Brawn denies deadline rumors

Ross Brawn

Ross Brawn has refuted claims he has two years to turn Honda's fortunes around. With Brawn on board Honda have already begun to show signs of improvement this year, however, they have yet to score a point leading to some suggestions that Honda's senior management have now given the Englishman a two-year deadline.

Asked by Autosport if the rumors were true, Brawn said: "We have actually not talked about it!

"I think the important thing is that we make good progress each year. I don't know if you can say when we will be in a position to win the World Championship, because so much depends on other people.

"If someone does an amazing job then it takes longer to achieve what you want to achieve. If you have a year where some people do a very poor job, then you might achieve that sooner.

"So to me it is very difficult to say. As I said, the important thing is that we make progress each year, and that we take the references of the previous year and do better each season."

Honda will only make one more major upgrade to its current car after the Spanish Grand Prix update before shifting focus completely to the 2009 machine, in readiness for the radical rule changes tabled for next season.

"The step for Barcelona is not of the magnitude of what we did between the launch and Melbourne, but it's somewhere in between and it's a good step," Honda team principal Ross Brawn told Autosport. "It's fairly traditional for all the teams to make a step for the first European race, so we've got to take that into consideration, but I'm very pleased with the way things are developing."

"Our plan is probably to do one more update for the middle of the season, and then I think we'll be focusing that resource totally on 2009," he added. "The 2009 program has started already but as each month goes by, we move more and more resource onto it. And the mid-season update, I guess the aero work will finish late May, early June, and then the focus will be on next year."