Talisman wrote: ↑28 Mar 2018, 22:02
They bought Brawn on the basis that the team would not cost a penny to run once sponsorship and prize money had been taken into account.
That was how Brawn operated in 2009, when they had transition funding from Honda, and only a couple of small commercial sponsors. In order to balance the books, Brawn let a lot of staff go, but expected to remain competitive because of the Resource Restriction Agreement (RRA) that all of the teams had supposedly agreed to.
Therefore their total F1 budget didn't increase after buying Brawn compared to previously where they developed and supplied a PU for McLaren and gave them cash just like Honda did with Woking. A large amount of the budget, far more than in Honda/Brawn days went on drivers, or rather Michael Schumacher, meaning that the car was actually developed on a moderate budget hence the poor initial results.
In interviews with Ross Brawn, he explained that when Mercedes bought Brawn, they expected the team to remain competitive because Brawn had operated in the 2009 season with a level of staffing that matched the RRA, and other teams were expected to downsize to comply with the RRA. It soon became clear that due to the collapse of FOTA, the RRA was also disappearing. Now the new Mercedes team had to go staff up again, having let good people go, in order to stay competitive.
