Of course,\u00a0there\u2019s\u00a0a \u2018but\u2019 coming. The BGP 001\u00a0wasn\u2019t\u00a0an accidental flash of genius, or the product of a vastly experienced driver arriving in the design office, leaning over the technical director\u2019s CAD\u00a0terminal\u00a0and suggesting a few tweaks to a hitherto\u00a0uncompetitive machine. It was among the most expensive F1 cars of all time, a\u00a0portmanteau of the work of three separate design teams working across three wind tunnels, with a consummate technical manager cherry-picking the smartest concepts.\u00a0It almost never saw\u00a0action\u00a0but circumstances aligned for it to make a surprising competitive emergence.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Read Also:<\/p>\n
The overtaking emergency\u00a0<\/p>\n
As the 2009 regulations came into force, the global economy was vanishing down the U-bend and F1 found itself plunged into crisis. But when the fundamentals of the new\u00a0rules were first formulated in 2006, the majority view was that lack of overtaking was the critical problem rather than commercial sustainability. FIA president Max Mosley had long championed the cause of reducing costs but the competitors, flush with money as road car manufacturers replaced tobacco sponsors as key investors, had little appetite.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Indeed, during an interview with this author, BMW team principal Mario Theissen had responded to questions about the putative budget cap \u2013 another idea Mosley was trying to force through \u2013 with a dismissive shake of the head: \u201cIt\u2019ll never happen\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/race-winner-jenson-button-braw.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
The 2009 regulations were a response to improve overtaking in F1 primarily, but they didn’t deliver as hoped<\/p>\n
Photo by: Getty Images<\/p>\n
Since Ayrton Senna\u2019s death in 1994, the FIA under Mosley had consistently tried to put the brakes on car performance as a complement to its\u00a0programme\u00a0of improvements to car and circuit safety. But while the latter was underpinned by considerable scientific\u00a0rigour, the attempts to limit speeds and lap times betrayed Mosley\u2019s limited\u00a0understanding of technical matters.<\/p>\n
The 2009 regulations represented a tacit admission that many of the blunt-force instruments used to slow the cars down had damaged the spectacle: \u2018grooved\u2019\u00a0tyres\u00a0were too prone to graining; and higher, narrower front wings were more sensitive to wake turbulence from the cars ahead, preventing drivers from getting close enough through corners to attack.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Not that this was the public message, of course. The narrative at the time was that\u00a0excessive aerodynamic complication was the root of the problem, so the proposed solution \u2013 formulated by the newly created Overtaking Working Group \u2013 was to strip the cars of the elaborate flow conditioners that they were sprouting across\u00a0seemingly every\u00a0available surface.<\/p>\n
KERS, meanwhile, had been inadequately thought through and at most circuits the additional performance \u2013 equivalent to 80bhp, limited to 6.6 seconds per lap \u2013\u00a0wasn\u2019t\u00a0worth the weight of the motor,\u00a0batteries\u00a0and associated hardware<\/p>\n
In tandem, the front wings would be lower and wider, while the rear wings would be higher and narrower, and the diffusers smaller and simpler, the idea being to reduce wake turbulence as well as downforce. Flaps on the front wings could also be adjusted by the driver to reduce drag on the straights, while hybrid technology arrived for the first time in the form of Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems (KERS), which harvested energy from a motor on the rear axle and stored it in a battery for redeployment at the push of a button.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ironically, perhaps, these attempts to\u00a0eliminate\u00a0the unforeseen consequences of\u00a0previous\u00a0interventions came with their own unexpected effects. In\u00a0practice\u00a0the adjustable front wings, limited to six degrees of articulation, were useless in terms of defeating drag, and only served the purpose of changing aero balance as the fuel load went down. KERS, meanwhile, had been inadequately thought through and at most circuits the additional performance \u2013 equivalent to 80bhp, limited to 6.6 seconds per lap \u2013\u00a0wasn\u2019t\u00a0worth the weight of the motor,\u00a0batteries\u00a0and associated hardware.