Matt Bishop meets Nick Fry, the man who led Brawn GP to 2009 F1 success

If you spend a couple of hours with Nick Fry – as I did recently – you quickly grasp two things. The first is that he is almost constitutionally incapable of self-aggrandisement. The second is that the modesty of the man makes the scale of his achievements sound faintly surreal when he finally does get around to describing them. He will talk animatedly about Ford and Aston Martin, about Prodrive and Subaru, about BAR–Honda and Honda and Brawn and Mercedes, but he will tell the stories as though they were showcasing the successes of someone else, or as though he had merely wandered through them, quietly holding a clipboard, generally trying to make things a little bit better.

Yet behind Fry’s chummy reserve sits a career that helped shape entire eras of both the global automotive industry and the strange, high-pressure, carbon-fibre-and-cojones world of Formula 1. He is one of the rare executives who learned to speak both languages fluently: the big-company dialect of budget cycles, capital expenditure and cautious governance, and the paddock patois of risk taking, engineering audacity, political dark arts and the occasional overnight miracle. Only a small number of men – and even fewer women – can walk comfortably in both worlds. Fry is one of them.

But before the boardrooms and pitlanes, there was a semi-detached house in Surbiton. “I was born in 1956,” he begins, with that wry half-smile of his, “and I grew up with my dad, my mum and my two younger brothers in Surbiton, a commuter town between leafy Surrey and suburban south London, in a very happy but, by today’s standards, probably rather poor household.” He pauses, unwilling to make it sound Dickensian. “To be clear, we certainly weren’t destitute. We just lacked creature comforts. For instance, we didn’t have central heating. But we never felt poor, not at all, because everyone else seemed to be in the same boat.”

It is typical Fry: an acknowledgement of minor hardship, immediately qualified by perspective. His father was a circulation manager for Mirror Group Newspapers. His mother – a housewife by the time Nick was born – had previously been a senior PA to Major HN Robertson, a splendidly patrician figure who became Nick’s godfather. “I think it was Major Robertson who made me realise that there was a bigger, richer world out there,” Fry says, “but it was my mum who instilled in me the devotion to attention to detail that I’ve always brought to my work.” He smiles again. “She was a brilliantly rapid and accurate typist. She used to get me to proofread her stuff when I was a boy, and I’d get a roasting if I missed anything. She believed in hard work. She always said, ‘They call it work for a reason.’ She was ambitious for me.”

Yet you sense that that ambition was never oppressive. It was love expressed as drive – a thread that winds itself throughout Fry’s life. Even so, nothing in his childhood pointed directly towards motor sport. His father was a sports lover – football, cricket, golf – but no petrolhead. “I simply have no idea where my passion for cars and motor sport came from,” Nick says, shrugging. But there it was: the child who obsessively compared the trim levels of his dad’s company Vauxhalls, noting which one had a temperature gauge and which did not; the teenager standing at Brands Hatch in 1971 for the tragic World Championship Victory Race; the young man at snowy Silverstone for the International Trophy in 1973. “Dad would take us to events because he got freebie tickets through the sports desk, but he wasn’t an F1 fan. It was just luck, really.” Luck mixed with instinct, which describes a few of the pivotal turns in Fry’s life journey.

“I learned a lot at Ford. I worked out what makes engineers tick”

He went to a secondary modern school but “I wasn’t the best scholar”, he admits, his end-of-term reports often containing the dreaded phrase ‘could try harder’. That changed when he encountered a charismatic A-level economics teacher. “Ah, yes, Mr Still,” Fry says, chuckling. “There were only six of us in his class. He’d take us down the pub at lunchtimes. I loved it. And that’s why I chose economics at [Swansea] university.”

For a working-class lad from Surbiton, university in the 1970s was an exploration. “No one in my family had ever gone to uni before,” he explains. “Graduates were pretty rare in those days, so I never feared not getting a job, as today’s graduates sadly often have to.” He interviewed with Ford, Unilever and Procter & Gamble, and he chose Ford, which was “immensely successful in the mid-to-late ’70s,” as he puts it, when the Escort and Cortina ruled the UK’s roads.

