Brawn: Ferrari, McLaren will catch up

By Jonathan Noble
Tuesday, April 7th 2009, 10:34 GMT

source : www.autosport.com

Ross Brawn thinks it inevitable that Ferrari and McLaren will recover from their disastrous start to the campaign and soon start putting his dominant team under pressure.
Jenson Button has taken victory in the first two races of the year for Brawn GP, with last year's title front-runners McLaren and Ferrari having scored just one point between them.
And although people are hailing a 'new world order' in F1 this year, Brawn is convinced that the current formbook is not indicative of how things will pan out for the rest of the season.
Instead, he believes that what is happening at the moment is simply the result of those teams who switched development onto their 2009 cars early having a head start on those that kept pushing with their 2008 machines until the end of the year.
"It is a reflection on what has gone on in the last year or two," said Brawn. "With such a big change in regulations, McLaren and Ferrari had a championship to fight and I can understand that it was very difficult for them to say, 'look we'll stop pushing this year and put our effort into next year'.
"For us it wasn't even a clever decision, it was a very easy one - we didn't have a very good car so why waste time on it? For them it was a much more difficult decision, but they are both very strong and fantastic engineering companies, so they will sort it out.
"I think they are just paying the price for winning the championship last year. Because normally you develop a car and, if you are fighting for the championship, that same car goes forward into the next championship, so you don't lose things.
"Everything they did last year for the championship was in the bin after the last race, so it was gone. We now have slick tyres and new aerodynamics, so everything they did at the end of last year they could virtually throw away."
Although Brawn is delighted by what his team has delivered in the first phase of the season, he admits the start to the year has been ‘difficult' off track – with the outfit needing to make 270 redundancies.
"It's a very unfortunate process," he explained. "Obviously it has been going on while I have been away so I have not been involved first hand in the process, but it is just very difficult.
"Especially with everyone at the factory having produced such a good car, to say to people 'We can't give you a future anymore' is very difficult. But we had over 700 people and that's not viable for us to continue at that level.
"We have treated everyone with respect and we have done everything that we can to give them a good chance of a future. We have all of our employees on the same terms and conditions as they would have got if Honda had closed the company.
"They were fairly reasonable, and certainly above statutory, but they deserved it. They have done a great job, it is just a shame that we can't justify keeping so many people.
"So it is a very difficult period. Just now try to look forward and put that side behind us and try and build the company for the future. I think in reality if we had kept 700 people we wouldn't have been around very long, it just was impossible."