Brawn GP Sandbagging - Let's Hope So!

The rumours flying around at the moment is that Brawn GP is seriously quicker than other cars on the grid, but is being careful about showing this pace.

A ‘senior source’ within the company has told the Guardian the team chose not to show its full hand and had speed in reserve.

“I think, basically, that if someone is two-tenths off us they can feasibly win the race but, if we’re half a second in front, which is probably where we are at the moment, although we don’t necessarily look like that, it is just foolish to just annihilate people all the time,” he said.

Although Button pulled out a four-second lead on the opening lap in Melbourne, Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel was in contention by keeping the gap down and BMW believe their driver, Robert Kubica, would have won the race if he had not crashed out.

The Brawn GP source denied this and said “I think we have a little bit in the bag.“We’ve got good stuff coming and I think we have reason to be confident.” he said

The diffuser row is the only thing hanging over Brawn GP at the moment, with an appeal set for April 14th. If they lose the right to use the diffuser will all the advantage for BGP disappear? Not according the secret squirrel from BGP. “The visual bits are not really the performance drivers; it’s all the surfaces you can’t see that give you the real performance,” he said.

“One of the good things about the Brawn car is that competitors will look at all of it and say, ‘That’s the bit that’s making it fast.’

“But it is not necessarily one thing; they could be focusing on something that is not really a big performance driver.”

With Honda writing of the 2008 season, their designers had been working on the car long before other teams and completed the initial design several momths before anyone else. This gave the team confidence of the car's ability early on in testing.

“We were looking at everybody else’s times asking why were they all so slow,” he said.

“Our research was telling us we would be the quickest car.”

And will the other teams catch Brawn GP ?

“We’ve still got a lot in the bag,” said the source

“The other teams will come back at us very hard over the season, but, long-term, Brawn will be a force in the top three – certainly while these regulations are stable and the budget cap remains.”