That management team, which saved the Brackley outfit from closure in 2009, operated as Brawn GP that year and then sold a controlling interest in the team to Mercedes, will remain on board but without holding equity.

Brawn: In the money (Photo: Mercedes)

Dr Dieter Zetsche, CEO of Daimler AG, said that this move by Daimler shows how serious they are about succeeding in F1, despite the fact that most other manufacturers in the last two years have gone in the opposite direction; either pulling out completely like Honda, Toyota and BMW or scaling down to having merely a presence as a supplier, in the case of Renault. Incidentally there is another interesting announcement due in the next 24 hours regarding a Renault backed deal for Red Bull with Infiniti – the Renault/Nissan luxury brand. There are various theories at large about the nature of the tie-up, but all will become clear shortly.

Daimler will hold 60% of the stock with Aabar the rest. With Mubadala having been requested to sell its stake in Ferrari back to the company at the end of last year, Aabar’s stake in Mercedes represents the main interest of Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth funds in Formula 1 teams.

Operationally the team will still operate out of Brackley with engines coming from Brixworth, near Northampton. Brawn remains as team principal in charge of all technical operations, but will no longer sit on the board, which will have three Daimler representatives and two from Aabar.

Brawn reports to Norbert Haug as head of Mercedes motorsport, who in turn reports to Zetsche. But I checked with Mercedes and on all decisions on the technical side Brawn has final say. He had spread himself a bit thin last season, trying to cover too many areas and so recently hired former Renault man Bob Bell as technical director to take a lot of the load off him. This should result in a stronger management structure.

Zetsche said: “The acquisition of a majority stake holding in our Silver Arrows team sends a clear signal that we intend to achieve technical and sporting success on world motorsport’s biggest and most important stage – and to do so in cost-effective conditions,” he said.

For all the complaints from union leaders in Germany about the company splashing the cash at a time of global cutbacks, withougt doubt the attraction to Mercedes is that they are going racing at a time when the Resource Restriction Agreement means that costs are under control and a well run, well sponsored team such as Mercedes, can even run at a profit. Mercedes has some of the strongest partners in the sport, so sponsor revenue is high.

They also have a solid customer base for engines, which is a profit centre.

As for Ross Brawn, he made the point that he plans to stick around for a few years yet, “Daimler and Aabar’s acquisition of the remaining 24.9 per cent stake in Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix will be a further step in the consolidation and strengthening of our team for the future, ” he said. “I remain fully committed to our team for the long-term, along with the management team and all of our employees. We all look forward to the challenge of making our team successful, and proudly representing Mercedes-Benz and the racing tradition of the Silver Arrows.”

Mercedes has had a tricky start to its second iteration in F1 (the first was in the 1950s). Last season the car suffered from lack of investment, resource and focus during the design phase of 2009, while this year’s car has not been very quick in testing. There are some cooling issues on the car, but it would be a mistake to judge them before we see the full package at Melbourne as they always planned to test a fairly basic car and then bring an update kit before the first race with refinements, especially in aerodynamics.

That said they will be coming from quite a long way behind when they bolt on the update pack next week for the final test in Barcelona. The cancellation of the Bahrain test and race will have bought them an extra week, but it will also have given the competition an opportunity to refine their cars too. Based on what we’ve seen so far, Mercedes has a good 7/10ths of a second a lap to make up to its rivals, possibly more.

He also tips Fernando Alonso to win the world championship this year, reiterating the admiration he has for the Spaniard, whom he tried hard to sign for Honda in late 2008.

Brawn: Going for it in 2011 (Darren Heath)

The difficulties of this season should provide that going into 2011, but it is interesting that he’s already started talking about an exit. He may stay with Mercedes for five or ten more years, but he’s saying that he won’t take on another project after this. What more is there to achieve when you’ve done what he’s done?

As a general rule, manufacturers running their own teams have been lacking in success; BMW, Toyota, Honda all failed to challenge. Renault won the title in 2005 and 2006, but since then it’s been Ferrari, McLaren in partnership with Mercedes and the new generation of customer teams like Brawn and Red Bull.

