“Our archive is really important and I find it absolutely fascinating,” adds Brawn. “All of the test and race reports, the design information, the green sheets, we hold them on file and can access them whenever we want, as well the original paper drawings to help remanufacture the cars or re-engineer components to enable the car to run.
“The green sheets tell you the driver involved, the time of day, what the weather was like, what the ride height was, what the camber was, what the wing level was, any problems they had… One of the sheets I saw recently was Damon’s from when he won the championship in 1996, with a note on the bottom from the race engineer saying, ‘P1 – world champ!’”
F1 ICONS: Damon Hill on his father, two-time world champion and triple crown winner Graham Hill
Such a detailed back catalogue does, however, come with its dangers…
“Unfortunately, it’s a bit like a TARDIS!” Barker laughs, in reference to the hit time-travelling television show Doctor Who. “It’s truly breathtaking to see what we’ve got. When you go in there, you do tend to lose half of your day, because you open a folder and go, ‘Oh my God, I remember that!’
“We can then offer copies to a potential owner. We don’t just go, ‘Your car was used in nine events’, and that’s it. We can say, ‘We’ve got an FIA official slip from the weighbridge; during the warm-up for that race, it weighed 601kg’. So, as an owner, you don’t just buy a car off us, you buy the car, its history and basically access to all of its records.
