Formula One: Richard Williams on the Passion and Patience of Jenson Button

Laid out amid the dreary industrial zones that separate Barcelona from the mountains, the Circuit de Catalunya is not a place that throbs with the history and romance of grand prix racing. To Jenson Button, however, it is where his formula one career was born, and yesterday it was where he again topped the timing sheets in the second session of practice for the 72nd grand prix of his career.

Six years ago, barely a handful of races into his first season in Formula Ford, the 18-year-old Button arrived at the Spanish grand prix on a mission to make his face known to the people who mattered. In the paddock, the fresh-faced teenager was photographed with Bernie Ecclestone, Frank Williams and Ron Dennis - formula one's biggest wheels. Two years later he was back, this time with the eyes of the world on him as he lined up for a shoot-out in which the prize would be a seat in the Williams formula one team.

Button met that challenge, which made him Britain's youngest ever grand prix driver, in the way he has met most of the others he has faced since his career began at the age of eight, with an engaging enthusiasm. This weekend, a fortnight after he finished second to Michael Schumacher at Imola, his ability to stay calm is serving him well in the face of increasingly noisy claims that he is only a race or two away from becoming Britain's latest grand prix winner. Schumacher is growing accustomed to seeing him on the podium and Ross Brawn, Ferrari's technical director, has spoken of him as a possible replacement for the German one day.

"It's difficult to explain," Button said on his return to Barcelona this week, "but I don't feel any pressure from outside. I put a lot of pressure on myself and I seem to work OK under that kind of pressure. And I think I did an OK job at Imola."

He did a lot better than that, of course, starting the race from pole position in his BAR-Honda and leading the early laps until the superior pace of Schumacher's car carried the world champion away to a fourth consecutive victory. Button, however, was the best of the rest by a considerable margin.

"In qualifying over one lap we're strong compared to Ferrari," he said last night, "but over five or six laps they're very, very strong. It's something we need to work on, but at least we're putting them under a bit of pressure. What gets me excited is that he was the only guy between me and winning at Imola."

Among those unsurprised by the maturity of his display two weeks ago was his father. "People kept asking me how Jenson was going to cope with starting from pole," John Button said in the paddock yesterday. "I told them he's been coping with it since he was eight. Starting from pole when you're eight years old -that's pressure."

John Button, a former rallycross driver, put in the entry for his son's first race 16 years ago on the advice of others who had watched him at the wheel of a kart. "Every karting father believes their son is something special, and I was trying to be realistic. I had no intention to race him at all. Then someone suggested it. So I asked him if he wanted to do it, he said yes, and that was it."

The debut race was at a track in the Dorset hills, an hour's drive from their Somerset home. "It rained more or less all day," John Button remembered. "When he won, I did the unforgivable thing of running out on to the track and jumping up and down. I soon learnt."

Before long his son was making rapid progress through the ranks of championship karting, although resources were sometimes stretched. Every weekend they would set off for a meeting, and their return from one race in Scotland was made possible only when John Button borrowed enough money to fill the tank of his van for the journey home.

Between winning the British cadet champion at 11 and the European championship at 17, Jenson acquired a formal education. At the beginning, his junior and middle-school classmates knew nothing of his exploits. But by the time he arrived at Frome College to study for his GCSEs, it was impossible to disguise the nature of his absences. Nevertheless, he is fondly remembered for refusing to exploit his achievements.

"He kept the two worlds firmly separate," Dave Kitchener, his old form tutor, said yesterday. "He was a regular member of the community, and that was why he was so well liked. If you asked him about what he was up to, he'd tell you. But there was no boasting or bragging."

At 18 he made the transition from karts to cars, and found himself a pair of managers in Harald Huysman, a one-time formula three driver, and David Robertson. Investing heavily in Button's career in return for a 35% share of his future income, they enlisted the help of Keith Sutton, a motor racing photographer who had helped publicise the early career of Ayrton Senna. In return for putting his agency's logo on Button's virgin-white car, Sutton used his contacts to spread the word about the young driver's talent.

It was Sutton who persuaded Ecclestone to grant Button a paddock pass for the Spanish grand prix in 1998, who put together a sponsorship proposal when he moved up to formula three the following year, and who jogged Sir Frank Williams' elbow when Alain Prost offered Button a test in his formula one car.