Mercedes have staked quite a bit reputationally on this project and after a difficult first season, they need to show that this model is workable. They need some strong results next year or the tensions will rise internally within Mercedes.

As always in racing, managing expectations is crucial and I got the sense that expectations were managed with the Mercedes board going into this project, given the resource restrictions the team was operating under in 2009, but still the actual performance has been a disappointment.

Brawn repeats the mantra that the forced downsizing of the team as it went from Honda to Brawn in early 2009 led to an under-resourced design team and a conservative, unambitious 2010 car. For 2011, with the support of Mercedes he says, “We have a group of young engineers who want to show their value and we will go back to being ambitious.”

He says that the main thing the team gets from Mercedes parent company Daimler is not people but resources; especially in CFD support, simulator and vehicle dynamics.

As for Michael Schumacher, Brawn affirms that he is 100% certain that the German will continue to race for Mercedes in 2011 and says “I expect that in 2011 he will come back much stronger.”

Interestingly Brawn says that he has been surprised by the performance of Nico Rosberg, who has turned out to be “far stronger than I imagined. He has had an exceptional year.” I hear that there will be some changes next year with regard to Rosberg’s race engineering team at the track.

The seven times world champion has had a torrid time this season, scoring 76 points less than his young team mate Nico Rosberg and generally being outpaced by him everywhere. The old Schumacher, who’s presence always dominated the paddock and the race track during race weekends, is a far more anonymous competitor these days. It is often easy to forget that he’s in the field.

The reason why he has struggled is because what he has around him now isn’t what he enjoyed for many years with Ferrari, where there was unlimited testing and he could fine tune both chassis and tyres to his needs. Ferrari had a development contract with Bridgestone and so Schumacher was able to get the tyres exactly how he wanted them.

He took a calculated gamble to come back this season with no testing and it seems that he underestimated the effect it would have on his performance. Mercedes team principal Ross Brawn has defended him in the face of a rather odd one main campaign by former team owner Eddie Jordan, using his BBC platform, to say that Schumacher should be sacked and in any case will not race next year. The team is mystified as to why he should be taking such a stand on this issue.

Speaking to the F1.com website, Brawn said, “If you take the telemetry data in fast corners or his reaction time when the car breaks away, I don’t see any difference [to before his retirement]. There he’s still the old Michael,” said Brawn.

“But in the slow corners he cannot make full use of the tyres as Nico can. Nico has put the bar very high in this respect. But I guess that’s okay for Michael as he clearly sees where he has to improve. I predict that in 2011 we will again see the true Michael – when we’ve delivered him a better car.”

And that is the key to it. The 2010 Mercedes suffers from the fact that it was developed by a Brawn team that had limited resources and much of them were being directed at winning last year’s championship.

The key question is whether Mercedes will be able to deliver a good enough car next season. The team’s track record as Honda wasn’t fantastic, the 2005 and 2006 cars being the only good ones and the Brawn’s success last year owed a lot to starting the season with a controversial and well developed double diffuser, which rivals then had to copy.

The other key component for Schumacher will be the new Pirelli tyres. Here he will be helped by the fact that it’s a level playing field for everyone. But if they don’t fit in with his driving style, as the current Bridgestones do not, he could be struggling again. This is a secondary point to the chassis, which is the most important. But it’s significant nevertheless.

(Photo:Darren Heath)

Brawn shed some more light on why Schumacher struggles on these tyres in the F1.com interview, “Michael’s driving style depends on a strong front tyre that can withstand his hard braking and the steering manoeuvres that he prefers,” Brawn explained. “Nico has simply understood better how to handle these front tyres.

“I have to say that this year’s front tyre is very uncommon. That stems from the fact that the FIA wanted to promote KERS and had asked Bridgestone to develop tyres that would fit a certain weight distribution and thus create a specific tyre characteristic.”

