Unfairly so too, Pierce.
Haug's move to purchase the team and it's subsequent decline was held against him, and ultimately cost the man his job.
Looking back, it was a masterclass by Haug.
Mercedes always yearned to have their own team, hence the abortive attempts to purchase McLaren.
The £100 million spent to buy the team now looks a complete bargain when you consider to build a factory from scratch, will cost in excess of £300 million, and that's 2004 money. You then have to staff your empty factory....
Schumacher too, came in for alot of flak, but when you see how Rosberg has performed against Hamilton...the old man did good, real good. Just a case of the car not being competitive enough. Schumacher also played the sacrificial lamb on a few occasions for the team, trying new engine maps for the EBD and also different set ups to improve the teams woeful tyre problems. Commendable.
But I think Brawn bore the brunt of venom on these pages. While Haug may have got Mercedes into the sport, Brawn was helming the ship.
It was the shedding of staff back in 2008/9 that did for the team. Losing the likes of Zander and others who were so instrumental in making the BGP001 had a knock on effect to the development of the subsequent W range Mercs.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/motors ... staff.html
270 staff let go in the space of 3/4 months, and a budget which dropped from £210 million to around half that.
No team in F1 could really maintain a development rate or continuity with this sort of disturbance.
It was however sold to Merc under the RRA guise, that all teams would need to meet the 500 maximum number of staff by 2011/12. Mercedes already operated on that basis.
Only when it became clear that the RRA was not being respected, or that clear advantages would be frozen in due to it, Brawn went on his now famous recruitment drive to get the like of Bell, Costa and Willis to turn the ship around.
In the meantime the old guard where being shipped out...Bigois to Ferrari etc.
In this transition, the team struggled which is only normal. But Brawn was singled out as the man responsible, yet in 2013 under stable regs from 2009...the team clearly leapfrogged McLaren and Ferrari by being the second best team.
That does not happen out of nothing, and is clearly also not because of the engine(frozen regs).
All of it is a culmination of Brawn's decision making, even if he is not the greatest engineer that ever lived.
Enter the W05.
This more than anything is cumulative work put in by Brawn, his team and Mercedes. The hashtags on the side of the cars for Micheal are nice touch...but underneath that...they should have #DankeRoss.
