The Brawn GP team celebrated their 1-2 finish at the Australian Grand Prix by announcing redundancies across their outfit totalling some 270 jobs. But on the bright side, Jenson Button revealed that there is more to come from the team.
The job cuts were announced by the team's CEO Nick Fry, and although shambolically poorly-timed, the redundancies are not a major surprise. With the ban on in-season testing and cost-cutting measures being thrown around Formula One at the moment, just about every team on the grid has either already announced similar measures, or is likely to in the future. The move will see the team's staff levels reduced by around a third, which would bring them back to the sort of levels supported before the team, then BAR, was bought out by the megabucks job creators at Honda.
"We are about 700 people at the moment and we talked to the staff about going down to about 430, something like that, which is where we were in 2004," Fry explained to Reuters, presumably still smiling inanely despite the content of the announcement, "It's very unfortunate that we've got to do that but it's the change of technical regulations and obviously we are now a private team."
The unfortunate employees destined for humbling trips to the Job Centre in the not-too distant future can take some solace in the fact that they're leaving behind a team predicting even greater things for the rest of the season. Or perhaps they won't.
Nevertheless, Jenson Button asserted that the team can get better after the near-perfect start to Brawn GP's time in F1.
"I am looking forward to getting back in the car and building it into something even more special, because we are not there yet," Button smugged towards Autosport, "It is not perfect and we didn't get the best out of it this weekend.
"I won the race, but our pitstops, I lost six seconds at the second pitstop. So we have a few areas we are weak in and that was always going to be the case because we haven't done any testing, so it has been very, very difficult for everyone to be perfect."
The mistake at the final pitstop was put down to a lack of chance for the team to practice extensively, and was indeed an area highlighted by Ross Brawn on the grid prior to the race as being a potential area where the team were underprepared.
Button did temper expectations ahead of the Malaysian Grand Prix at the weekend, saying that he expected teams to close the gap to the pacesetting Brawn as the season progressed.
"You would say we are going to be competitive, but it is a question of who else is going to be up there with us," he said, "I think people will start to make big leaps forward. I don't know if it is going to be at the fly away races, but when we get back to Barcelona people will have new aero packages and they will be on our arses.
"So we need to make the most of this and get the best out of everything, which we haven't quite done. But it is nice to have had not quite a perfect weekend and come away with a pole position and a win."
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