Jenson Button

On the face of it Spa should have been a circuit that suited the BAR-Honda, and bearing in mind that Jenson qualified third on his first visit with Williams in 2000, it's also a place he loves. But the rain on Saturday didn't do him any favours, and he had to settle for 12th.

From there a good first lap was imperative, but at the first corner the nightmare scenario happened when he lost his front wing against the back of Felipe Massa's Sauber. It seemed that the race was over before it had started.

"I turned into Turn 1 and Kimi and Massa were hitting each other on the outside," explained Jenson. "I thought I'd be able to go down the inside of Massa, but I got hit from Pizzonia in the rear, which jumped me forward a little bit."

Like other drivers who received damage at La Source - Massa, Rubens Barrichello and Olivier Panis - his race was saved by the accident at the top of Eau Rouge. It not only took some cars out, it also created a safety car that allowed Jenson to pit and fit a new front wing without penalty. He didn't really see what actually happened at the top of the hill.

"I was just trying to fight the car, because I didn't have a front wing," he said. "I've looked at the footage, and it looked like Taku went round the outside of Webber, and Webber just understeered into Taku because he didn't have a front wing on the car. There was debris everywhere [before that], because Webber's front wing fell off, and my front wing fell off."

After the safety car period expired everything fell into place, and Jenson made his way steadily up the leader board as other cars retired. It all went wrong when, like Coulthard and Montoya, he suffered a left rear Michelin failure. His was the most spectacular, as the tread peeled off and left him with very little chance of controlling the car. There was no warning.

"I didn't know about it until I got there. You'd think you'd feel it through Eau Rouge, so it wasn't a slow puncture or anything, because I would have felt it through Eau Rouge. Suddenly it just went.

"You can't do anything. As soon as you lift off, because of the difference in force into the tyre, you immediately snap sideways anyway. Your immediate reaction is obviously to slow down. I lifted off and it snapped one way, and I caught it, and it went the other way."

After losing control he bounced off the unfortunate Minardi of Zsolt Baumgartner, which at least avoided what could have been a nasty impact with the barriers.

"I was really lucky the Minardi was there in one way. It could have been a lot worse. Also I was lucky that I didn't hit his rear wheel or something. Both cars stayed on the road, which was fantastic to see, because it could have been pretty serious. I was very lucky.

"It's pretty scary when it suddenly snaps. The lucky thing is there is so much run-off there, because it wasn't at the end of the straight yet. I hadn't started braking, so I was nowhere near the barriers. But when you look behind you and you're still doing 160mph backwards it's pretty weird not knowing where you're going..."

After the race there was a lot of discussion about whether there was a specific reason why the three tyres had failed, especially as Toyota's Ryan Briscoe had a similar problem in practice, albeit on the left rear, which was blamed on the chicane kerbs.

"Maybe there is, maybe there isn't. Hopefully they'll find out. You can't go racing like this, being unsure whether the tyre is going to last or not. You don't crash at 200mph unless you have a failure, and it was obviously a big shock for both of us.

"It's a pretty serious problem if you have four people have failures, and at over 200mph it can be very dangerous. It needs to be sorted out before we test [at Monza] even, not just before the race."

Meanwhile he had to rue the lost of valuable points. The only consolation was that he wasn't the only driver to have bad luck.

"We definitely would have finished third, but the BMWs had finished the race, it would have been pretty close. Without the BMWs there we would have been easy third, considering how bad our qualifying was and how bad the first lap was for me, because I lost the front wing."