Jenson Button hung around a while in Melbourne today to bask in the warm glow of victory as fans queued to get the autograph of the winner of the Australian Grand Prix. Nice to be loved, although Australia’s home-grown favourite was not so sure.
Mark Webber not only dashed the hopes of a nation with his erratic drive on Sunday, which included wrecking Lewis Hamilton’s race on the way, but then gave his countrymen a bit of a kicking while they were down.
Webber branded his homeland “a nanny state” when asked his opinion of police who impounded Hamilton’s road car after he was stopped for smoking his tyres on a public road. Webber, Formula One’ straightest talker, pulled no punches on his way to riling government officials.
“I think we’ve got to read an instruction book when we get out of bed - what we can do and what we can’t do,” he said. “It’s certainly changed since I left here. It p****s me off coming back here, to be honest. It’s a great country but we’ve got to be responsible for our actions, and it’s certainly a bloody nanny state when it comes to what we can do.” Well, perhaps Webber had good reason to be, as he put it in somewhat earthy Australian terms, p****d off as his Red Bull team threw away the chance of victory yet again, leaving the door open for Button to sneak through to a celebrated win.If Button’s victory was typically unspectacular, with Hamilton and Fernando Alonso producing the fireworks, it had the experts drooling. Sir Jackie Stewart, the three-times world champion, dropped by the McLaren hospitality suite late on Sunday night to tell Button he had produced a performance in the mould of truly great champions.
“That was a drive that Jim Clark [double Formula One world champion] or I would have been really proud of,” he said over a hearty handshake. High praise indeed.
Button continually bats away any suggestions that he could make himself Britain’s first back-to-back world champion but there was no doubt the thought was swimming around his mind yesterday as he absorbed the acclaim. Multiple champions are rare commodities and only Clark, Stewart and Graham Hill among British drivers won more than one title.
“You want to retain your title — only 30 per cent of drivers do it,” Button said. “But it’s never easy, especially fighting against these exceptional drivers. It would be an achievement to win back-to-back titles with two different teams - but we can’t write that story yet. We don’t come away from Melbourne thinking we can win the next race easily. It’s not like that. We have a long way to go, so we are going to work on it and I hope this win has spurred us all on.”
Button had earned a day off today and he indulged in familiar rituals, repeating the routine of this weekend last year when he won the first race of the season on the way to his maiden world championship: coffee at the same restaurant by the beach in Melbourne’s St Kilda suburb on Sunday and dinner in his favourite Japanese restaurant with Jessica Michibata, his beautiful girlfriend.
Button can’t remember the rituals he went through in Malaysia, where he also won last year, but you can bet he is rooting through his 2009 Filofax for ideas before he flies to Kuala Lumpur late tonight.
Even though his McLaren is not the class of the field, he has somehow taken a victory and good enough points in the first two races of the season to get himself into third place in the world championship, while Sebastian Vettel, the fastest man so far this year, has scored a big fat zero after two breakdowns while leading. That alone is encouragement.
“Vettel had the quickest car but they [Red Bull] weren’t able to make the most of it and didn’t get points,” Button pointed out. “We are picking up points when we don’t have the quickest car and hopefully we will get to a point when we are as quick or quicker.”
Malaysia was the scene of one of Button’s finest, if weirdest hours, when the 2009 grand prix was stopped midway in a torrential downpour and he was awarded half points for leading. Another deluge is on the cards on Sunday but Button will not worry. He is as calm as he was on Sunday when he snatched victory from under the noses of Red Bull’s Vettel and Webber — and he needs no nanny to tell him how to win again in Malaysia.
Source:The Times
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