gained a significant secondary benefit in terms of wins and positive image – and they’ve been making money from the deal to boot.

Unlike the other manufacturers in F1, Mercedes has always been happy not to pay for the whole team, instead using the team’s ability to find decent sponsors. Mercedes concentrate on funding a really good engine programme and contributing to team funds, but not underwriting them.

Now with F1 contracting and the manufacturers in retreat comes an opportunity to grab more of the sport’s real estate at low cost. The Brawn buy-in, if it happens, is part of that and it makes real sense, leaving Mercedes as a major player in F1, while still paying out a fraction of what it has cost Toyota to achieve very little. Timing is everything. It also strengthens a key FOTA member. Brawn is a team of the future, with a structure and business model, which is the blueprint for post-Mosley, post credit crunch F1.

They zig, we zag; it’s set to become one of the winners’ catch-phrases of the Great Recession.

Next year there will be less white space

Today I see that the story is in the open as Autosport has got Nick Fry to talk on the record about it,
“We’ve signed some nice contracts, and those will come out into the open when we launch the car next year, but we will see what happens. There is zero worry on our side,” he said.

Brawn has had a great year by anyone’s standards and look likely to win at least the constructors championship and the drivers’ as well. The car has had pretty thin sponsorship this year as it came into life at a time of great economic uncertainty as the world’s financial institutions rocked. At the same time there was terrible instability in F1 as the large egos in F1 were bashing up against each other in a process which led to the announcement of the breakaway series in June, followed a month of so later with the resolution and the signature of the Concorde Agreement.

With that milestone passed, Brawn has been able to conclude a title sponsorship deal with a company, I hear it may be an Asian company but that was from a non-team source and there are other companies looking for the title sponsorship deal who may become secondary sponsors.

“That (Concord Agreement) was a log jam because sponsors wanted to know what the situation was, ” said Ross Brawn when I asked him on Saturday about the team’s financial strength, “And things are freeing up. Everyone up the pit lane will find that things are now much better because we know what the commercial basis is for the future.”

I spoke to Zak Brown of Just Marketing, one of F1′s top sponsor getters and he said that he expected a few companies to come into Formula 1, who had been in a holding pattern waiting for the politics to get resolved. But he added that it would not be a ‘deluge’. Renault is looking for a title sponsor at the moment.

With regard to Brawn it is also worth remembering that as constructors’ champions, the team will be entitled to something in the region of US$70 million of TV and prize money from FOM. So they will be well beyond $100 million budget for next year at a time when budgets are coming down dramatically thanks to the resource restriction agreement. In many ways Brawn is a blue-print for the F1 team of the ‘resource restricted’ era; owned by a group of shareholders who don’t have to go to a company board to get a decision, strongly engineering led, buying a manufacturer engine at low cost.

The only thing is, how competitive will they be next season? Can they keep it up? My hunch is that they will slip back a little from this year’s pre-eminence because they are now in the position that McLaren and Ferrari were in 12 months ago of having to keep developing this car to win the title at the expense of next year’s. With the resource restrictions in place wind tunnel time is limited so any time spent making this car faster is time spent not working on next year’s car.

Ferrari has already thrown its efforts into 2010, I’m slightly surprised that McLaren is still going for it as much as it is on this year’s model.

Of course working on next year’s car is only any use if you have an idea – as Brawn did with their double diffuser. Ferrari seem to have for next year and you’ve got to imagine that they will be pretty strong in 2010.

Meanwhile Virgin, which has supported Brawn to a small extent this year, is going to be title sponsor at Manor and I think the team cars will be named after them, along the lines of what Benetton did in the 1990s. This was a model Sir Richard Branson was attracted by when he came into the paddock at the start of the season and I’m sure that he will be attracted by the idea of getting all the brand recognition of running Virgin-Cosworth cars.

He sees the attraction of F1 for business-to-business deals; not long after he came into F1 he managed to sell a stake in Virgin Galactic to the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, a deal brokered in the F1 paddock. That is a good example of how well F1 cane work as a business.

Since Jenson Button’s last win, in Turkey three races ago, he has not featured in the top three in qualifying or the race and the only podium has been Rubens Barrichello’s at Silverstone. Button toiled there, largely it was assumed, because he could not get the tyres up to temperature, but in the final laps he suddenly got on to the pace, which is a more complex problem.

Shovlin, like all the other Brawn engineers will not have been able to relax on the beach during the enforced two week shutdown. His mind will have been turning over possible reasons for the car’s erratic behavior. He told the BBC’s Sarah Holt that, “At the moment there is such a small window where it is working really well and we can’t cope with that. We need to fix it so it’s quick on any track and in any temperature.”

