At garage 20 there was a refrigerator perched wonkily on the tarmac and meals being served on plastic plates. The victors ate where they stood. This is the temporary Brazilian headquarters of Brawn GP, the most successful team in Formula One this season. Next year, they will move to garage 1, as kings of the hill. The bald facts are the stuff of legend now.
The team that did not exist until three weeks before the start of the season. They had worked through the winter not knowing if they would survive.
And then: the only team to win the championship in its first season, the first one-two finish in a debut race in 55 years, the first to win its debut race since 1977.
The day of the crucial winning race at Interlagos in Sao Paulo belonged to the champion driver, Jenson Button, but once the smoke had cleared, the most incredible story of the season remains the brain of Brawn.
In the sparse team office close to garage 20, Ross Brawn, the principal who made this little miracle happen, is struggling to put emotions into words. Brawn is an engineer, a behind-the-scenes guy and, as such, unlikely to win the personality awards that await Button back home.
The team bears his name, but ego trips are not his thing. He is plainly uncomfortable with any suggestion his team name is eponymous because of a lust for personal glory.
"It was awkward at the beginning to even see my name there," Brawn said. "We did go through a lot of permutations at first. Pure Racing was one, but Mercedes were supplying the engine and Pure Mercedes didn't sound right.
"So we were consulting them and Caroline McGrory, our legal secretary, said we should call it Brawn and there were no objections. I felt awkward. It is an odd thing but I have got used to it now, and today, I am very proud and honoured that my name is carried by the team.
"When I left Ferrari, they kindly gave me a replica of the constructors' trophy, which I keep in my study. There are all the little badges that go round it, Ferrari and Lotus and McLaren. And we are going to have Brawn GP on there now. That feeling is indescribable. Just so special, really." Brawn GP rose from the ashes of Honda's decision to pull out of Formula One in December last year, with Brawn, Honda's technical director and the intelligence behind Michael Schumacher's seven titles at Ferrari, initiating a management buy-out completed perilously close to race time.
The entry fee was waived due to Brawn GP's straitened existence and drivers Button and Rubens Barrichello took massive pay cuts to remain employed.
Brawn said: "We had a team of people who worked through a whole winter not knowing if they had a future. They did whatever it took, put in 60 to 70 hours a week for a team that didn't exist. It was so very close to not happening. There were days when I went home thinking it was all over.
"The great thing with the management group was there were five of us and we were not all down at the same time. So I would go home desperate, get a phone call from Nick Fry (Honda F1's chief executive officer who stayed on with Brawn GP), saying he had found a way around it. On other days, I would do the same for him. "There was a group of people who saw no alternative but to find a solution and others who faced being put on the street, yet stuck with and supported us, even though they had no idea how it would end.
"Is it a fairytale? I'm not sure what a fairytale is, but we took something that was on its knees and got it to where we are today, and that has been an exceptional experience.
Survival
"Survival was our first objective, genuinely. Get to the first race and try to put the thing on its feet, see if we can find funding for the future.
"All I knew was we had a car which was a good step from where we were before and when the testing began we didn't see any other cars performing in the way we thought you should with the new regulations. It sounds arrogant but that was our analysis and it made us even more determined to get off the ground because then we knew we had a good car."
With the residue of the Honda money drying up, Brawn's resources will be limited next year and it will be hard to defend this title.
Changes in regulations, however, mean that in time all teams will have the same budget and size as Brawn, at which point, success will depend on more than money. So do not bet against Brawn GP returning to garage 1 in future.
London Cheers rang out from inside the Brawn GP garage as dusk fell over the Interlagos circuit on Sunday night. It was the sound of a team that had risen from the ashes.
Moments later, Ross Brawn emerged from the gathering at which he had delivered a speech congratulating his colleagues on winning the constructors' and drivers' titles in the first season under their new name, less than 12 months after Honda reacted to the international financial crisis by withdrawing its support.
Brawn had left the engineers and mechanics with a reminder of the need to aim for the same targets again next year in order to prove that their astonishing success in 2009 was no fluke. For Jenson Button, the agenda will be the same. Once the celebrations have died down, his overriding ambition will be to make himself the first British winner to mount a successful defence the following season.
He is Britain's 10th world champion, a total unequalled by any other nation, but none of his predecessors, from Mike Hawthorn in 1958 to Lewis Hamilton 50 years later, has been able to match the ability of men called Ascari, Fangio, Brabham, Prost, Senna, Schumacher, Hakkinen and Alonso to come straight back and win it again.
Although Brawn and Button have yet to agree a contract to succeed the one that ends after the Abu Dhabi grand prix, it is difficult to imagine that they will not be in harness again next season once they have agreed on a figure somewhere between the £12m Honda was paying the driver and the £4m or so which he accepted in this season's reduced circumstances.
"I hope he'll be with us," Brawn said. "We'll be sitting down with the drivers over the next few weeks to sort it out. But we're not Honda any more. We've got to find the balance between what Jenson's happy and motivated with, and what we can afford. I'm sure we will."
—Guardian News and Media 2009
