...to newly-crowned World (well, Formula One) Driving Champion Jenson Button, and the entire Brawn team for winning the Constructors' Championship as well.
In their first season as a team? Remarkable.
The story has been well-told, both right here in Wheels and elsewhere, but that doesn't diminish the enormity of what they have accomplished.
A few short weeks before the season started, team owners Honda decided to pull out of the series. I had dinner just this evening with Takanobu Ito, president and CEO of Honda Motor Corporation (name-dropper, name-dropper) and as much as he loves motorsport, he said that at the time it was absolutely the right thing to do, and he has no regrets. His first obligation is to the company, and in the financial situation Honda found itself at the time, no other decision was viable.
Honda did pull off some as-yet undetailed financial fiddle that allowed team manager Ross Brawn to continue to operate the team with a somewhat reduced staff and, of course, no engine.
Brawn - one of the most impressive people it has ever been my pleasure to meet, at last year's Montreal Grand Prix (name-dropper, name-dropper) - somehow convinced Mercedes-Benz to sell him some engines, stitched together a team, and proceeded to blow the field away during the early part of the season, starting with a one-two qualifying and finish at the first race in Australia.
Button piled up an (as it turned out) insurmountable lead in the first half of the season, and while he seemed to have lost the plot at that halfway point, generally being out-driven by his older teammate Ruebens Barrichello, Button still snagged a point here and a couple of points there until clinching the title with that fifth place in Brazil.
Prior to this year, many thought Button was already yesterday's man. He came onto the scene in a blaze of glory as a very young man, but seemed to succumb to the mythic lifestyle of Formula One racing.
The steady and sometimes firm hand of Ross Brawn seemed to do the trick, and Button, always smooth, never seeming to be that fast yet also pretty easy on his car, has rewarded that nurturing.
Mercedes-Benz racing boss Norbert Haug put an interesting spin on the results, noting that for the second year in a row, an Englishman driving car number 22 with a Mercedes-Benz engine finished fifth in Brazil to win the world title. Last year of course it was Lewis Hamilton in the McLaren, except in that case Hamilton had to snatch fifth on the very last corner of the race - the very last corner of the entire season - to secure his title. Button still had another race to go in Abu Dhabi, if he needed it.
He didn't.
Credit must also go to the largely forgotten Honda. Obviously, the team was a lot stronger than its results up until this year had indicated. Brawn himself told me at that Montreal dinner last year that he had been very surprised at the calibre of people that were in place when he arrived. He likened his role to that of a symphony conductor who 'simply' had to get all those talented people on the same page, and turn them into a real team instead of a collection of sub-optimizing individuals.
Mission accomplished.
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