Barely eight months after Honda called it quits, another manufacturer of white cars is out of Formula One as BMW throws in the towel at the end of this season. What will this mean for the all-conquering Brawn GP?

It was a late March day in Melbourne and Robert Kubica was breathing down hard on Jenson Button’s neck in this season’s first grand prix. Leading the race with three laps to go, Button was slowing down in his yet-unproven ex-Honda on supersoft tires as Kubica crept ever closer in his BMW. The young Pole—like Button, a winner of a single grand prix—was at last set to launch into a season of victories.

Of course he then tangled up with Sebastian Vettel in the Red Bull and it was all downhill for both him and BMW. Button and Vettel would go on to win 8 of this year’s 10 grands prix, while Kubica’s best result was 7th in Turkey. Apart from a lucky second place for teammate Nick Heidfeld in the wacky red-flagged Malaysian monsoon race, the BMW team—in their fourth season as a factory team in F1—are permanent backmarkers in the 2009 season, bringing up the rear with Force India and Toro Rosso.

They have decided to put themselves out of their misery. BMW will go out fighting but not come back to contest the 2010 season.

“This was a difficult decision for us, but it’s a resolute step in view of our company’s strategic realignment,” was the jolt of corporatese offered by Dr. Norbert Reithofer, chairman of the board of management of BMW, to the BBC.

Team principal Mario Theissen had this to say:

We, the employees in Hinwil and Munich, would all have liked to continue this ambitious campaign and show that this season was just a hiccup following three successful years. But I can understand why this decision was made from a corporate perspective.

Launched as a factory team for the 2006 season, BMW had originally given themselves three years to win the world championship. They finished second in 2007 after McLaren was disqualified and came in third last year—second only to McLaren and Ferrari—with several podium finishes and a grand prix victory by Robert Kubica in Montreal, his and BMW’s only.

One cannot help but wonder if the Bavarian-Swiss squad will try to make lemonade of the situation the way Ross Brawn has.

Brawn’s Honda team suffered through an ignominious 2008 season at the end of which Honda decided to quit Formula One altogether. Over the winter, Brawn managed to acquire the team’s assets and drivers from Honda, launched it under his own name with the car they had been developing since November 2007 and went on to win 6 of this season’s 10 grand prix with Jenson Button. After 10 out of 17 races, Brawn GP leads both the driver’s and the constructor’s championship.

So let’s keep our fingers crossed for Mario Theissen and his mercurial Pole. Formula One cannot make do without such a well-groomed mustache as Theissen’s:

Source: BBC. Photo Credit: BERTRAND GUAY/AFP/Getty Images, DIMITAR DILKOFF/AFP/Getty Images, Paul Gilham/Getty Images, OLIVER LANG/AFP/Getty Images

Stirling Moss: 1955, 1957

It took the Brits six tries to crack their home grand prix and it took their greatest driver and the car the Germans came back to Formula One with. Held at Aintree, it was the only race of the season where Moss managed to beat his teammate Juan Manuel Fangio, who went on to claim his third world title. As his win came after a pass at the last corner, Moss wondered whether Fangio had let him win, but the Argentine would always say: “No. You were just better than me that day.” British-Argentine relations would, in a few decades, take a turn for the worse.

Moss’s second win came two years later in a Vanwall VW5 shared with Tony Brooks, who is also credited with the victory.

Photo Credit: Daimler Global Media. Moss is driving his Mercedes-Benz W196 to victory at Aintree.

Tony Brooks: 1957

Dr. Brooks—he was a dentist by training—was the first Brit to drive a British car to grand prix victory after World War Two, winning a non-championship race in Syracuse. His win, shared with Stirling Moss, was his first of six victories in Formula One.

Photo Credit: Terry Whalebone. This is the Vanwall VW5 before the start of the 1957 British Grand Prix at Aintree.

Peter Collins: 1958

Collins was an up-and-coming driver at Ferrari, much liked by il Commendatore himself, whom Juan Manuel Fangio passed on the Nürburgring Nordschleife in 1957 to take his last win.

In 1958, driving the Ferrari 246 F1, he took his third and last victory in front of his home crowd at Silverstone. Two weeks later, he returned to the scene of his great battle with Fangio. On lap 11 of the 1958 German Grand Prix, he went over the embankment and hit a tree with his head, dying later that afternoon.

