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Mercedes-Benz has announced that it has bought a controlling stake in the recently-crowned Formula 1 champions Brawn GP and re-named it Mercedes Grand Prix. The German car maker has bought a 75.1% stake in the squad while the current stake holders continue to hold the remainder.

Mercedes meanwhile will continue supplying engines to the McLaren Formula 1 team until at least 2015, but will no longer be a stake holder in the team and shall sell back the 40% of McLaren that it owned by 2011. McLaren will have to buy its engines from Mercedes like any other customer team.

The structure of the Brawn GP team has been left intact. Team boss, and engineering guru, Ross Brawn has committed long-t erm to the team, and the other top management has not been touched. The long-time head of Mercedes motorsports Norbert Haug will coordinate between Brawn's current Brackley based operations and Brixworth, where the Daimler-owned subsidiary Mercedes-Benz High Performance Engines is based.

With just Mercedes-Benz, Ferrari, and Renault left as manufacturers in Formula 1, the former's decision to increase its role and presence will come as a boost to the beleaguered series that has seen BMW and Toyota announce their departure this year. The deal will also see the return of the hugely-successful Silver Arrows to Formula 1, last seen in 1955 when Juan Manuel Fangio won the championship with them.

Mercedes' reasons for effectively ending their highly successful 15-year collaboration with McLaren, and buying a controlling stake in Brawn seem pretty clear. They always hoped that McLaren would, in some ways, turn into their Ferrari - where they would build high-performance road cars and use the Formula 1 program to highlight it. Even though together they did build the McLaren F1 road car, it was always an uneasy partnership, made more so by the fact that earlier this year McLaren announced that they would go into the road car business on their own. McLaren Group head Ron Dennis announced that he was leaving the Formula 1 team and would head McLaren Automotive, the road car side of the sprawling McLaren empire. A few months ago, Dennis announced a new McLaren sports car - the MP4-12C, to be launched in 2011. The writing from that point on was pretty clear - McLaren had every ambition of being another Ferrari, but on its own terms.

Ron Dennis said as much when announcing the split with Mercedes. "I've often stated that it's my belief that, in order to survive and thrive in 21st-century Formula 1, a team must become much more than merely a team. That being the case, in order to d evelop and sustain the revenue streams required to compete and win Grand Prix's and World Championships, companies that run Formula 1 teams must broaden the scope of their commercial activities," said Dennis.

McLaren also never let Mercedes buy a controlling stake in the team. In 2000, Mercedes bought 40% of the team from Ron Dennis and Mansour Ojjen who had controlled the team till then. Then Mercedes wanted to increase its holding in the team to 60%, but rather than sell to the three pointed star, Dennis and Ojjeh both sold 15% each of their stake to Bahrain Mumtalakat Holding Company. Though Mercedes was still the biggest share holder in the team, they had no say in the running of the team because of a complicated structure that Dennis and Ojjeh created. So, Mercedes could never buy the team, re-brand the team, or create it into its own image. The team was the mirror-image of Dennis, 'not Mercedes'. By buying Brawn, they have done just that: re-created the Silver Arrows that many at Mercedes Benz had long wanted to do.

It's a deal that should not hurt McLaren much, and Ron Dennis described it as a "win-win situation, for both McLaren and Daimler". As recent events have shown, having the muscle of the global car giant can very often be a liability than a boon, especially when the car market tanks and they scramble for ways to cut costs. McLaren will continue to get what are regarded as the best engines on the grid in what by all appearances seems to be an amicable split, and with costs going down in F1, they should ideally be well-suited to come of this without a slip down the grid.

The Brawn GP team in the meantime - which as of today no longer exists - continues its fairy tale journey. A last minute appearance on this year's grid after Honda left F1 last year saw the team win both world championships in their debut season. Now they set off on another incredible journey - one steeped in history and folklore that conjures up legends like Hermann Lang, Manfred von Brauchitsch, Rudolf Caracciola and Fangio - and try to recreate the dominating form of the German machines of the past. Given Brawn's form this year, and that next year's rules will be pretty stable, the new Mercedes Grand Prix team could, like Brawn, once again win in its debut season.

Mercedes 'Fast' Facts:

• The name 'Silver Arrows' was reportedly given by press to Germany's Mercedes-Benz and Auto Union Grand Prix motor racing cars between 1934 and 1939, and also later applied to the Mercedes-Benz Formula One and sports cars in 1954-55. This is rumoured to have been due to the removal of white paint from the body of a car which was overweight, leaving the silver almunium casing bare on display, which a radio broadcaster termed as the Silver Arrows.
• Mercedes Grand Prix the team debuted in Formula One in 1954, and competed with great success in the 1954 and 1955 seasons.
• Juan Manuel Fangio, a 1951 champion transferred mid-season from Maserati to Mercedes-Benz for their debut at the French Grand Prix on 4th July 1954. The team had immediate success and recorded a 1-2 victory with Fangio and Karl Kling, as well as the fastest lap (Hans Herrmann). Fangio went on to win three more races in 1954, winning the Championship.
• The team participated in 12 races in the 1954-55 seasons and won 9. To complete their domination, they had 8 pole positions and 9 fastest laps to their credit.
• The team quit all forms of motorsport in 1955, after the Le Mans crash that killed 55 spectators when a Mercedes car flipped over and ended up in the crowds.
• The company made a return to the sport in 1993 by unofficially supplying the Sauber team with engines. Since 1995, their engines have powered McLaren's Formula 1 cars.
  
• Mika Häkkinen is the most prolific driver in a Mercedes-Benz car or a car with a Mercedes-Benz engine under its hood. He has 20 race wins, followed by David Coulthard with 12, Lewis Hamilton with 11, Kimi Räikkönen with 9 and Juan Manuel Fangio with 8. Other members of the top ten include current world champion Jenson Button, and two-time former champion Fernando Alonso.

For more information on the Mercedes saga, check out McLaren and Brawn's statements on the same.

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