This May, in Miami, the auction house Bonhams will put up for bid Jenson Button’s Brawn GP car from the 2009 season. The car comes with an asterisk: it's not actually the one Button drove to the F1 world driver's championship — it’s the one he was given under legal duress.
The details of Brawn GP’s 2009 F1 season amount to one of the great underdog stories in all of sports history: the team, left for dead by its previous owners, won six of the first seven races thanks to a brilliant “double diffuser” downforce breakthrough by engineer-owner Ross Brawn — only to find itself desperately trying to maintain a dwindling late-season points lead in both the drivers championship (for Jenson Button) and the constructor’s championship as the rest of the paddock caught on, and caught up.