All of this is also forcing a re-evaluation of Rosberg’s talents. At Williams alongside Webber and Nakajima he did not look anything particularly special, but this season he has really come of age and put in many strong performances across qualifying and race. Schumacher’s powers have waned in the years since he retired, but Rosberg is on it.

Brawn admits in the interview that if it were any other driver, he would not be retained. Schumacher needs a good car next year to salvage some dignity from his comeback. A few wins would be ideal, but even some podiums would enable to say that that the comeback was worthwhile on balance and that he enjoyed it. It is for this reason that it makes no sense for him to stop at the end of 2010.

The risk is that he gets another bad car next year and the poor results continue. Then he – and Mercedes – would be forced into some tough decisions during the season.

Speaking in an interview with F1.com, Brawn spoke of Rosberg benefitting from being Schumacher’s team mate to set him up for life after Schumacher’s retirement.

“I never wanted Michael to dominate, ” he said. “(At Ferrari) Michael dominated because he was the best. There was never a structure that enabled him to dominate. He dominated because he was the fastest and most consistent driver. So we will have to see how the season develops.

“It is not good having one driver dominate a team because that means the other driver is not performing as he should. I don’t want Michael to dominate. I want them both to compete very strongly and both to win races. But at the end of the day we want to win the championship. Decisions may develop where one driver has to be given extra support for the championship but we won’t do that until the situation arises. Until then it is a completely open competition and I don’t want one driver to dominate the other.”

At Ferrari. Brawn made the decisions, especially during races, but the tone was set by Jean Todt, then the team principal. In his own team, Brawn made some decisions last season which went Jenson Button’s way during races and which irritated Rubens Barrichello, but close analysis of the decisions shows that they allowed Barrichello a chance to come out on top, but he failed to take it. At Ferrari he was clearly moved out of the way on occasions to Scumacher’s benefit. It is unlikely that this would be repeated at Mercedes partly because Brawn is in charge and times ahave changed, partly because it would not be what Mercedes want and partly because Rosberg is the kind of driver who would have a lot to say about it.

That said, every team will invoke some priority later in the season if one of the drivers is going for the world title.

I find Brawn’s comments on Rosberg very interesting. He says he tried to hire him for Honda in 2007 and has the highest admiration for his raw talent. Like many drivers in his position, the first win is a hurdle he needs to overcome soon. Many people admired Rosberg’s performances after a shaky start last season, but to hear Brawn speak in such glowing terms is interesting. He’s not normally given to eulogies on young drivers. He normally only speaks in glowing terms like this of drivers he knows well.

“We have tried to sign Nico for several years,” he says. “We had strong discussions with him two years ago. We see Nico as a great talent, but it needs finishing and maturing. He has not won a race yet, although he came very close, and I think it is a wonderful partnership between him and Michael. They work well together and I see Michael helping Nico develop his career. Michael has come out of retirement but we have to accept that there will come a day when he has to stop forever and then we will have Nico.”

As for the new car, which will debut on Monday, Brawn expects a significant performance step from the chamionship wining Brawn car of 2009. This will make it a pretty competitive machine unless one of the main rivals has found some unique solution to deal with the added weight and tyre wear of the cars under the 2010 rules.

“It’s probably quite a bit quicker, ” he says. “We have two stages with the car. The one you will see in Valencia and a different car that you will see in Bahrain.”

Then the 90 minute drive from Brussels to Spa, which is about half an hour south of the city of Liege. Amazingly it’s a beautiful day here. I’ve been coming to Spa for the Grand Prix for 20 years and I can count on my fingers the number of times I’ve seen a hot sunny day here. Let’s hope it lasts. The forecast is for it to stay sunny or partly cloudy all weekend, with a high of around 22 degrees.

Eau Rouge: A real man's corner

I used to stand up there with the legendary journo Denis Jenkinson and he could always tell the top 6 just from the way they went through the corner. He was always right.

This track is very special and it’s special to me because it’s a track where my Dad, Bill, always did really well. He was a works Lotus driver in the late 1950s and early 60s and also ran the Lotus sportscar team doing Le Mans, Spa 24 hours and all the big events. He told me all about this place long before I ever came here and I have always loved it.