It's been heavy going for Button

From then on it didn’t change all that much for the first four flyaway races, which it dominated, then they had a major upgrade in Spain which seemed to work well. Monaco was all about Button’s finesse and Turkey was a great drive again by Button, forcing Vettel into a mistake on the opening lap.

Brawn would love to wind the clock back to the specification which worked perfectly on all circuits, but according to Shovlin, “It’s not as simple as going back to an old car specification. That’s not the answer; it is something much more subtle than that. We may have done something to the car to make it more sensitive.”

Button’s plaintive wails over the radio that the tyres are not working, or that he has savage oversteer have become as much a soundtrack of these last three races as the sound of the engines. It is the sound of the dream of a lifetime slipping away.

So can they fix it? Well their biggest problem is that testing is banned, so even if they think they’ve found the answer and line up a few solutions, they cannot go out on track to test them for verification. That will make the task ten times harder. It also means that they have to spend precious time during Friday practice at Grands Prix sorting out problems, rather than going faster.

There is another area of concern, which Shovlin hints at in his interview, “The problem this year is the budget,” he says.

When Brawn led the management buyout of the team he was given, as he said at that Barcelona test, “a budget to impress,” with which to develop the car. The idea being that they would find sponsors and partners to ensure their survival into 2010 and beyond.

But they had a nervous few months recently, as the business plan called for them to receive $35 million owed to the team for Honda’s share of TV and prize money. This money was not forthcoming and in June and July the team had to be very careful about committing funds to development, because they also had to keep one eye on budgets for 2010.

My understanding is that they received this money when they signed the Concorde Agreement last week, so that puts some much needed funds into the team.

I know also that there are sponsors and investors who have been sniffing around F1 for some time but were unwilling to commit until stability was restored with the Concorde Agreement. We may start to see them come in soon and hopefully one or two of them will go Brawn’s way. In addition, as front runners this year, their share of the prize money next year will be or the order of $70 million.

But the team is definitely in a finely balanced situation, with regards to this year and next and as Red Bull is throwing the kitchen sink at trying to win this world championship, Brawn must decide when and how much to take from Peter to pay Paul. And then find a quick fix to a complex problem.

Brawn had a third bad result in a row on a track where everyone thought they should have re-established themselves. Hungary was everyone’s idea of a strong Brawn track and if you throw in the heat, and the updated technical package, it is deeply worrying for them that they could not convert it all into a strong run. Button had no pace for most of the race and he reported terrible problems with rear graining on both types of tyre. He set only the sixth fastest race lap.

The high temperature was not the silver bullet they were looking for. It’s a tense time for Brawn, with McLaren, Ferrari and Williams looking faster. They seem to have taken a wrong turn on development somewhere along the line and it’s stopped the tyres working.

“I don’t know what it is but I don’t think we can blame the weather,” he said on Sunday night. We have got to be looking in other areas than that.”

“We have had two different updates on the car but they shouldn’t unbalance the car in any way,” Button said. “You can say that the other teams have improved their cars for sure. The Red Bull is a lot quicker and obviously McLaren, Ferrari and Williams have stepped up their game. But our car is not what it was to drive a few races ago.

“It’s not that we’ve got the same paced car and everyone has overtaken us. Our car is not driving as it has done from the start of the season so there is obviously an issue, but the good thing is there is a break before the next race for us to try and solve it.”

On Red Bull he said something very interesting, which is that he hopes the updates Brawn has brought here this weekend will “be enough to challenge the Red Bulls,” suggesting that he clearly feels that Brawn has fallen behind them lately. This may seem obvious given the mauling he’s taken in the last two races, but bear in mind that the team was saying that much of the performance gap was down to the cold conditions, which suit the Red Bull much better than the Brawn. Clearly having analysed it further they feel that it wasn’t just the cold, Red Bull has had a clear edge,

“There’s no excuses,” said Button. “It’s supposed to be warm this weekend, so we should get the tyres to work. I think people are going to struggle with overheating on the super softs, so it’s going to be about tyre management as usual. This year has been all about tyre management.

“We also have some updates that will move us forward a good chunk, they are mostly aerodynamic. You see what it says in the windtunnel, but you don’t know whether it’s going to be reality on the circuit. I’m happy with the step forwards and hopefully it’ll be enough to challenge the Red Bulls and make it more exciting.”