Ford was where his education truly began. Sales, market research, customer service, then brand management: a steady, deliberate rotation around the engine room of a vast industrial organism. “Although I’m no engineer, I learned a lot,” he says. “From about 25 I was working closely with Ford’s design engineers on the specs of new models – Escorts, Cortinas, Capris and Granadas – and I worked out what makes engineers tick.”

That insight – the realisation that engineers require the rare combination of freedom and clarity – became one of Fry’s defining skills. He also developed the equally rare understanding that, if you want to manage complex organisations, you must learn about their shop-floor chores as well as their boardroom strategies. “I always felt I needed to understand the whole business,” he says. “So I volunteered to run Ford’s Dagenham factory.” Running a plant producing a new car every 50 seconds is “gruelling”, he says with characteristic understatement, but he did it. And when Ford needed someone to steady Aston Martin, it turned to Fry.

“Ford owned Aston Martin in those days,” he explains. “At first Victor Gauntlett was running it, then Walter Hayes took over as chairman.” Hayes was a legendary figure: the man behind Ford’s backing of the all-conquering Cosworth DFV engine, the man who helped create Jackie Stewart, the man who nudged the Ford GT40 to glory at Le Mans. Fry was just 35 when Hayes invited him to his plush London offices, just off Mayfair’s Berkeley Square. “He told me all about fathering the DFV, about mentoring Jackie Stewart, about winning at Le Mans, and I didn’t say a word. I just sat there, listening to this legend whom I’d only ever read about before. Then he said, ‘OK, I’ll offer you the job – boss of Aston Martin – but you’ll have to do three months’ probation, and if I don’t like you after that, I’ll fire you.’” Fry, with a new baby at home, said yes.

Aston Martin in the early 1990s was a glorious shambles. “A complete mess, yes,” Fry says. But with Tom Walkinshaw’s TWR handling the engineering, and Fry managing the brand and the business, the DB7 emerged and changed Aston’s fortunes. “We sold loads of them – 10 times as many cars as Aston had been selling before,” he says, permitting himself a demure grin. The car was as successful as it was beautiful.

Fry returned to Ford thereafter, to take charge of the Mondeo from a brand point of view – a big job – but the motor sport threads in his life were tightening. David Richards – the Prodrive owner and chief executive, the rally navigator turned team principal – had become something of a friend, for he had bought Astons as road cars, had run them as daily drivers and had loved them. Moreover, Ford wanted its Mondeos to deliver British Touring Car Championship glory, and Prodrive would run the programme. Alain Menu took the BTCC title in 2000, which was the last hurrah of the Super Touring era. Then, when Richards found himself busy with the complexities of the World Rally Championship at the turn of the millennium, he asked Fry to join Prodrive as managing director. Again, Fry said yes.

At Prodrive he witnessed the artistry of Richard Burns, who had been runner-up in the WRC in 1999 and 2000, and would be champion in 2001, Fry’s first year at Prodrive. “Richard Burns was brilliant,” Fry recalls. “He’d say, ‘Do this, do that, hire this person, fire that person.’ And I did it, and it worked.”

Because Prodrive’s Subaru WRC team was sponsored by BAT’s 555 brand – and because BAT owned the BAR F1 team – BAT’s senior executives soon spotted a solution to their F1 difficulties. Craig Pollock, BAR’s founding team principal, would be replaced by Richards, and Prodrive would run BAR. Richards would be supported by two capable lieutenants: Hugh Chambers for marketing; and Fry for operations. “The team was in a right old mess,” Fry remembers. It is becoming a refrain.

Honda was supplying the engines and Fry’s background with Ford made him the natural interpreter between manufacturer and race team. “Honda latched on to me as the car company man who understood them,” he says. “David was brilliant with the outward-facing stuff. Hugh handled marketing. I spent my time in the factory trying to get it to run well.” There were improvements; there were even breakthroughs; but there was also Jacques Villeneuve.

