Brawn GP F1 racing team wins dream race then cuts 270 UK jobs

Jenson Button’s Formula One team is making more than a third of its staff redundant, cutting 270 jobs.

The Australian Grand Prix winner’s Brawn GP announced the losses just hours after Button and Rubens Barrichello completed a fairytale first- and second-place finish in Melbourne yesterday in the opening race of the F1 season.

Chief executive of Brawn, Nick Fry, said: “It’s very unfortunate that we’ve got to do that but it’s the change of technical regulations and obviously we are now a private team.” The jobs will go from the team’s Brackley factory in England.

Fry added: “We are about 700 people at the moment and we talked to the staff about going down to about 430 – something like that – which is where we [the firm’s predecessors BAR] were in 2004.”

The president of motorsport’s governing body the FIA, Max Mosely has repeatedly for called for F1 teams to operate with less staff.