We all know that Brawn GP had one heck of a season last year. Eight race wins and two world championships for a team which technically didn't exist until a few weeks before the season got underway is a pretty good record. It was a huge gamble for Ross Brawn and the team's management who took over the outfit from Honda in March last year. Nevertheless, it has certainly paid off.

A recent report in the Evening Standard by Pitpass' business editor Chris Sylt revealed that Brawn GP's revenues hit £234.5m last year - more money than any other F1 team has ever made in a single year. However, let's reflect on that for a moment.

Brawn GP had more money flowing into its coffers last year than Ferrari, Red Bull, McLaren and Renault yet it didn't have a car manufacturer or a billionaire backing it. Remarkably, Brawn had even higher revenue last year than in 2008 when it was fully owned by Honda, the biggest-spending car manufacturer in the history of Formula One.

How on earth was this possible? The answer, in a nutshell, speaks volumes about the progress achieved in the past decade in giving F1's teams a fairer share of the sport's spoils.

Brawn GP's 2009 accounts reveal that £92.6m of its revenue came from Honda. The reason for it giving this money was simple: after numerous failed attempts to sell the team Honda handed control to its management and gave them the money which it would otherwise have had to spend on redundancies when closing the team down.

Deducting the Honda payment leaves £141.9m of revenue unaccounted for. An estimated £22.7m of this comes from prize money which the team received for finishing ninth in the 2008 championship. That leaves £119.2m.

Sponsorship only brought in an estimated £11.7m, for although the team was leading the championship for much of the season its livery was largely blank. Brawn GP's biggest-paying partner was Virgin which only spent an estimated £3.2m. The team pulled in a further £6.1m from Bridgestone and other suppliers leaving a total of £101.4m in revenue from other sources.

The clearest indication of who the biggest of those 'other sources' might be comes from the following line in the accounts. Referring to the increased prize money which F1 teams became entitled to on signing the Concorde Agreement in August last year, the accounts state "the company received full payment for all entitlements due up to the end of 2009, including retrospective amounts due from previous years." Brawn had Honda's membership of the Grand Prix Manufacturers' Association (GPMA) to thank for that.

For years the GPMA lobbied F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone about increasing the amount of revenue that the teams received from the sport. Until 2007 the teams' only take from F1 was sharing 47% of the revenue from television rights and this equated to around 25% of the sport's overall profits.

The GPMA negotiated a deal whereby the teams split 50% of F1's profits from all of its revenue sources including the valuable race hosting and trackside advertising fees. This deal was written into the famous Memorandum of Understanding signed in May 2006 with the increased payments beginning the following year. In return, the teams shelved (albeit temporarily) their talk of setting up a rival series. Ecclestone had his own carrot to put a more permanent end to this idea.

He offered teams which signed the Concorde Agreement a windfall payment comprising the difference between the prize money they were paid between 2004 and 2006 and the amount they would have received over that period at the higher 50% rate. Since the difference came to around 25% of F1's profits, it was a pretty big carrot. After the teams finally signed the Concorde Agreement last year the retrospective payments were fully settled as the Brawn accounts reveal.