Button expects the Brawn to manage the super soft tyre better than Red Bull, much as it did in Monaco. From this race onwards Bridgestone has decided to change its strategy and bring tyres which are only one step apart in softness, rather than two. I think it’s a shame to move the goalposts mid season and it will be interesting to see which of the two title contending teams this move favours. I sense it may be Brawn as the gap between their performance on the two different tyres had been seen to be much larger than for Red Bull, which performed quite similarly on the two different tyres.

As to his opposition Button was very interesting, as usual. He has a 21 point cushion, so no need to panic, but he has seen his lead eroded alarmingly in the last two races. He noted that both Webber and Vettel have always outshone their team mates at Budapest. The big question is, what kind of boost will victory in Germany give to Mark Webber?

More than one commentator has compared him to Nigel Mansell, who took a long time to get his first win and then couldn’t stop winning. I think there may be something in that. One of my readers here on JA on F1 opined after Nurburgring that Webber is a journeyman, no more. I’m not so sure. He has always been immensely quick, but struggled to put it all together. This season he has been strong in races, moving up from his grid slot at times and has had plenty of speed in qualifying. He dominated Nurburgring and could do that again, now he has the map in his head.

“He was very quick,” observed Button of Webber. “Compared to his team-mate as well. I think both of them are going to be quick. If you look at past seasons they have been very quick around this circuit, both of them against their team-mates, they are driving a very competitive car.

“But they have us to contend with here, we’re going to be pushing them a lot more here. It’s going to be a bit cooler this weekend, but it’s still going to be hot enough to make the tyres work. And we need to start beating them, otherwise they’ll take too many points off us. They’ve already taken 11 points out of me in two races – that’s too many.”

We thought that Silverstone may have been a turning point of the season, with the almost brand new Red Bull car which dominated the weekend. Today we got confirmation that it was – and it is not just because of the high speed corners that the car was quick there. They are now the fastest car out there on any kind of circuit and as Ross Brawn and his team huddle in their debrief tonight they have a lot to chew over. Rubens Barrichello’s outburst on the BBC is the talk of the paddock tonight and Brawn looked furious when I saw him after he learned about it. This is the second time that Barrichello has come out with some strong words against his own team, the other occasion being Barcelona.

I can understand him being unhappy that the team switched the order of the final pit stops, giving Jenson the chance to pass him, but Jenson was faster at that stage of the race. Nevertheless it again gives a clear signal that the team wants Jenson to fight for the title and the extra point he gained here may be vital at the end of the season, given how quickly his lead is being eroded by Vettel and Webber.

But what cost Rubens a shot at victory and certainly a podium was the refuelling issue at the second stop. The first rig did not work so they had to go for a second one. Rubens thought he was fuelled to the finish but wasn’t. I can’t see Ross forgiving him for the way he spoke about the team and about Ross. He’s been on the wrong end of things in the past at Ferrari and this is uncomfortable territory for both men.

It’s always a bad sign when a team starts arguing with itself in defeat and they have to rally from this low point.

Here the Brawns were beaten on pace and they were also put into a corner on race tactics, as they were obliged to run a three stop strategy because they could not get the hard tyre to work and yet they could only run short stints on the soft because of the severe graining problems they encountered.

Red Bull had no such problems and were able to stick the hard tyres on Webber’s car at the first stop and watch as he pulled out fantastic lap times to stay in touch with Barrichello, despite having lost 15 seconds due to the drive through penalty.

Barrichello ran the early part of his second stint behind Massa’s Ferrari and lost time, while Webber was able to reel him in.

The wider problem for Brawn is that Red Bull sensed back in March that they could win this championship and have thrown their not insignificant resources at developing this car. You never know when you are going to get another chance to win a workd championship so you have to maximise your opportunities.

They have very impressive production facilities now and can turn new pieces around very quickly. The design for the Silverstone update only left Adrian Newey’s desk to go into production  around the time of the Monaco GP weekend, so they turned a huge update around very quickly.

Brawn has gone from 700 people to 450 this year, where Red Bull has gone the opposite way, although with budget cuts imminent for F1 the new people are all on contract, not staff and many of them came from Brawn.

Red  Bull can see that Brawn has to have one eye on saving some money for next year and they sense a weakness. The rest of the season RBR will develop relentlessly to keep locking out these 1-2 finishes and try to take both championships. Certainly the lads on the shop floor at Red Bull think they will do it.