One of my strongest memories of this place is the time when Kimi Raikkonen was battling with Michael Schumacher for pole position, it was 2002 and Olivier Panis had blown an engine in the BAR at Radillon, at the top of Eau Rouge, which meant that there was a curtain of dense white smoke sitting on the hill. Raikkonen plunged into it without lifting, or caring where in that pall of smoke the stationary BAR might be. It was one of the bravest and most committed pieces of driving I’ve ever seen. Raikkonen always goes well here and even though they have stoped developing the Ferrari I think he’ll get a good result here, especially as the KERS will help him on the long run from Eau Rouge to Les Combes.

Another strong memory here is the time when there was a massive pile up at the start in 1998 and I was doing on the spot reports for ITV F1. I realised that it was going to be a long afternoon, so I popped into a portaloo. Out of the blue Murray Walker threw to me, so I had to hurriedly retrieve my mike and make something up on the spot.

I’m looking forward to this race. Ross was saying on the plane this morning that they just need to get the tyres up to temperature and they will be competitive, but in trying to make that happen in the past by loading up corners of the car, they’ve introduced imbalances. He’s hoping that it will work this weekend. Red Bull should be quick, although they are going to be concerned about engines for this race and the next one at Monza after Sebastian Vettel lost his fourth of the season in Valencia.

Mark Webber needs a strong weekend and a win. If he doesn’t win and take a big bite out of Jenson Button’s lead then it’s going to make it hard with the races we have coming up.

On the tittle tattle front, it looks like Williams is moving closer to using Renault engines next year. And all routes seem to point to Nico Hulkenberg getting promoted to a race seat next year, possibly alongside Robert Kubica.

Red Bull are divided on switching to Mercedes. I hear that some of the team want to do it, but there is some resistance from some key people.

He says that he would put money on Jenson Button to win the drivers’ title and Michael Schumacher to win a race before the season’s end and discusses his team’s recent problems, which have lost them ground in the title fight.

Brawn was the architect of all of Schumacher’s seven world titles, one of the most unique and successful partnerships in F1 history.

“Michael has simply responded to the passion and the bond of loyalty he has for Ferrari,” says Brawn. “A passion I continue to feel myself. There is an important aspect to bear in mind; his comeback is only for a limited amount of time. We can imagine that Michael is coming back with his usual determination and seriousness, but he also wants to enjoy himself. I can’t wait to see him at work.”

“I’m convinced he will [be strong], I still remember the great race he did in Brazil in 2006. Of course it’s obvious that he has to familiarise himself with the car, but I’m sure that if he doesn’t win one of the remaining races of the season it will not be his fault, but because Ferrari is not in a winning position.”

As to his own team’s chances, Brawn highlights the fact that the team has recently lost the ability to get the tyres working and it’s chances of winning the title rest on fixing the problem,

“At the start of the season we were able to make the most of the tyres. Unexpectedly we have had problems. It’s certainly linked to some modification which we introduced during the season, and so we are analysing carefully every step we’ve made to understand what has caused this problem. This is a challenge with this year’s rules in the absence of any testing.”

An inaccurate report from AP this evening suggested that his condition was life threatening but this is not the case. The operation was successful and he is likely to be woken tomorrow.

Medical estimates of how long he will be out of action vary from two months, to longer. It has been suggested by one doctor here that he may miss the rest of the season. More will be known when the medically induced coma ends and the medics can assess the amount of bruising to the front of the brain.

The 28 year old was hit in the head by a spring which had fallen from the rear suspension of Rubens Barrichello’s Brawn car. He was on a lap heading back to the pits and was four seconds behind Barrichello on the road, when the spring became detached. It bounced down the road for four seconds and hit Massa in the head. He was briefly knocked unconscious and his feet went onto the brake and throttle simultaneously.

The data says that he applied 60bar of pressure to the brake, which is the equivalent of laying his foot on it gently, while the throttle was effectively jammed on.

