A FEW years ago Rockydirector Sylvester Stallone spent months shadowing the Formula One circus in the hope that the sport would provide the material from which he could construct a summer blockbuster.
Something like Rockyperhaps, in which a kid from the wrong side of the tracks overcomes obstacles and ultimately triumphs over adversity.
The machine-like era of Schumacher didn't offer much material, so Stallone retreated to the US to make the thoroughly awful Champ Car movie Driven. Maybe he should have stuck around a bit longer.
Last weekend in Australia Brawn GP delivered a story straight out of the Rockyschool of scriptwriting. Take a team on its knees, add two drivers cast aside by an unforgiving sport, mix with a sprinkling of engineering cleverness and wait for the sparks to fly.
Six weeks before the start of the season, no-one was giving Brawn a prayer. Honda had walked out on the 700-strong workforce, the credit crunch spooking the manufacturer into bolting from a sport into which it had ploughed something in the region of €170m during the 2008 season.
Deep into February and the search for a buyer for the team was proving fruitless.
It was left to the management to effect a buy-out – the least and least appealing of all the options. The patronage of billionaires bestows some level of security, the ownership of engineers and F1 politicos does not.
So when Brawn arrived at their first pre-season test in Barcelona just two weeks before the trek to Australia there was little hope that the team would do more than trawl around at the rear of the field.
So when Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello, two drivers written off by many, set blistering times and sent the old order of McLaren and Ferrari plummeting down the timesheets, the seeds of a remarkable story were sown.
In Melbourne they blossomed. Button and Barichello locked out the front row in qualifying, with no other car on the grid coming close to matching their times. And in the race Button was imperious, leading from lights to flag. Not even a catalogue of race mishaps for Barrichello could upset the script.
He stalled on the grid, got involved in not one, but two collisions and still managed to claim second, after Red Bull Racing’s Sebastian Vettel and BMW-Sauber’s Robert Kubica crashed out three laps from home.
It was the first one-two for a debutant team in 55 years. Sports stories don’t come more Lazarus-like.
But what happens now? Is this the first chapter in a season-long fairytale or is it, like so many sporting comebacks just a single bright spike on an otherwise downward trajectory.
Team owner Ross Brawn is hopeful. “It is just the beginning for us, but it wasn’t a perfect race by any means, so we will learn from today and continue to improve,” he said in the aftermath of the race.
That development will cost and at the moment funds are thin on the ground. Almost as soon as the race victory was scored the team announced that it would soon shed some 270 staff from its workforce of 700.
It was different message to that of Saturday morning in Melbourne when Virgin boss Richard Branson had flown in to announce a major sponsorship deal. That had seemed like the great escape, Branson arriving like the piece’s fairy godmother, to bestow good fortune and wishes on the new outfit.
The truth is that the deal is more limited. Rumours are pegging Virgin’s involvement at £250,000 per race – a relatively small sum for Formula One.
Branson offered a ray of hope in the glow of victory.
“It’s a case of watch this space, I think,” he said after the win. “Theyve certainly got me addicted so it’d be a good time to sit me down and have a word about upping my interest.”
Brawn is a wily campaigner, haven taken Michael Schumacher to seven titles with Ferrari and also having won titles with Benetton, when that team was a small fish in the F1 shark pool.
Future success, though, requires money. The strength of the current Brawn GP car is borne of Honda’s €170 million 2008 investment. Those are resources the team no longer possesses. Virgin’s confidence and a new team could entice others but while the short-term outlook looks bright, the deeper into the season Brawn goes, the murkier the outlook. The first chapter has seen a happy ending but in true Hollywood fashion the sequel is likely to be darker and altogether more uncertain.