Was Hamilton's Mercedes move inspired by brain or Brawn?

24Jan 2013

There are big changes behind the scenes in the Mercedes F1 garage. Ralph Ellis wonders if that's bad or good news for Lewis Hamilton's chances of another Drivers Championship...

One of the more dangerous words in sport is "but". It tends to come at the end of a statement discussing what a brilliant job somebody has done - and it normally means they won't be doing that job any longer.

Bad news this morning, it seems, for Ross Brawn as Toto Wolff, the new executive director at Mercedes, began discussing the prospects of the team's 58-year-old principal.

"I admire what Ross has done," he said. If that was followed by a full stop, then fine. Instead there was a but: "but I need to understand the structure and what Ross has done."

Given that Wolff, the man that Mercedes F1 director and racing legend Niki Lauda, is trying to poach technical director Paddy Lowe away from McLaren that can only be a signal that Brawn's time is up. The technical genius who was one step ahead of every other garage when designing the car that gave Jenson Button his 2009 world title is being shunted into the barriers.

Brawn's reward for that season, when he'd invested his own money into keeping the former Honda team alive because he knew he was on to a winner, was to make a few million by selling out to the German car giants. But now they are selling him down the river because his promises of delivering them a title winning team have not materialised. In fact he has barely even delivered a race winning team - just one Grand Prix success in three years.

Brawn's stance on that has always been that it was a work in progress, a "project" to use the favourite modern sporting term. Wolff, a 41-year-old Austrian, is moving to the Mercedes base at Brackley in Northamptonshire to be hands-on and will demand more instant results.

The big question for the Formula One world is where this all leaves Lewis Hamilton. When he made his move from McLaren to Mercedes, he said one of the driving forces in the decision was how much he was looking forward to working with Brawn. Will he be shocked by the changes. Or was that PR spin? Did he know the manoeuvres that were going on in the background?

It's a big question. I've always thought Hamilton wouldn't have moved for money alone and had to have been given promises about the quality of the team's 2013 car. It's why I've felt he was a value bet for this season's Drivers Championship - his current price is 14.0.

Hamilton was talking up his chances when he made his first visit to the company's facilities in Stuttgart at the start of this week.

"I live to win. That's what we're going to work towards and it isn't impossible," he said. That was before the changes to the management structure leaked out, but surely Hamilton must have known. Surely he or his people must have had some advance idea from Lauda when he was being courted back in the summer.

I'm working on the theory that Hamilton had been briefed, and as a result was confident about the quality of his new car and the engineering team who would be developing it. I think that makes him even better value as a long odds bet for the new season. Just beware because that sentence probably really needs a "but" at the end.