It is no secret that I have been nutty about motorsport all my life. In the late 1960s, my dad would take me to watch races at the Oulton Park circuit in Cheshire. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, I was intermittently competing myself – with little talent or success – in Formula Vee and Sports 2000 racing with the 750 Motor Club. Following my election to Parliament, I competed in a House of Commons v House of Lords motor race that used to take place annually at Brands Hatch and, later, at Donington Park. In 1994 I even won it.
At a more serious level, as Chair of the Parliamentary All Party Motor Group and advisor to the Sports Minister, I worked to increase understanding amongst MPs and government ministers of the contribution that the motorsport industry makes to the UK economy and its potential to catalyse technological innovation in sectors well beyond racing and automotive more generally.
No surprise, then, that I am currently glued to the four-part docuseries Brawn: The Impossible Formula 1 Story, which is being screened on BBC Two.
Hosted by Keanu Reeves, it tells the remarkable and true story of how Nick Fry and Ross Brawn defied all the odds to keep what had been the works Honda F1 team in business after the famous Japanese car company decided to close it down in response to the 2008 financial crash. Not only did what became Brawn GP survive but it then won the Formula One World Championship with Jenson Button – all on a shoestring budget compared to its competitors.
Taken over by Mercedes the following year, it went on to become one of the most successful F1 teams in history, taking Lewis Hamilton to all but one of his seven world championships.
But Brawn: the Impossible Formula 1 Story is not just for motorsport nuts like me. It has potential to appeal to people who have no interest in either Formula One or motor racing in general. It is an inspirational story of how a group of people succeeded against all the odds by a combination of commitment, teamwork and sheer audacity. The characters who appear throughout the story – those directly involved in or supportive of Brawn and those who tried to derail them – are as colourful as those you would find in any fictional thriller. But they happen to be real. It’s an addictive series that you really should not miss.
For me it brings back special personal memories, as someone who was around at the time, albeit with no more than a brief cameo role in what happened.
I had known Nick Fry since the mid noughties when he was Managing Director of Honda’s F1 team, based in Brackley, just down the road from Silverstone circuit. In fact, I had seen him just three weeks before the start of the dramatic events chronicled in the TV series. He and his wife Kate were at an election night party hosted by the US embassy in London on November 4th, 2008. Kate is American and it is not giving away any secrets to share that all three of us were hoping to see the young senator from Illinois called Barack Obama elected as President of the USA. We got our wish there but none of us had any idea about the bombshell that Honda was about to drop on Nick and around 700 other Honda employees on this side of the Atlantic.
Fast forward to the first week of December. I was at Brackley at Nick’s invitation with a group of MPs and peers to see Honda’s F1 factory and the state-of-the art engineering work going on there. Soon after we got there, Nick asked if he could have a confidential word with me in his office. That is when he told me. Very few people yet knew it but Honda bosses had just informed him and Team Principal, Ross Brawn, that they were pulling out of F1 entirely and that they had decided to close the Brackley operation with virtually immediate effect.
Nick told me that they had already known Honda – like all major car companies – was being hit hard by the financial crash. He and Ross had been expecting a big cut in the F1 budget for the coming 2009 season. They had not expected summary closure. When told the news, they had pressed Honda bosses to be allowed time to find a buyer; time to avoid the closure of the plant with the loss of 700 jobs directly and probably more in their supply chain. In response, Honda gave them one month to find a buyer and three months to make all 700 staff redundant assuming no buyer could be identified.
I said I would brief ministers and ask them to emphasise to Honda, whether directly or through officials in the UK and Japan, the importance that the UK government attached to the F1 operation in Brackley and that ministers supported the search for alternatives to closure.
I duly did so privately and, after the news of Honda’s withdrawal had become public, I continued lobbying more openly, including raising, during a Commons debate in December on the UK automotive industry, the importance of Honda giving Nick, Ross and their team the time they needed to find a solution that could prevent Brackley being lost from the UK’s industrial base.
I was in touch with Nick several times over the frantic weeks for him that followed Honda’s announcement. He made sure that I was supplied with the information I needed to brief ministers about how things were going and how they could help.
In the event, despite a number of avenues being explored, no viable external buyer for the Brackley F1 team was found. That is when Nick, Ross and their team achieved the impossible in securing the management buy-out that is chronicled in the TV series.
One of the keys to their being able to pull it off was getting Honda to move beyond the one month deadline that they had given Nick and Ross in the last week of November. Another was convincing the company to make a significant (if modest in F1 terms) contribution to the 2009 running costs of the new Brawn GP team.
A 2.00am phone call from Nick to the UK Embassy in Tokyo prompted direct official representations to Honda’s top management in early 2009 and helped achieve those things.
Nick was already connected into Whitehall well before the crisis hit Brackley, having personally helped with a number of trade promotion initiatives. He and Ross had also presented to the government’s Technology Strategy Board as recently as October 2008 on the opportunities that F1 offered for collaboration with higher education and technology transfer to industries as diverse as aerospace and medical.
They and their colleagues at Brackley were the ones who pulled off the impossible. Ross Brawn’s leadership and reputation for technical brilliance were pivotal, as were the incredible efforts of the Brackley team to build a car to compete in – and win – the F1 World Championship in just a few weeks. Nick Fry’s drive, commercial acumen and direct contacts with government officials were also vital in enabling it all to happen.
As I said earlier, my role in the whole thing was no more than a bit part at the start of the Brawn GP journey. But it was an amazing story to have been close to at the time and it is something I will never forget.
Brawn: The Impossible Formula 1 Story was originally screened by Disney+ last year. The first episode was broadcast on BBC Two last night (Sunday 17 November) and all episodes are available on iPlayer.
You can also read the whole story in Survive. Drive. Win by Nick Fry with Ed Gorman, published by Atlantic Books.
