10/08/2009
NEWS STORY
Brawn GP is using the summer break to try and discover the root cause of its recent slump in form.
While the poor results in Britain and Germany can be attributed to the weather, namely the unseasonably cool conditions, the Brackley outfit is seriously concerned at it lack of competitiveness in Hungary, where conditions were widely thought to be almost ideal for the BGP 001.
However, yet again, Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello struggled, allowing Red Bull, McLaren and Ferrari to close the gap.
The reason for the poor form is mainly due to the inability of the BGP 001 to generate heat into its tyres, with some sources claiming that the operating (tyre) temperatures in Hungary were down by as much as 20 degrees.
Mystified by what is clearly a worrying drop-off in form, the Brackley team is using the summer break to work backwards in terms of its recent development and hopefully discover at what point things started to go wrong.
"It's certainly related to some modification which we've introduced during the year and so we are analysing exactly every step we've taken to understand what has caused this problem," Ross Brawn told Gazzetta dello Sport."
While most of the teams are clearly catching up, eating into his team's early season advantage, Brawn doesn't believe that this is the main reason for his outfit's slump.
"It's true that the opposition has got a lot stronger," he said, "but in the first part of the season we were getting the most out of the tyres and unexpectedly we've had problems there since."
Despite having agreed a ban on in-season testing, the Englishman admits that the inability to run the car other than on GP weekends is hurting.
"I would be more comfortable if we had been able to do some testing," he said. "But this is a challenge which the regulations impose this year."