I’m backing Brawn-again Jenson to be on the button

Matthew Norman
27 Mar 2009

You wouldn't believe it but with the season's opening Grand Prix still two days away, the first pair of practice sessions barely concluded, and Murray Walker yet to cement his BBC comeback with a trademark Colemanballs entry, already the inaugural Formula One legal wrangle of the year is under way.

Actually you would believe it, because no sport on the planet invests more time and energy in litigating matters that utterly bemuse those of us without Harvard degrees in mechanical engineering and computer telemetry.

Now and again, it's true, legal matters involving the titans of motor racing are less opaque.

Take Max Mosley, as an earlier Max (Miller: music hall's greatest star when Mosley's dad was overdoing it a bit on the fascist front) might have put it. Take him into a very private room, in fact, and reward him with a damn good thrashing for keeping F1 in our hearts and minds during its winter break with his campaign for privacy legislation.

As for Bernie Ecclestone, he's had a lively close season himself.

Little Bern maintained the air of farce that clings to the sport with his ambition to turn the drivers' championship into an event won not by points accrued but the number of victories - a masterplan brilliantly designed to avoid repetition of the astonishing melodrama that climaxed last season, when with seconds to spare Lewis Hamilton overtook Timo Glock to secure the title with a lowly fifth place in Brazil.

Bernie assures us that this change has merely been postponed for a year but even he will surely come to accept that ensuring the title is decided with half-a-dozen races left isn't a great idea and quietly let this lunacy drop.

Other developments intended to inject more thrills have come to pass, however, and it is one of these that will be exciting the lawyers.

There's a new kid on the grid this year, romantically named Brawn GP after owner Ross Brawn, who took over the Honda team he led in a management buyout, and it is petrifying the opposition.

Frankly, it's terrifying me too, because it's hard to overstate how unnerving the following fact is.

The bookie's favourite to win in Australia is a British driver but it isn't Lewis Hamilton.

On this morning's evidence, his McLaren has half the pace of the 1957 Morris Minor - a vehicle ritually overtaken by golf buggies, wheelchairs and escaped tortoises - in which I learnt to drive. This is why Lewis is making menacing noises about welcoming offers from other teams.

No, the favourite for Melbourne is . . . the favourite for Melb . . . the favou . . . sorry, my typing fingers are paralysed by disbelief. Let me have a nerve-steadying swig from the Courvoisier bottle, and try again.

Right. The bookie's current favourite, in a very tight betting market, is Jenson Button. Yup, that's the Jenson Button who has won a single race in his nine-year F1 career, and hasn't wasted perfectly decent champagne from a podium since 2006. Doubts may linger about the speed of Jenson's brain but so quick was his Brawn in Spain recently that he's been hotly fancied ever since, and this confidence was at least partly justified by him posting today's fifth quickest time.

That legal challenge, which seems certain to ensue after Max's FIA rejected yesterday's protest, concerns the "rear diffuser" used by Brawn and two other teams.

This is not, as you might assume, a medieval instrument of torture applied to the buttocks by Max's lady friends, but something low down at the back of the car that drastically improves grip, down force, aerodynamic performance, or something or other quite different (I hope this isn't too technical).

There are other changes, mostly intended to make overtaking easier, which explain the surreal look to this morning's practice, in which our world champion came 18th out of 20 in the second session, and the two Ferraris finished in mid-division.

But this is the one causing the contention and if it can flip the form book to the extent that Button is a pre-race favourite, who can blame them for being suspicious?

Myself, I will be rising before dawn on the Sabbath in the fervent hope that Jenson pulls it off. We all love a trier, and few British sportsman have been as trying as he has.

As for Lewis, we also wish him well in his McLaren Morris Minor 1000. If he is still on lap 11 when the chequered flag is waved, let him be consoled by this thought.

However miserable his race, however intense the humiliation of being lapped by the safety car, at least he didn't have to do what I did on cold mornings, dishcloth wound around wrist as protection against the kick back of the iron bar, and crank-start the truculent little bugger himself.