Brawn: Honda must wait until 2009 to win

By Phil Huff
June 29 2006

Ferrari's technical director Ross Brawn feels that Honda's move to oust Geoffrey Willis will make life harder for the team, putting that first race win off until at least 2009.

"A technical change takes three years to settle down," said Brawn in Montreal. "If you make major changes to the technical team in my view, it's three years before you see the result. It takes one year to understand what's happening, a second year to change things and a third year to get the results. I don't know Honda's structure, but if someone asked me to go into an organisation, I think realistically it would be a three-year time scale."

With first hand experience of rebuilding a team, and arguably more experience of winning races than any other technical boss, Brawn's words shouldn't be taken lightly. One key element that he helped introduce at Ferrari is consistency - the same skilled staff, developing together, year on year, and that's been a vital key to the recent Ferrari success.

"I don't really know what happened," added Brawn. "They [Honda] wanted to take the team in a different direction but I don't know enough about it. Any person who is secure in their job in F1 is the one who is winning. And all the rest of us? Well, that's the nature of the business.

"You have to have a balance, you have to decide between making any changes, against consistency. Ferrari have been great as even in difficult times our president has always supported the team and taken the view that they want consistency."