The much publicised Williams shoot-out, between Button and Bruno Junqueira, the team's established test driver, was supposed to take place in Jerez. When the team's new BMW engines kept blowing up, however, the drivers and cars moved on to Barcelona, where the 20-year-old from Somerset proved not only quicker than the 24-year-old Brazilian but also precociously calm in his approach to the job. And when he got his reward, he and his father met in a tearful embrace.

"We were supposed to be away three days," John Button remembered, "but it turned out to be two weeks before we got home, and the world seemed to have gone mad. I could hardly open the front door for all the cards and letters."

Everyone who saw Jenson Button testing a formula one car noted his unflustered approach. John Fitzpatrick, a former saloon car racer and secretary of the British Racing Drivers' Club, watched his very first laps at the wheel of a McLaren at Silverstone in 1999, the prize for winning the BRDC/Autosport young-driver-of-the-year award. "The weather was atrocious," Fitzpatrick remembers, "and in those circumstances you would have expected him to be a little nervous, but he was supremely confident and outstanding in the wet."

Humphrey Corbett, who supervised his test with the Prost team, was astonished to find Button lapping the Magny-Cours track a second faster than Jean Alesi. "We thought, 'Bloody hell, who is this guy?' He was so relaxed. It was as if he'd been driving an F1 car for five years."

The smoothness and consistency of his style have become a hallmark. "He's not one to muscle the car around," Geoff Willis, BAR's chief designer, said after yesterday's session. "He's trying to make the car work for him rather than fighting it. It's about fingertip control. That's one of the reasons he responds well as the car improves. And this year we've got a much better car."

Jackie Stewart and Ron Dennis were among those who offered Button deals at the start of the 2000 season, but whereas their proposals involved spending two or three years in lesser categories of racing, Williams put him straight in at the highest level. Although he responded by matching the pace of his team-mate, Ralf Schumacher, he lost the seat at the end of the season - as he always knew he might - when Juan Pablo Montoya became available.

Over the following two years Button's career seemed to go backwards as he struggled in the Benetton-Renault team. There were criticisms that he had taken the rewards - the yellow Ferrari, the yacht, the pop-star girlfriend - without first producing the results. At the end of his second year he was replaced by Fernando Alonso, the protege of the team's boss, Flavio Briatore, and some feared that his formula one career might be over. But then David Richards, freshly installed at BAR, took a hand, negotiating a four-year deal with Button's new manager, John Byfield.

"I watched Jenson when he was racing karts," Richards said yesterday. "He was an extraordinary talent. I watched his start in formula one with great enthusiasm, and I was saddened to see the way it somewhat petered out. You know, people do not lose talent overnight. But they can get put in an environment which doesn't allow them to fulfil their promise.

"I think he was probably beginning to become somewhat cynical about the world of formula one, about the way it just picks up and discards people on a whim. But when he became available, I was determined that he was going to join our team. First because I felt there was a great talent that we could help to unleash, and second that as a personality, as an individual, I felt he would fit very well with our team of people. I felt that having a British driver in a British team would be an important asset to us."

Jacques Villeneuve, his first team-mate at BAR, greeted him with a calculated insult. "He's a smiley person," the 1997 world champion told journalists, "and he brings a boy-band element to the team." Button responded by comprehensively outperforming the French-Canadian, who left the team at the end of the season.

By comparison with the blunt Villeneuve, Button blends his professionalism with an approachable air. "The changing culture of the team is in no small way due to his attitude," Richards said. "Formula one teams are a very aggressive environment, and you need that to get the best out of people. But I think you can still carry it off in a polite and respectful way. Jenson recognises the effort that the team give him. I'm sure it's been there all the time, but this year he's gone out of his way to communicate that to people, and the support he's got within the team is extraordinary."

Geoff Willis was the chief aerodynamicist at Williams when Button took his first steps in formula one, and has watched his progress at BAR. "He was always very quick," Willis said, "but what last year showed was that he could take the pressure outside the cockpit. It was a mystery to me why he struggled at Renault. Maybe politics had something to do with it. But BAR is a zero-politics team. We've stepped up to the next level this year, and so has he."

No one is less amazed by this than John Button, who needed to be nudged into giving his son his first race. "Being up against it, having hard times and surviving, it's done Jenson a lot of good," he said. "Now he's back in the limelight when it would have been so easy to disappear."