First corner chaos shouldn't spoil Button's win

The first-corner carnage at Spa robbed us of what the unusual-looking grid suggested would be a sensational Belgian Grand Prix.

While we did get some action as cars that were out of position worked their way through, had all the top-10 qualifiers made it round the first lap intact, it surely would have been a much better spectacle.

However, none of that should detract from the superb performance of Jenson Button. We'll never know for sure what would have happened had everyone else stayed on the road, but he'd already done half the job by getting to La Source safely in front, and there's little solid evidence to suggest that anyone else would have had the speed to beat him in a straight fight.

Indeed from the moment he secured pole in such convincing style the race seemed to be Jenson's to lose. Come Sunday, he didn't put a foot wrong.

"Those sorts of races are made to look easy," said Martin Whitmarsh. "And he was taking it easy and conserving all the way though. But I think people can underestimate what a great drive that is.

"You've got to put yourself in that position, you've got to be able to be quick in qualifying, you've got to be able to not make mistakes.

"I think it was textbook stuff, an absolutely great weekend. He's dominated Saturday and Sunday here, and I'm sure he's going to take a lot of pleasure out of that and build on his confidence."

Saturday set-up decisions proved the making of Button's weekend © LAT

The remarkable thing about Jenson's weekend was how it was turned around by choices made over Saturday lunchtime. Like everyone else McLaren lost a day to Friday's rain, so all the homework had to be compressed into FP3 on Saturday morning.

Both drivers struggled for pace, and some big decisions had to be made for qualifying with only limited information on which to draw.

It's not unusual for team-mates to take different directions on set-up, but we rarely hear much about it. In this case the two drivers went for different rear wings, so it was a bit more obvious to seasoned observers.

Lewis subsequently made sure that everyone else knew about the split in choices and the outcome it had...

Although both he and the team were confident that his high-downforce set-up would work over a lap, for whatever reason the revised package didn't do what it said on the tin; he couldn't make up the time lost on the straights in the more twisty stuff in the middle sector.

"This morning in P3 I had some instabilities with the new wing that we were trying," he explained after the session. "And at the time we had a relatively big gap between ourselves and the Red Bulls and the Ferraris.

"And so we felt on our side of the garage that we should try something to fix it, and for us that was to potentially go to the wing that we used in the last race.

"I was told or we believed that the gap between those two wings wasn't so big. But we proved ourselves wrong. It was obviously the wrong way to go. We made the decision as a team."

Asked if there were any benefits, he added: "There weren't any good points with that wing. We thought there would be benefits of having more downforce, but it didn't feel that way."

"We made a decision, and again I was very involved in the decision," said Whitmarsh. "Sat here this afternoon we feel we made a wrong decision. We didn't have very much data, as you know, and very limited running. We didn't look sparklingly competitive with either car this morning, and thought we'd make some changes.

Button elected to stick with the planned Spa/Monza rear wing... © LAT

"It's easy to under-react and then be kicking yourself, but perhaps we overreacted. We'll see. A lot of things can happen. Tomorrow's another day, it's a long race, and it may let us do some different things in the race."

Meanwhile Button had stuck with the intended Spa/Monza wing, and the contrasting choice reflected a famous example in Italy in 2010, when Lewis opted for traditional straight-line speed and Jenson wanted downforce.

Last weekend JB was happy with the former. "I spoke to my engineers and we decided to stay where we are because with the sun out hopefully the circuit would grip up.

"And we thought it was the best option; we just didn't think running that much drag for today - and also more importantly for tomorrow - would be the right thing.

"It should be good for us, and we should be good in a straight line. We shouldn't need to push as much in the corners. But you never know, and we don't know who's going to be quick either, and consistent."

However, Jenson's crew did make other changes to the car over the lunch break, and he hit the ground running at the start of qualifying.

"As soon as we got to Q1, he was right there," said technical director Paddy Lowe. "We made a few changes, most of which were to some extent a gamble, because we'd had such limited running.

"Difficult to know which one of those was a significant change, or whether it just happened that way as the circuit improved.

"There's a lot of noise in that experiment, because we changed quite a few things and conditions around us changed quite a bit. I think we were more pleased than anyone to see Jenson's pace in Q1. Tremendous."

He carried that pace into Q2 and Q3, topping both sessions and setting two laps that were good enough for pole.

Now he had to turn that into a race victory, and the superior straight-line speed would clearly give him a chance to break clear of any pursuer and stay out of DRS range.

...while Hamilton's side of the garage, to the Briton's cost, returned to the old wing © LAT

The downside was that in theory in low-downforce spec the tyres take more of a pounding as the car slides around more. In Jenson's case that did not prove to be an issue, and indeed from the start the intention was always to stop only once.

"To be honest we thought it might be [one] coming here," said Whitmarsh. "In fact the engineers and the specialists told me that, and I said no way. It shows how much I know! I was sceptical.

"But it was based on the analysis and the data that we had. Of course they [Pirelli] have changed the tyre here so there was a lot of extrapolation of data. It sounded strange to me, but the engineers and strategists are a damn slight cleverer than me, fortunately!"

The limited data gathered on Saturday did not deter the engineers from their plan to go for one stop. And the race unfolded perfectly for Jenson's side of the garage, at least.

He made a good start and stayed clear of trouble, and the four-lap period behind the safety car made a long first stint and a one-stop even more practical, as long as he kept that set of options in good shape.

The loss of most of his main rivals - the cars that started second, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth were all out or delayed - made his life much easier, and after Nico Hulkenberg moved ahead of Kimi Raikkonen to claim second, he was able to open a comfortable gap.