Ross Brawn tonight explained that the spring was from the third damper and is made of steel and weighs around a kilogramme.

“The damper is still attached but the cap had come off and the spring escaped,” said Brawn. “I don’t know the full details but it was a freak accident.”

Brawn replaced the spring on Jenson Button’s car just in case, but Brawn said that this did not affect the balance of the car for Button’s final qualifying run.

He said that he had never experienced a spring detaching itself in all his years in F1 engineering. He added that he thought that the work done on making helmets safer had been ‘essential’ in this situation.

“In March 2008 that was offered. If I’m frank I didn’t say ‘look we are going to do this diffuser if you don’t accept this rule’ because I’m not going to tell people what we’re doing, but I explained that I felt that we should have a different set of rules to simplify what needs to be done,” he said.

“I offered them and they were rejected, so my conscience is very clear. And those rules that I put on the table would have stopped a lot of things. It would have stopped the diffuser, it would have stopped all those bargeboards around the front, and it would have cleaned the cars up.”

I’ve been told by a senior engineer from a non-trick diffuser team that Brawn came to one meeting and said, albeit not in so many words, “Look we need to change the rules here because we are going to be miles ahead next year.”

The others chuckled politely given how far back Honda were at the time. They are not chuckling now.

Several of the comments made the point that the investment required to get to F1 for an individual and his family is far greater than for a footballer. Valid point and this gives rise to a little theory about drivers I picked up through conversations with some senior engineers in the sport recently. So to move the discussion on a little I thought I would share it with you.

When interviewing Ross Brawn for the Schumacher biography I wrote in 2007, he made the observation that you can really tell with today’s young drivers that they have grown up playing computer games, Sony Playstations and so on. He said they have an intuitive feel for technology and computers and are at ease with them, noticeably more than the previous generations of drivers. This process accelerates with each new generation of children enjoying ever more sophisticated gaming experiences.

As the father to two young sons, seeing how capable they are on the Wii (FIFA 09 is currently the big hit in the Allen household) and on the PC, I can tell that kids are only going to get more adept with time. So what implications does this have for young F1 drivers?

Well clearly the star drivers of the future are likely to be far better trained and therefore more able than today’s stars and the pool of talent from which to choose the best will not be limited to the rich. Tony Purnell, the FIA’s technical consultant who is behind the proposals for cutting costs, argues that if you have £4 million and a son with some talent, you have a one in three chance of getting him into F1 by buying his way through the junior formulae in the best cars. For most it is very hard even to get past the first hurdle which is karting.

Drivers like Schumacher, Raikkonen and Hamilton came from ordinary working class families, but through unbelievable determination they were able to find backers to fund their dreams. They are the exception. Most kids whose dads are not loaded never get past the first few stages. So the drivers we get in F1 are not necessarily the best we could have had, they are just the privileged few.

Thanks to the sophistication of simulators, like the one at McLaren, and computer gaming this is all about to change. In the next few years it will be possible to evaluate and train young drivers, using gaming and simulations and this can only mean that it will make the sport much less elitist. Those who make it to the top then will truly be the best of the best. If you compare it to athletics, the standard is far higher today than 40 years ago because there is a bigger pool of talent to choose from and far more sophisticated training techniques and funds available. The same cannot be said for F1 drivers, many of whom are still the sons of wealthy men.

I’m sure you are with me so far. So then what you need to do is smooth the path by introducing more affordable, competitive racing series for them to compete in. It’s nonsense that F3 costs £600,000 a season, who can afford that? And GP2 at £1.4 million.. well you know what kind of drivers you’ll get at that price. With more low-cost racing series leading right up to F1 and the rise in simulation and gaming, it with be the wealthy also rans who drop out and the talented kids from all backgrounds who come through. We will soon be producing a whole field of Schumachers and Raikkonens and Hamiltons, not just one or two per generation.

Gaming recently overtook the Hollywood movie industry in terms of turnover as a business and this will only increase. And I reckon that from it will come a new generation of super-drivers.