Of course at some point they will have to decide which of their drivers is going for the championship. At the moment with Webber and Vettel on winning form and a gal between them of only 15 points that is a decision they cannot make. Webber reminds them that Vettel has crashed three times this year and could do so again, but Vettel has until this weekend, been the faster driver. It’s a wonderful battle and it has brought this world championship to life

Got this message today from one of my readers, Charlie. Put a smile on my face and hope it will do for you too.

“James, Do you remember me taking your advice and putting £20 on Brawn to win the Championship? at 15-1? well I got this email from Paddypower this morning:

…..With the British Grand Prix around the corner and Jenson Button and the Brawn team still thrashing allcomers, we’ve decided to accept reality and settle all bets on Jenson Button to win the World Drivers Championship and Brawn to win the World Constructors Championship as winners!

That’s right – given there’s no point in making you wait another four months to collect on what is effectively a racing certainty, we’ve paid you your winnings today….”

The suggestion was made when we first saw the Brawn in anger at the Barcelona test. You get a mega car which shows itself in pre season testing to be head and shoulders above the others about once every five years or so. Last time was Ferrari on the new Bridgestones in 2004, before that McLaren in 1998.

It’s been a stunning first half of the season for Brawn, with six wins from seven races and 16 trophies in the cabinet. Jenson Button is on target to win the world championship. If things carry on as they have so far, then Jenson could be in a position to clinch the title in Japan.

Hands up who thinks they'll win Silverstone?

Many people, including Ross, thought that Red Bull in particular would be hard to contain in Turkey and he was delighted with the way his team attacked the main weakness their car had relative to the Red Bull, it’s performance in the fast corners. The result was a more comfortable victory than anyone expected and it gives the team a lot of confidence going into the high speed corners of Silverstone.

But, as Ross points out, Rubens Barrichello is a formidable competitor around the old airfield track and could easily get stop Button making it a British win in the final race at Silverstone.

“Rubens is extremely strong at Silverstone, because of his early career a lot of time was spent here. He seems to fit with the track; he likes it and it suits his driving style. It’s not a track which is particularly sensitive to brakes, for example, which is an area he often finds quite critical on a car. I expect him to go very well this weekend and he is extremely motivated despite the challenge of beating Jenson.

So they are still going at each other then, no team orders?
“We have a sporting meeting before the race and last Sunday they said, ‘Are we still free to race?’ and I said, ‘Yes, but just don’t hit each other.’ I don’t expect them to do a 50-50 overtaking manoeuvre where they put each other at risk, that’s all I ask. I think it helps with the atmosphere inside the team. In terms of the championship, he has a challenge because Jenson is driving exceptionally well and for Rubens to have a chance, Jenson has to start dropping points through DNFs (non-finishes).”

How much has Jenson Button impressed you? Did you think he was this good?
“I just continue to be impressed. Last year I saw little flashes of it but they were such difficult circumstances, I didn’t benefit from seeing the real deal. But people within the team whom I respect said, ‘You are not seeing him at his best, seeing what he’s capable of doing.’ I think I am now seeing it and I think it was just shrouded by the poor car we had last year. Two years of banging your head against the wall with a poor car just takes the edge off you, it has to. He’s rejuvenated because of the performance and you are now seeing his natural ability and he has the approach and the attitude supporting that.”

You started the season with a car advantage and yet, here we are after seven races and you still have it. You must be delighted that you have kept improving the car?
“When we got back to the European season, the consensus was that we were going to come under huge pressure from the steps that the big teams were going to make, so quietly we went about making some steps ourselves. With Turkey what I was especially pleased with was we had identified that Red Bull were faster than us in the quick corners and we had focussed on that, the aerodynamic group and the chassis group, to find ways to set up the car differently, to find improvements in the aero and I think in Turkey in Turn 8, we were one of the quickest cars, as quick as Red Bull. That showed great strength.”

Do you worry that this year will be a flash in the pan, because you focussed Honda’s money on this car for so long and that you won’t be able to repeat it next year?
“We had a major restructure over the winter, but I can already see from the development of next year’s car that it is already progressing strongly enough and the output from what I call the ‘centres of performance’ of the team is maybe even stronger than before because of the clearer focus and structure we have in place. Obviously we have lost some capacity for manufacturing and for design and those are the areas we will have to be careful with to make sure we can cope. But I think you can see from the way we are developing the car this year – and we have new parts for Silverstone – that we are managing to keep up.”

What’s in the pipeline?
“We have new front wing endplates for Silverstone and new rear wing, some different chassis settings again which have come from rig work we have done. We’ve got some upgrades over the next few races which should help again.”