OCTOBER 20, 2016

Brawn quit F1 over lack of trust at Mercedes

Ross Brawn says he left F1 at the end of 2013 because he "couldn't trust" Mercedes' management team.

Ross Brawn says he left F1 at the end of 2013 because he couldn't trust Mercedes' management team.

The highly respected Briton was team boss until the end of 2013, and he now says he decided to quit rather than try to work with current chiefs Toto Wolff, Niki Lauda and Paddy Lowe.

"I never really knew what they were trying to do," Brawn wrote in his forthcoming book Total Competition.

He said when he heard Lowe was joining from McLaren, he asked Wolff and Lauda about it and "they blamed each other".

And he said Wolff told another former F1 chief, Colin Kolles, that Brawn was "resting on my money".

"Even with Paddy Lowe, I was never quite sure -- he was quite happy to jump in and take my job," Brawn added.

"I couldn't trust those people so I saw no future unless I was willing to go to war and remove them."

Mercedes did not comment.

(GMM)