MRF1

Ross Brawn had a year off, back in 2007. After helping mastermind Ferrari’s imperial championship run, he elected to hang up his headphones and strolled away from the pit lane. His public persona is avuncular, a perception that’s backed up by his love of fishing and gardening. It was time for a rest and reset.

But as good as he is at catching salmon, Brawn is also a master when it comes to dealing with Formula One’s piranhas. Few if any people have survived and thrived at F1’s pointiest end as successfully as Brawn, and now he’s guiding the sport’s entire destiny. A former apprentice who was hired by Patrick Head as a milling machinist for Williams in 1978, he worked his way through the ranks in Eighties F1 (not to mention co-designing the 1991 world sports car championship-winning Jaguar XJR-14), before landing the role of technical director for Benetton. His arrival coincided with Michael Schumacher’s. It went pretty well.

The rest you probably know. He moved to Maranello for the 1997 season, and together with Jean Todt, Rory Byrne, Nigel Stepney and Schumacher, was instrumental in ending Ferrari’s lengthy F1 championship drought. There were six consecutive constructor’s titles and five driver’s championships, from 1999 until 2005, Brawn’s implacable strategic genius as crucial to the Maranello steamroller as the car and the man behind the wheel. When he returned to the paddock after the sabbatical, it was as team principal of Honda, only for the wheels to come off that project in the immediate wake of