Ross Brawn: “Creating the right foundations”

During this week of testing, he set up his office in a small room in the Barcelona control tower. He receives a lot but rarely goes into the paddock.

He knows that he is at the center of all conversations, that his appointment to the position of sporting and technical director of the Group F1 is as appreciated as it is feared, that he inherits an F1 at a crossroads, more than ever torn between its desire to remain the hi-tech formula that it is, and the spectator sport that it is. more.

Ross Brawn, who has known everything about F1, the victory and the defeat, the pomp and the difficult ends of the month, knows better than anyone that the premier discipline must reinvent itself. Question of prosperity, but also of survival.

How are you going to judge what is good or bad in this very contradictory F1 where the fans want tight grids but also differences in performance to overtake, cars which pass quickly in corners with strong downforce but which can follow each other with close…

You are right, what we need is complex and that is why it is important not to rush. We need time to evolve. You must first create the right foundations, and then take care of them. By good foundations, I mean less difference between the top and bottom of the grid than there is right now.

The real question is: what are the things we need to focus on in the future to move in a different direction? Resource dependence is one of the areas we need to explore. Should we move towards a capped budget or towards a series of technical constraints? Maybe a combination of both.

We must reduce the importance of money in the performance of single-seaters because this is the current direction of F1. What we want is to try to raise the overall level of the grid without using artifice...

Find the full interview with Ross Brawn, in issue 2105 of AUTOhebdo, available now in digital version and on newsstands.