With less of a threat from behind than anyone anticipated, Jenson could drive his own race and focus on saving the tyres. Meanwhile the pitwall monitored what was going on behind, in case anyone on a two-stop became a serious threat.

"We'd planned one-stop, that was our baseline plan," said Lowe. "Obviously you want to watch and see how that turned out, and also be quite wary when people first stopped on what would be clearly a two-stop to make sure we had them covered, Kimi being the leading example of that.

"So we were keeping a very close eye on what he was doing and if necessary would have covered that. As it turned out that wasn't necessary.

Mercedes tried to match McLaren's one-stop strategy, but neither driver could make it work © LAT

"So then we stuck with the one-stop. With Jenson the tyres were fine. To be honest he could have gone longer on the first stint."

Jenson went as far as lap 20 on his options, and crucially he emerged from the stop still in the lead, so nobody was going to hold him up and compromise his strategy.

After that it was pretty straightforward as he ran 24 laps on a set of new hard tyres, remaining a consistent 14s ahead of Sebastian Vettel - who also made it with only one stop - throughout the second half of the race.

In contrast the Mercedes drivers couldn't make it on one stop and had to switch to two, which showed that it perhaps wasn't as easy as Button and McLaren made it look. Together they managed to hit the sweet spot that has been the Holy Grail for everyone this year.

"I had a bit more oversteer in the car, which isn't ideal," said Jenson. "But yeah, the balance was reasonable, and it feels that the first 10 laps were not perfect and then the tyres would come to you. You would lose a bit of front grip and you would get a balance - on both sets. So it was good.

"I knew that Sebastian stopped a couple of laps later than me, so he had a couple of laps' fresher tyres, but he had to pull back 15 seconds, so we were in a pretty good position."

Once again Jenson showed that when the package is right he is as good as anyone out there.

"I think the car's working well, I think more than that he's found a great way to drive round here," said Lowe. "We saw that last year, he was very strong here, he drove a great race. If he'd qualified better he would probably have won the race. He certainly drove tremendously then and we've seen that again today."

With Raikkonen behind Hulkenberg, Button opened up a comfortable gap © LAT

"He has certainly performed well in the last few races," said Whitmarsh. "And exceptionally well here, and there's no reason why he can't be on a massive roll and score lots of points and lots of victories in the run-in of this season. Likewise Lewis can as well.

"Our job is to give them the best possible car, make sure we don't make mistakes, do some good pitstops, run the right strategy. I think we did all of those things right, and therefore they went unnoticed.

"According to our data it was a 2.49s so it was the first time in F1 that the average of all the stops was less than 2.5s for sure - albeit the average was one! Great job there.

"Those things go unnoticed, and it's probably best when pitstops and strategy and all the decisions taken by the team go unnoticed because it probably means they are not too bad."

The unanswered question was what would have happened to Hamilton had he made it beyond the first corner. His high-downforce choice was made with an eye to the race and not just qualifying, and the team remains convinced that it was a good choice.

"Kimi had a very similar set-up to Lewis aerodynamically," said Lowe. "There were a few interesting things about that in terms of our choice for Lewis. The first one was he went for the two-stop, and if anything you would have thought that would have helped him with a one-stop.

"The other point was although he was easy prey with the straightline speed in the race, in the end his performance came through, and he got to third place. You could arguably say he should have beaten Vettel, as he started ahead of him, nevertheless it wasn't a disastrous set-up for him.

"I'm sure if Lewis would have been in the race he would have been right up there and could well have been on the podium with Jenson."

Whitmarsh was similarly supportive of Hamilton's choice: "Jenson got it right for him, but Kimi was on the podium and he had more downforce than Lewis, Kobayashi didn't feature but could have. Fifty per cent of the top 10 had broadly equivalent downforce.

The violent first corner crash cost Hamilton a shot at the podium © LAT

"I think Lewis could and should have been on the podium today, and I think he would have run a one-stop. It would in my opinion be easier to run a one-stop with high levels of downforce, but Kimi ran two stops with it and got himself onto the podium as well.

"To be very clear I felt after P3 where Lewis was unhappy that we should go to that downforce setting. We'll never know how successful he could have been in the race. I think he could have done very well, but we don't know that."

As for Button's successful Spa package, it certainly bodes well for next weekend's Italian GP, although not everything is transferable.

"I think it's not that far off what we might run in Monza, Jenson's set-up," said Lowe. "So that's encouraging, that package is working well. A lot of the elements that we used today will go into what we run at Monza."

As mentioned earlier, in 2010 Button and Hamilton made different choices in Italy, with the latter running high downforce and ultimately losing out to his team-mate.

Inevitably there will be similar experiments up and down the pitlane this coming Friday, with the need to optimise DRS and KERS to be taken into consideration as well.

"I was looking back at that myself," said Lowe, "because in 2010 we had a big split. That was complicated by the fact that we had the F-flap, and our Monza wing wasn't an F-flap wing and that did flatter the high downforce in an unusual way.

"We still have an element of that effect, though. Lower downforce wings have a lower DRS delta, so they've got less authority to drop downforce, less to start with, so an element of that can still apply."

Perhaps even more importantly for McLaren than the nuances of aero set-up, their man Button has his mojo back.

"People quickly got on the case of his loss of form, but I think he's actually always believed in himself," said Whitmarsh. "He was frustrated when it didn't go well, but with a performance like that he's got to believe he's capable of getting up there now.

"It's a long old season. We've clearly got a quick car, we've been quick both sides of the break on very different circuits. I think that must be reassuring for him and must give him the confidence that he can get the job done."