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Those teams who had committed to KERS, either as a philosophy (BMW) or for pure technical reasons (Ferrari<\/a>, for instance, buried the hardware deep within its chassis, so it\u00a0couldn\u2019t\u00a0easily abandon the concept) therefore had a baked-in disadvantage. And this was all before the effects of the global financial meltdown, which had begun in mid-2007, finally crashed into F1 in December 2008.<\/p>\n Honda has a disaster car and chose to sell – or close – its F1 team at the end of 2008 as the financial crisis hit<\/p>\n Photo by: Christopher Lee \/ Getty Images<\/p>\n The money emergency\u00a0<\/p>\n In a complex series of transactions in the mid-2000s, Honda had first\u00a0acquired\u00a0a minority stake in the British American Racing team for a reported $180million, then converted it to a full shareholding. The complication was necessary because British American Tobacco, which had bankrolled the acquisition of the struggling Tyrrell team in 1998 as part of a consortium involving the\u00a0Brackley-based race car constructor Reynard and Jacques Villeneuve<\/a>\u2019s manager Craig Pollock, wanted to divest itself of the other\u00a0minor shareholders first, blaming them for the team\u2019s competitive struggles and\u00a0substantial debts. In 2001 it brought\u00a0Prodrive\u00a0magnate David Richards in to turn the team around, and by 2005 Honda was enthusiastic enough about the\u00a0state of affairs\u00a0that it was prepared to buy the team outright.<\/p>\n Thereafter, competitiveness slumped as it installed its own people in key technical positions despite their inexperience in F1 car engineering. Hiring former Ferrari technical director Ross Brawn as team principal ahead of the 2008 season was a\u00a0prudent means of initiating a course-correction, but it was going to take time: a cursory glance over the 2008 car was all it took for Brawn to decide it was a basket case, and that resource would be better expended focusing on the incoming regulations for 2009.\u00a0<\/p>\n The resource involved was huge. While the 2008 season unfolded miserably for Honda, requiring much expectation-management by Brawn, no fewer than three design teams were picking over the new rulebook in search of loopholes: Honda\u2019s own engineers in\u00a0Brackley; those of the former Super\u00a0Aguri\u00a0team, a satellite operation recently shuttered\u00a0by Honda; and a third group at Honda\u2019s Sakura R&D facility in Japan.<\/p>\n It was a young engineer at Sakura who\u00a0identified\u00a0the loophole in the wording of the diffuser regulations, at first thinking that because English was his second language he had simply made a mistake in translation. But no \u2013 the prescriptions were chiefly two-dimensional, describing the volume as viewed from below. It would be perfectly legal, according to the letter of the law, to have a secondary diffuser volume above the first, fed via gaps that were effectively invisible when examined from the position laid out in the rulebook.\u00a0<\/p>\n But by late 2008 Honda, in common with many other car manufacturers, had a problem it\u00a0couldn\u2019t\u00a0resolve easily: vast inventory of unsold stock as consumers, starved of credit \u2013 or now out of work \u2013 stopped buying. On Friday 5 December, at a press conference in Tokyo, Honda CEO Takeo Fukui announced that the company was withdrawing from F1\u00a0immediately. The team would be sold \u2013 or closed.<\/p>\n Three months of limbo then ensued as Brawn and CEO Nick Fry cast\u00a0about for\u00a0potential purchasers, of which there were many \u2013 but\u00a0rather fewer\u00a0were serious or had the money to keep the team going beyond the nominal \u00a31 Honda was asking. Among the\u00a0distressed-asset\u00a0grifters circling was a potential investor who presented as the scion of a billionaire\u00a0dynasty, and\u00a0arrived in an ex-military helicopter; it turned out his father\u00a0actually washed\u00a0dishes in a restaurant in Hammersmith. Months later, BMW almost went down a similar route when it came close to selling its team to convicted fraudster Russell King.<\/p>\n Having kissed plenty of frogs, to no avail, Brawn and Fry engineered a management buy-out via a parachute payment from Honda and a tacit loan from F1 \u2018ringmaster\u2019 Bernie Ecclestone. McLaren<\/a> COO Martin Whitmarsh, at the time\u00a0organising\u00a0the Formula One Teams Association (FOTA) to take on Mosley on the political front,\u00a0facilitated\u00a0a supply of Mercedes engines. He would come to rue his benevolence.