Brawn already planning for successor at Mercedes

YEONGAM, SOUTH KOREA // Ross Brawn, the Mercedes Formula One team principal, has already started planning for his eventual replacement, even if he intends to be around for years to come.

The former Ferrari technical director, who won both championships with his own Brawn GP team last year before selling it to Mercedes, said at yesterday's Korean Grand Prix that it was important to have a succession plan.

That could eventually involve him coming to fewer Formula One races in future and spending more time at the factory, possibly in a different role.

"When you are spending so much time at races, it's difficult to devote time to the factory and we've got a lot going on.

"We're developing the organisation, very excited about how the organisation is developing for the future," he said.

"So it's just looking perhaps at a different balance in the future, but it's not for a few years.

"I think every organisation should be structured such as to have someone to replace them," the 55-year-old Briton added.

"You never know, touch wood, that bus comes around a corner ... so you have to have an organisation that can cope.

"I am totally committed for the next few years and want this team to succeed. In a way, I hope, as I was able to do at Ferrari, to leave a good structure behind."

Brawn left Ferrari at the end of 2006, when Michael Schumacher, the seven-time world champion, retired, to take a year's sabbatical with clear successors already lined up for every key role.

He then returned as team principal of Honda, Brawn's predecessors, in 2008.

The Briton has been reunited with Schumacher this season after the German came out of retirement at the age of 41.

At Mercedes this season, with the car off the pace and only being fourth in the constructors' standings, Brawn and Norbert Haug, the Mercedes motorsport vice president, have regularly dismissed media reports of internal discord.