There's a lovely irony surrounding the fact that Ross Brawn is taking charge on the eve of F1's biggest technical change since 2009, the year his team read the regulations better than most and blitzed the championship. Could we be in for similar shock in 2017? Never say never.
This time eight years ago, Brawn was not mentioned in the season preview carried by a leading F1 monthly magazine. This was no surprise since the British team wasn't even on the back foot; it was getting up from the floor only a few months after a knockout punch delivered by Honda. The Japanese manufacturer's unexpected decision to pull out of F1 had appeared to be the final nail in the coffin for a team already in dire straits.
When Jenson Button's Honda caught fire at the end of the final round of the 2008 championship in Brazil, it had seemed the only decent thing this deeply unloved car could do. As Lewis Hamilton was rocketing to stardom as the new world champion, Button's career seemed to be going down the plughole. For Jenson, it had been a terrible year with a crap car. Then, with Honda's withdrawal, he had no car at all. Or so it seemed.
Even when Brawn led a last-minute buy-out of the team for which he had become principal at the beginning of 2008, the chance of success appeared to be zero. Testing was under way; the start of the 2009 season just around the corner. Ferrari and McLaren were being seen as favourites with BMW and the hugely talented Robert Kubica threatening to take a run down the inside. Brawn - if they were lucky -- would be at the back with Toro Rosso and Force India.
But Brawn, ever a man to keep quiet counsel, knew something the opposition did not. Having immediately determined the 2008 Honda was a dog twelve months before, Brawn and his small team of underrated but smart aero engineers had begun to pick apart the new regulations proposed for 2009.
According to Max Mosley, president of the FIA, the intention of the rule change was to allow scope for innovation. There would indeed be imaginative interpretation, albeit not in the way Mosley had envisaged.
Brawn had a reputation for bending but not breaking technical rules when presiding over the Jaguar sports car team, Benetton and then Ferrari. Indeed, fair play to Ross, he went so far as pointing out that the proposed changes for 2009 would not reduce downforce by desired amount. Renault and BMW dismissed such talk on the assumption that they knew best. Big mistake. Brawn's aero boys knew better.
They had come up with some pretty impressive figures, mainly generated by a clever interpretation of revisions to the rear diffuser that were supposed to reduce its effectiveness and improve the ability to overtake. A lower diffuser allowed use of a gap beneath a step plane that effectively gave two diffusers -- and twice the downforce. This, and clever aero detail around the front wing, took Button from potential scrapheap to possible superstar from the moment he completed the first shakedown lap at the eleventh hour.
F1, being the cynical business that it is, wrote off the consistently fast times as the product of the car running light in the hope of attracting sponsors to its virgin white flanks. An extraordinary one-two for Button and Rubens Barrichello in Australia proved the performance was real rather than contrived, Ferrari and others (but not Williams and Toyota, who had got hold of the same idea, albeit not as effectively) wringing their hands.
When the subsequent and predictable whinging protest was thrown out, Brawn was on its way to the championship and the front covers of magazines that, not long before, had barely given this team the time of day.
Could the same thing happen in the coming months? One thing for sure is that Ross Brawn will view the exploitation of any loophole with the experienced and reasonably charitable eye of someone who has been there and won it.