John F. Burns of The New York Times, who saw Collins drive to his last win, has written a heartbreaking report on the fair-haired young man, one of many casualties of the brutal 1958 season.

Collins is shown at the 1957 German Grand Prix in his Ferrari.

Jimmy Clark: 1962–1965, 1967

He was the fastest sheep farmer who has ever lived, the very humble soulmate of Lotus founder Colin Chapman, the man who could not put his head around the fact that everyone else was slower on the track. Chapman had a philosophy of building his Loti light enough to last only the duration of the race but not a second more. When the cars held together, Clark would usually win. When not, he would lose out on races—and championships. He dominated his home grand prix like no other Brit, winning a total of five times at Aintree, Silverstone and Brands Hatch.

Three months before he could defend his 1967 win with the dominant Lotus 49B, he lost control of his car at a Formula Two race at the Hockenheimring, crashed into a tree and died from his injuries.

Photo Credit: Allsport Hulton/Archive. Bette Hill throws her husband Graham a party to celebrate his homecoming from America where he won the Indianapolis 500 in a Ford-Lola. Graham and his son Damon Hill—who would become a British Grand Prix winner, unlike his dad—push reigning World Formula 1 Champion Jim Clark around on a toy tractor.

Jackie Stewart: 1969, 1971

The man who taught James May how to drive fast won his home grand prix twice—both times in cars which were either French or built with French money. Not that it troubled the cool Scot, who would go on to extend both of his home wins into world championships.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images. Stewart is at the 2003 Canadian Grand Prix with fellow Brit Ozzy Osbourne. No pigeons were harmed in the taking of this photo.

James Hunt: 1977

A Silverstone race, it was a battle between party boy Hunt and his Austrian archnemesis Niki Lauda, who returned phoenix-like from the ashes of his fiery crash on the Nürburgring at the 1976 German Grand Prix.

While Hunt held off Lauda by over 18 seconds in front of his home crowd, he had no chance to defend his 1976 world title, which Lauda would win by a wide margin over Jody Scheckter.

This race also marked the Formula One debut of the turbocharged engine, at this point a comically inept device campaigned by Renault, which would over a few short years come to rule the sport.

Photo Credit: Allsport UK/ALLSPORT. All smiles is Mrs. Hunt, three years before James’s home win. Note Hunt’s totally rock and roll breast patch.

John Watson: 1981

Watson was an F1 driver who later became a sports car racer and a broadcast commentator. His win at Silverstone was the second one of his career. He would win three more GP's before moving on to sports cars.

It was the car he drove which marks this race for history: Watson’s McLaren MP4/1 was the first F1 racer made of carbon fiber. Watson drove the plastic tub to its first victory. The material would take over aluminum for the construction of racing cars in a few months.

Photo Credit: Tony Duffy/Getty Image

Nigel Mansell: 1986, 1987, 1991, 1992

While Colin Chapman watched Jim Clark die, it was the other way around with the mustachioed Mansell: it was only at his third year in F1 when Chapman dropped dead of a heart attack at the age of 54. His relationship with Lotus’s new management soured after that and he moved on to Williams, then Ferrari—where he witnessed Enzo Ferrari die after selecting him as his last driver, in a motorsports career which spanned six decades.

Mansell would return to Williams to drive their high-tech active-everything cars. He won his fourth and last British Grand Prix with the Williams FW14B, one of the best F1 cars ever made, with which he claimed his only world championship.

Photo Credit: DOMINIQUE FAGET/AFP/Getty Images. The other guys pictured here having a killer time at the 1986 Portugese Grand Prix are Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost and Nelson Piquet.

Damon Hill: 1994

His father Graham may be the more famous of the Hills, with his dapper mustache, his six wins at Monaco, his three Formula One world championships and his victories at the Indianapolis 500 and at Le Mans, but he never won the British Grand Prix.

Unlike his son Graham, who won at Silverstone and was then rammed by Michael Schumacher at the last race of the season, denying him the world championship.

Photo Credit: Pascal Rondeau/Allsport. Hill is in his Williams Renault before the Pacific Grand Prix at the TI circuit in Aida, Japan.

Johnny Herbert: 1995

Who’s Johnny Herbert? Why, he raced for a decade in Formula One and won three races, one of them at Silverstone, where duelling championship leaders Schumacher and Hill knocked each other out, allowing the Brit in his Benetton to slip by and claim victory.

