Former Mercedes team principal Ross Brawn has revealed why he left the team during the 2013 season, a year before Mercedes won its first championship since it took over the Brawn GP outfit – which it followed up with two more titles in 2015 and 2016.
Brawn admitted he had trust issues with current team bosses Toto Wolff and Niki Lauda, which ultimately forced him to exit the team as he was unwilling to "go to war" and fight against them for power over the team.
"People were imposed on me who I couldn't trust," Brawn wrote of Wolff and Lauda in a new book titled Total Competition: Lessons in Strategy from Formula 1, which is set to be published next month.
"I never knew really what they were trying to do," he explained. "Niki would tell me one thing, then I would hear he was saying something else [to someone else]."
Brawn confirmed he also had a problem with current technical boss Paddy Lowe, who was all too happy to take over Brawn's role.
"Even with Paddy Lowe, I was never quite sure – he was quite happy to jump in and take my job.
"I couldn't trust those people so I saw no future unless I was willing to go to war and remove them," he added.
Meanwhile Brawn revealed that a secret recording between Wolff and former HRT team boss Colin Kolles confirmed his suspicions that the Austrian was keen to oust him as leader.
"He said that I was resting on my money now. I had got all this money and I wasn't interested in the team any more and I wasn't motivated and I wasn't doing this, I wasn't doing that. That the team needed a fresh impetus.
"So I was beginning to deal with people who I didn't feel I could ultimately trust – people within the team who had let me down already in terms of their approach."
