Formula 1

About the season

Honda announced its withdrawal from Formula 1 amid the financial crisis at the end of 2008, but Ross Brawn bought the team for a single pound and entered it from scratch as Brawn GP barely three weeks before the season opener in Melbourne. The fairy tale continued: Jenson Button and Brawn GP won both the drivers' and constructors' championships, the first time any team had done so in its debut season, with Button winning six of the first seven races. Brawn's (along with Toyota's and Williams's) novel "double diffuser" aerodynamic solution triggered fierce protests from rival teams, before the International Court of Appeal ultimately ruled the design legal. In September, shortly after being dropped by Renault, Nelson Piquet Jr. revealed that he had deliberately crashed on team orders at the previous year's Singapore Grand Prix, the "Crashgate" scandal that saw team boss Flavio Briatore banned indefinitely and technical director Pat Symonds banned for three years. Jenson Button won the 2009 Drivers' Championship with 95 points (Brawn), 11 points ahead of the runner-up. Brawn won the Constructors' Championship with 172 points, 18.5 points ahead of the runner-up. Across 17 completed races this season, there were 70 retirements. 6 different drivers won a race this season. Jenson Button took the most race wins, 6 in total. Button won the season-opening race, the Australian Grand Prix. The closest finish of the season came at the Australian Grand Prix, with a gap of just 0.807 seconds. Trulli made the biggest gain of the season at the Australian Grand Prix, from grid position 20 to finishing 3 (up 17 places). The Australian Grand Prix saw the most retirements of the season, with 8 drivers failing to finish. The most dominant win of the season came at the Malaysian Grand Prix, with a margin of 22.7 seconds. The season's biggest upset win came from Räikkönen at the Belgian Grand Prix, starting from grid position 6. Vettel won the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, the final race of the season.