Herbert was also on the team which drove the Mazda 787B at Le Mans in 1991, a shrikeing Day-Glo quad-rotor Wankel racer, which still holds the only Le Mans title for Felix Wankel’s wacky invention.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images. The person you are looking at instead of Johnny Herbert is British model Keeley Hazell.

David Coulthard: 1999, 2000

The man who is to jawbones what Jay Leno is to chins may not be remembered as much of a grand prix winner over his grand total of 15 years in Formula One, but he’s managed to take both Monaco and Silverstone twice. In both of his wins, he was sitting pretty in the sister car to Mika Häkkinen’s championship-winning McLaren.

Photo Credit: Clive Mason/Getty Images. Coulthard is showing his incredible mandible at the 2004 San Marino Grand Prix.

Lewis Hamilton: 2008

Last year’s race was a rain-soaked wacky waltz, notable for Felipe Massa’s numerous 360’s, a high speed track bunny and a beautiful, composed drive by McLaren’s Hamilton, who was yet to face what it’s like to race in an uncompetitive car.

The race was also a sign of things to come with Ross Brawn back in the game: in a snap decision, he outflanked the field on tire tactics to propel Rubens Barrichello to third place in that utter crap Honda My Earth Dream car—notable for always bringing up the rear—which they had already given up development on.

A year later, the tables have turned: Honda is out of Formula One, their 2009 car is powered by a Mercedes-Benz engine and is absolutely pulverizing the opposition. It is the clear favorite to win this year’s race, the last at Silverstone, with Barrichello’s teammate Jenson Button set to become the thirteenth Brit to win at home.

And there may never be a fourteenth, of course.

Photo Credit: Paul Gilham/Getty Images. Hamilton is at a press conference before this year’s British Grand Prix, with Jenson Button looking on.

Ross Brawn is back! If you’ll recall, the man who made Schumacher the Superman of Formula 1 racing left Ferrari at the end of the 2006 season and ended up at Honda after a one-year sabbatical. Honda was particularly hard hit by the Carpocalypse and decided last December to abandon its F1 efforts. An agreement has now been reached to preserve the team, with Brawn as its new owner and namesake.

Brawn GP will swap its Honda engines for Mercedes V8’s and immediately hit the track at Barcelona on Monday. Honda drivers Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello will remain with the team as they take to their first season on March 29 at the Australian Grand Prix.

This is absolutely wonderful news. As for why, you only need to call to mind last year’s British Grand Prix at Silverstone.

It was a motley ballet of a race, with the recurring gag of a hapless Fernando Alonso spinning his car at every corner and a bunny speeding across the rain-soaked track. Lewis Hamilton massacred the field, but the most remarkable part of the race happened on lap 40.

This was when Ross Brawn, in anticipation of more rain, decided to put Rubens Barrichello on extreme wet tires as opposed to the intermediates on every other car. Then the rain came. Barrichello’s Honda, a hopeless non-contender througout the season, went through the field like butter, outpacing everyone by nine seconds a lap. He ended up at third place, by far the best result for Honda in the entire season.

Yeah yeah yeah, you put on wets when you see the clouds, but if the rain doesn’t come, wet tires slow your car down like molasses. It was a brilliant hustle, but one built on a foundation of data, which Brawn reputedly has an infinite capacity to spot patterns in.

Not evident on most Formula 1 newscasts due to its invisibility to the naked eye is the extremely large outboard brain attached to Ross Brawn’s cerebrum. A picture of which we have obtained with Jalopnik’s imaging satellite parked above the Japanese Home Islands. It really is one bad mother of a brain.

Expect fun things to happen in F1, and expect Brawn to step on Hamilton’s toes at every chance he gets. We at Jalopnik HQ couldn’t be more happier and we hereby celebrate with a six-pack of Brawndo:

Photo Credit: p_c_w, rallycarter, Source: BBC Sport

Reports are coming in stating a flurry of applications from Honda F1 employee-hopefuls have been going unanswered for some period of time. This is a bad sign; not responding to apps could mean management doesn't see a future for the team. We hope either this report is false or some big Daddy Warbucks steps in to buy himself a plaything. Thanks to Mark and everyone for the tips [GrandPrix]

[My Earth Dream]