“The truth is that I found Jacques very difficult,” Fry says plainly. Villeneuve had arrived at BAR as its superstar signing. He was Pollock’s protégé, Pollock remained his manager and a shareholder in the team, and Villeneuve’s side of the garage – “the chosen few”, as Fry calls them – had grown accustomed to exceptionalism. “Jacques got miles better treatment and equipment than his team-mates,” Fry says. “The parts weren’t even interchangeable between the two cars.”

And the 1997 world champion could be abrasive, too. Fry recalls one particular exchange: “He said something very unpleasant to one of our engineers. I said, ‘Jacques, how do you think that guy feels after you’ve spoken to him like that?’ Jacques just stared at me. He didn’t even understand the question.”

Yet 2004, after Villeneuve’s departure and Jenson Button’s arrival, was a revelation. BAR finished second in the F1 constructors’ championship, behind only Ferrari. The team that had once been a punchline was gradually becoming a powerhouse. Better still, two years later, in 2006, Button won his first grand prix in a wet-dry-wet-dry-wet Budapest epic of the sort that makes or breaks the delicacy of a driver’s touch. “That’s the kind of situation in which Jenson used to come into his own,” Fry says. “He was always so sensitive in tricky, changeable conditions. He always understood what was going on in those kinds of races.”

“Ross is a truly outstanding engineer. We never had a cross word”

But 2007 brought the opposite of glory, for the RA107 was a car so off the pace that Button looked genuinely shellshocked when I interviewed him in the Melbourne paddock that March. “That was a terribly difficult year,” Fry admits. But that experience taught him a crucial lesson: “F1 is no place for beginners.”

So he went to see Charlie Whiting, F1’s unflappable and much -missed race director and paddock sage. “I said, ‘Charlie, who have I got to get to be successful?’ And he said, ‘Get Ross Brawn, Adrian Newey or Pat Symonds.’ So I set out to do just that.”

He spoke to Newey first – “but it was immediately clear that it wasn’t going to work”. Newey’s genius is matched only by the singularity of his working style, and Fry feared that Honda would be discomfited by it, so he quickly moved on to Brawn. The Honda hierarchy opposed the idea at first. “Not because of Ross personally,” Fry explains, “but because they thought the perception would be that they’d hired the guy who’d won everything for Ferrari. Any success wouldn’t be seen as Honda success therefore.”

Fry argued the opposite. If a Honda team won, the credit would go to Honda, he insisted: Brawn was merely a means to that end. He pursued Ross relentlessly. He called him repeatedly. “Eventually I persuaded him to come to my house in Woodstock [Oxfordshire] and we talked it all through. I’d prepared diligently. I showed him an org [organisation] chart, and we went through all the people on it, every single one, and he seemed relatively satisfied with that. Then I went through an inventory of all the new tech we’d invested in. Then I took him through the budgets. Finally, he nodded and said, ‘OK, I’ve heard it all from you, but now I need to hear it all from Honda.’ So, the following week, we boarded separate flights to Japan, so that we wouldn’t be spotted together, and we went to see Honda. And, after that, Ross said yes.”

Their partnership was seamless. “We never had a cross word,” says Fry. “It worked perfectly, and we’re still good mates now. Ross is a truly outstanding engineer and engineering manager, and he’s less interested in the commercial side, which I took care of.”

Their 2008 season was a building one. There were no signs of impending doom. Then the global financial crisis hit and, in December, Honda summoned Brawn and Fry to a Heathrow hotel and told them that they were pulling out. Tears ran down the faces of the Japanese executives as they imparted the news. Seventeen years later Fry recalls the moment with vivid clarity. “They instructed us to go back to Brackley and tell everyone to go home. I explained that, under UK employment law, you can’t just sack 700 people on the spot. And we had responsibilities to our suppliers, too. In the end we managed to persuade them that they’d have to help us try to sell the team.”