\u00a0<\/p>\n With Mercedes power and a rescue package, Brawn could seize its moment<\/p>\n Photo by: Darren Heath – Getty Images<\/p>\n Retrofitting the car, now known as the BGP 001, with the Mercedes V8 entailed a certain amount of engineering compromise around the rear \u2013 but\u00a0perhaps was\u00a0for the best,\u00a0since the Honda engine it replaced was both heavier and thirstier. Then as now (since Aston Martin\u2019s Honda power unit is\u00a0reportedly up\u00a0to 15kg overweight), the company\u2019s engineers tended to focus on horsepower rather than taking a holistic view of performance.\u00a0<\/p>\n Double-diffuser jeopardy\u00a0<\/p>\n Brawn arrived late for testing and\u00a0immediately\u00a0blew away its rivals\u2019 lap times. In hindsight it should have\u00a0sandbagged, since\u00a0its pace unleashed a\u00a0furore. Williams<\/a> and Toyota had also\u00a0identified\u00a0the\u00a0loophole\u00a0and their cars sported double-volume diffusers,\u00a0but rivals had\u00a0largely greeted\u00a0these with a raise of the eyebrow. Now, though, it was not only a massive\u00a0issue,\u00a0it was\u00a0very much the only show in town.\u00a0<\/p>\n Amid much wailing and gnashing of teeth, the double-diffuser concept was ruled legal, albeit to be banned\u00a0at a later date.\u00a0Red Bull technical director Adrian Newey has said more than once that he believes this was simply a case of Mosley vindictively punishing McLaren and Ferrari for challenging his power via FOTA. Whatever \u2013 the other teams now had to imitate the\u00a0development,\u00a0a process made difficult or even impossible given the presence of hard points such as the gearbox in that area.\u00a0<\/p>\n Having been forced to make large-scale redundancies, Brawn could add little development to the car through the season; Jenson Button won six of the seven opening rounds, then stood on the podium on only two further\u00a0occasions as he frantically held on to his championship lead<\/p>\n Rose-tinted storytelling has tended to overstate the importance of the double diffuser.\u00a0In itself it\u00a0wasn\u2019t\u00a0a \u2018magic bullet\u2019 worth huge swathes of lap time, but what it did do was not only bring the downforce generated in that area closer to 2008 levels \u2013 and solve a problem created by the \u2018legal\u2019 diffusers being prone to stalling. This\u00a0opened up\u00a0a beneficial series of development opportunities\u00a0all across\u00a0the car. The BGP 001 also had a more mature front wing design, making the most of the new width to \u2018outwash\u2019 air around the front wheels.\u00a0<\/p>\n Rivals quickly caught on and caught up, although it would be mid-season before a KERS-equipped car would win a grand prix, when McLaren introduced a new floor and Lewis Hamilton<\/a> won in Hungary. Having been forced to make large-scale redundancies, Brawn could add little development to the car through the season; Jenson Button won six of the seven opening rounds, then stood on the podium on only two further\u00a0occasions as he frantically held on to his championship lead.\u00a0<\/p>\n Read Also:<\/p>\n The consequences of this season would ripple on and on. Although Brawn sold his eponymous team to Mercedes, it took several seasons to rebuild and restructure after\u00a0its enforced downsizing, by which time the board had lost\u00a0patience\u00a0and Brawn was\u00a0\u00a0 This article is one of many in the monthly Autosport magazine. For more premium content, take a look at the April 2026 issue and\u00a0subscribe today<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n A drivers’ and constructors’ title double for a new team – unlikely to ever be repeated in F1 again<\/p>\n Photo by: FIA<\/p>\n We want to hear from you!<\/p>\n Let us know what you would like to see from us in the future.<\/p>\n![\"Honda](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/jenson-button-honda-racing.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"With](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/jenson-button-brawn-bgp-001.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
forced out.\u00a0Outwashing\u00a0front wings, meanwhile, made overtaking harder rather than easier since the cars now left an even more turbulent wake. The 2009 formula, altogether, was an appalling bust.\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/jenson-button-brawn-gp-ross-br.jpg\")
<\/p>\n