> Ross Brawn retires from the Ferrari team and F1 !!

Ross Brawn will leave Ferrari before the end of this year, the Italian squad confirmed on Thursday.

In a long anticipated move, Brawn will stand down from his post of technical director and will make way for Mario Almondo.

Engine guru Paolo Martinello will also leave the team, moving to Ferrari’s parent company Fiat.

Meanwhile Stefano Domenicali will take over Jean Todt’s role as sporting director.

The Frenchman, who was appointed CEO of Ferrari on Wednesday, will serve as managing director of Ferrari’s sporting division for a transitional period.

Aldo Costa will head up the team’s chassis department and Giles Simon will lead the engine department. Both men will report to Almondo.

“Ferrari offers its most heartfelt thanks to Ross Brawn and Paolo Martinelli for their immense contribution in the drafting of an extraordinary chapter in the history of the Scuderia and motorsport, which has produced a tally of 11 world titles and of around ninety wins in Formula 1 grands prix,” Ferrari said in a statement.

“After years of hard and demanding work, Ross Brawn has decided to turn his attention to his personal life, while Paolo Martinelli will take on an important role within the Fiat Group: to them go best wishes for a satisfying future.”

Only time will tell whether the new-look 2007 Ferrari team can match the competitive level of the Michael Schumacher/Ross Brawn era, reckons the Italian team's technical manager Nigel Stepney.

With Schumacher now having closed the book on the most successful career in the history of the sport and technical director Brawn expected to take a sabbatical next year, Ferrari faces a major reshuffle.

"It's not going to be easy," team stalwart Stepney told The Times newspaper on Tuesday.

"I don't know at the moment what's happening to Ross, but taking two or three members out of the team and with people moving up into their places - it's difficult to say.

"It depends if everybody respects the people and responds in the same way to their predecessors"

Stepney, who joined the team in 1992 and was famously run over by Schumacher during a pit stop in the 2000 Spanish Grand Prix, typifies the dedicated and devotedly loyal staff that forms the backbone of a team that has secured 11 world championships in ten years.

He believes it's this attitude that is responsible for the team's stunning run of success over the last decade.

"Having over 90% of the team together for that amount of time is unusual – not losing people," he said

"Even if we lost one engineer or some technicians, it didn't upset the applecart and we were able to keep continuity because we all grew up as a team together."

According to Stepney one of the toughest challenges the team faces is integrating new star Kimi Raikkonen into the squad.

The Finn has a very different character to his predecessor, who had to a large extent built Ferrari's racing organisation around himself.

"Nobody can fill Schumacher's boots," said Stepney.

"It's not going to be easy for him [Kimi]and it's not going to be easy for us, because after 10 years you get into a certain rhythm and way of working and understanding and interpreting the driver, and then you get another driver, so it's going to take a while."