This photograph is from the mid-2000s — 2004, give or take a season — not last year. The car gives it away. Lucky Strike on the sidepods, Honda on the nose, BARf1.com on the engine cover. I am standing in the BAR factory at Brackley, which is the Mercedes Formula 1 works now, trying not to lean on anything expensive.
I was CFO for the commercial rights holders of the World Rally Championship. David Richards was chair of ISC, and through Prodrive he was team principal of BAR. He invited me in as his guest. We watched the Japanese Grand Prix from the factory. The drivers that year were Jenson Button and Takuma Sato.
Jenson later won the world championship with the same team after it re-emerged as Brawn in 2009. Same factory, same spine of people, different name on the door. Formula 1 does that.
The car in the lobby
Show-car or spare, it hardly matters. It is a BAR Honda of the Lucky Strike years — the last moment a cigarette brand could still shout from the bodywork. Sato was the Japanese driver; Button was already the one the factory believed in. Standing next to the rear wheel, you get the scale that television flattens: the tyre is a piece of furniture, the wishbones look like they were drawn with a scalpel.
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A WRC finance man in an F1 factory
ISC held the World Rally Championship commercial rights. Rallying was the day job. Brackley was a guest pass. David had already run a grand prix team before BAR — he was chief executive at Benetton Formula — and Prodrive was the thread through all of it. I did not go there to play team principal. I went because the invitation was rare, and because a Japanese Grand Prix on the factory screens — with one of the cars in the building — is not a meeting you decline.
What happened next
Honda took the team over. Then Honda left. Ross Brawn’s double-diffuser winter produced a world champion in Jenson and a constructors’ title in a car that had been a Honda a few months earlier. Mercedes bought the team. If you drive past Brackley now you would not guess Lucky Strike was ever on the wall.
I later became CFO of the Virgin/Marussia Formula 1 team. That is another story, and a harder one. This picture is the earlier chapter: a WRC finance director, a borrowed afternoon, and a Honda-powered car that still looks fast standing still.
If you know the print, you will also know it has spent years slightly the wrong way up on a shelf. It is the right way up here.