Fry sought buyers everywhere, but in a global financial crisis no one suitable was willing. So, on Boxing Day, in a modest hotel just off the M40 motorway, he sat down with his finance director Nigel Kerr, the M&A [mergers and acquisitions] expert Gordon Blair and a blank sheet of paper. Over sandwiches and coffees a management buyout plan began to form. When Brawn returned from his Christmas holiday, Fry explained it. “At first Ross wasn’t keen,” he remembers. “It was way out of his comfort zone.” But Fry knew that, paradoxically, taking the team off Honda’s hands would be cheaper for Honda than shutting it down.

The UK government concurred. High-profile job losses on that scale would be a PR nightmare; from a political perspective a management buyout was significantly preferable. But the price was brutal: 350 redundancies, half the staff gone; and research and development budgets slashed to less than a quarter of what Red Bull was spending. “Winning the world championship wasn’t even on our horizon,” Fry says quietly.

Also, they needed a new engine to replace the Honda unit. They considered Ferrari, but the Scuderia’s V8 would not fit their car. Besides, Ferrari would never allow a customer outfit to beat its works team. “By contrast, Ross and I believed that Mercedes would be honourable,” Fry says. “We thought they’d abide by ‘may the best man win’.”

Even so, Brawn and Fry still had to work out how to persuade the powers-that-be in Stuttgart to let them use their engines – not an easy task, on the face of it, since for many years Mercedes power had been harnessed exclusively by McLaren. Enter Martin Whitmarsh. The McLaren team principal, in one of the most surprising acts in 21st-century F1 history, secured Merc engines for Brawn GP – at very significant competitive cost to his own team. “Without Martin we’d have been done for,” Fry says. “But, amazingly, and to McLaren’s detriment, he gave the crown jewels to the enemy. It was bonkers really, but it saved us.”

“Winning the F1 world championship wasn’t even on our horizon”

It did indeed – and, in Melbourne, in 2009, the Brawn BGP 001, white, yellow and day-glo fluorescent green, rolled into the paddock like a ghost that had drifted in by mistake. Yet, from its first lap, it was obvious that it was the class of the field. Button duly won the Australian Grand Prix from pole position. Rubens Barrichello completed a Brawn 1-2. Then, as all the drivers ran their cars down the pitlane after the race, something extraordinary happened: every mechanic from every other team lined up to applaud them home. “Even now, 17 years later, I could almost cry about it,” Fry remembers. “It was off-the-scale special.”

Brawn kept winning, although Red Bull began inexorably to catch up. “Actually, they were faster than us pretty early,” Fry admits, but Brawn had accumulated enough early points to arrive in Brazil with Button still leading the F1 drivers’ championship. “Yes, we got to Brazil, for the penultimate race, and Sebastian [Vettel] had won last time out in Japan for Red Bull, whereas Jenson had finished only eighth there. Then, in Brazil, it rained in qualifying, and Sebastian ended up 16th, and in the race he battled through to fourth, but Jenson was fifth, and that was enough. We’d done it. He was F1 world champion.” Brawn had already secured the constructors’ crown. Together they had achieved the impossible.

I ask Fry how he views Button as a driver – and as a man. “Oh, Jenson was great,” he replies, “but I want to say something about John [Button, Jenson’s father], too, if I may, because John’s influence shouldn’t be underestimated. When Jenson came to us, in 2003, he was fast, but he was still young [23], he was good-looking, and he was a bit of a playboy. Behind the scenes he needed a bit of controlling and, even though John was a bit of a character himself, he did a lot of that work. John and I used to talk on the phone a lot, and that way we’d agree on a strategy to get Jenson to do the right thing. Don’t get me wrong: Jenson was never a tearaway but he needed management in that way when he was in his early twenties.

