Take nothing away from Brawn GP. The way the team under Ross Brawn have rallied through a most trying time to emerge on top at the beginning of the new season is indeed some of the stuff fairytales are made of.

Until the announcement was made just after midnight on the morning of 6 March — just three weeks before free practice in Melbourne — nobody in that team could be sure about their future. A last-minute glitch could easily have scuppered the dream and sent every member into the unknown.

To continue working under such trying circumstances and then turn the world of Formula One upside down is far more than just a remarkable achievement.

But a fairytale in the sense of a wholly unexpected or far-fetched sequence of events it is not.

A fairytale in F1 terms would have been Mark Webber winning on debut in a Minardi in front of his home crowd in 2002. Or an Anthony Davidson on the podium in a Super Aguri in 2008. Or — and this actually happened — Jody Scheckter winning for Wolf in their debut race in 1977.

In each of these cases the result would have been — and in the Wolf case was — far beyond that expected from either a small backmarker outfit or a team cobbled together in the few months leading up to a new season.

The Brawn BGP001 is a remarkable car and thoroughly deserves its success. But in reality it is the Honda RA109 — a design that has been in the making since January 2008.

It is the product of 15 months' worth of meticulous attention to detail, exhaustive multiple windtunnel testing and thus the refinement of every possible aerodynamic advantage allowed within the new-for-2009 technical framework.

While top teams like Ferrari and McLaren had to keep their eyes on two balls — battling for championship honours and working on the design of their 2009 cars at the same time — this team could focus on just one.

Brawn GP is certainly not a team cobbled together in the last few months (and in fairness they have never claimed to be — it’s just that certain members of the media create that impression when they talk about a team that 'didn't exist three months ago').

They are the same people working in the same, state-of-the-art facilities that Honda Motor Corporation in Japan spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build up since taking full possession of BAR-Honda at the end of 2005.

The big mistake made by Honda since then was that they continued to throw money at a fundamentally bad design, which only resulted in the pathetic RA107 and RA108 over the last two seasons. In those two years together the team scored the grand total of 20 Constructors’ points, versus the 378 scored by world champions Ferrari.

The one thing that Honda F1 CEO Nick Fry did get right was to hire Ross Brawn at the end of his sabbatical year in 2007.

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