“All in all, I’d say that Jenson was a superb driver but in terms of one-lap pace and sheer bloody-minded resilience he was never quite in the same stellar category as your Michael Schumachers, your Fernando Alonsos and your Lewis Hamiltons in their prime, or your Max Verstappens now. Put it this way: by contrast to those four, if Jenson had a tricky Friday, you knew you were likely to be going to have a difficult weekend. But whenever he had a fast car that he was comfortable with, and that he could really lean on, he was brilliant.”

That memorable day at Interlagos, in October 2009, Button’s fifth place was enough. Relief flooded Fry as Button crossed the line. Pride, too. But then came the suitor they had been half-expecting: Mercedes. The German giant wanted to buy the team. “People sometimes say, ‘If you’d kept it, it’d be worth billions now,’” Fry says. “But lots of things could have gone wrong in the meantime. Besides, we never intended to be team owners, Ross and I. And the most likely outcome is that we’d have ended up like Williams, hobbling along, surviving but never winning.” So they sold. They made a lot of money, they gave the team a secure future, and Mercedes went on to dominate F1.

“Since leaving uni I’ve never been poor. I’m humbled by that”

Soon after Mercedes bought his and Ross’s team, Nick moved on. Today he is chairman of Motion Applied – which you will remember as McLaren Applied – and he remains at the cutting edge. “We’re doing the new standardised electronic system for F1, for the 2026 power units, and the equivalent for NASCAR, and plenty of other things, too.”

He is 69; he could pass for 15 years younger; and he is comfortable, successful and secure. I ask him if he ever expected to be so rich. “Well, since leaving uni, I’ve never been poor,” he says, after a pause. “I’m humbled by that. But I’ve done it myself – with the brilliant help of some fantastic colleagues.”

That last phrase is the closest he will come to boasting. But it is also the most accurate. His life has been one long partnership – with industrialists, with entrepreneurs, with engineers, with mechanics, with drivers, with risk and with opportunity. He is, at heart, a quiet and collaborative master of the improbable. He speaks of it all with no trace of regret. Well, almost none. If you ask him directly about regrets, as I do as I reach for my iPhone and stop our recording, he answers instantly: “Teams I ran [at Prodrive] finished second at Bathurst twice, and it really bugs me.” That’s Fry for you: the F1 world champion exec whose only real irritation is not quite cracking Mount Panorama.

As our encounter draws to a close, I realise that what I admire most about Nick Fry is not the trophy cabinet that he helped build, nor even the F1 world championships that he helped win. It is the old-fashioned decency that underpins every chapter of his story. He is a man who rose from a humble house in Surbiton with no central heating to the summit of world motor sport – not by swagger, not by ruthlessness, not by guile, but by judgment, curiosity, hard graft and a sort of loyal, unshowy competence that F1 often undervalues. Perhaps that is why his story still feels so uplifting. F1 is a sport of sharp minds and sharper elbows, yet sometimes, just sometimes, every so often, a decent man wins. Nick Fry is proof.

Born: 29/06/1956, surbiton, surrey

• 1978 Joins Ford as a graduate trainee after gaining an economics degree.
• 1979-2001 Moves to Ford’s Product Development office as product planner, ultimately becoming business director.
• 1992-95 Shifts to Aston Martin as MD, overseeing development of DB7.
• 2001 Becomes managing director at Prodrive; doubles company turnover in three years; two WRC titles.
• 2002 Adds managing director of F1 team BAR Honda to his responsibilities.
• 2004 BAR Honda is runner-up in the F1 constructors’; Fry becomes CEO in 2005.
• 2006 Fry appointed Honda F1 CEO.
• 2007 Negotiates hire of Ross Brawn.
• 2008 Fry and Brawn lead a management buyout when Honda pulls out of F1, purchasing the team for £1.
• 2009 Brawn wins F1 drivers’ and constructors’ titles; team sold to Mercedes with Fry becoming CEO of the F1 team.
• 2013 Leaves F1; business interests include healthcare, artificial intelligence, esports and data security.
• 2021 Appointed non-executive chairman at McLaren Applied.