Q & A with Jenson Button

The Brawn driver, however, says he is ready to give it all to leave Interlagos as the world champion.

AUTOSPORT heard from the championship leader ahead of a crucial race.

Q. So qualifying took more than two hours and 40 minutes. At one stage it looked quite good, but ultimately ended in frustration and disappointment for you.

Jenson Button: Yeah, the first 10 minutes were good for me - and that was about it. In Q1 the car was working well. I had a little bit of oversteer, and we were struggling with the rear tyres as they were going away. We thought we were overheating them and that is because the pressures were very high. And when we eventually got out in Q2 to set the lap times, we had lowered the rear pressures quite a bit - the reason was because of the aquaplaning. But the problem was we lowered the rear pressures and I had so much understeer - it was like I didn't have a front wing on the car.

So we struggled with that when the circuit was in the condition for wet tyres, extreme tyres. After that it was just greasy and it had gone really - and I had grained the front tyres as well, which was a surprise because with this tyre it seems like the rear normally goes away more than the fronts. That was it.

I am very disappointed to be down where I am. [Sebastian] Vettel is behind me, but Rubens is on pole. It was a terrible qualifying and very frustrating. You can say that we should have run with the intermediate tyre, but the pace was not there on the wet tyre - and that was the issue. On the first two laps I had massive amounts of understeer and I just could not do anything with it, whereas in Q1 the car was working well and I was sixth quickest. So it is difficult to understand where it went really.

It makes tomorrow very interesting. It is going to have to be a hell of a race from me, and I don't want to just be picking up a couple of points. I want a much better result than that, so I am going to be fighting tomorrow - as I am sure there will be a couple of other people fighting through the back.

With the weather I don't know what is going to happen. I would rather it was dry. We have a very good pace in the dry, and there are good possibilities for overtaking so I think it could be a fun race in the dry - and it is a going to be a hell of a race.

Q. Do you sit there and think about 'what if' from your own perspective, or do you look at what happened to Rubens who, by the skin of his teeth, got into Q3 and then pulled out all the stops?

JB: I think he struggled a little bit with the tyres as well, but not like I did on the wet tyre. He said that he had a balance in Q2, and I was a long way from that. After the first couple of laps I added all the front wing I could and opened the diff as much as I could because it was locked previously, but then the problem was it was getting greasy and the rear tyres had gone away. As well as having the understeer I had lost a lot of rear grip so I was just skating around.

Q. If it does now go to Abu Dhabi and Sebastian Vettel is out of the equation as he could well be, is that some sort of comfort for you that you will only be fighting your team-mate?

JB: Not really. You want it done as soon as possible, for sure. Today was frustrating. We felt we had very good pace in the wet this morning, and also in Q1. So it is just frustrating. Yeah, it is difficult to know where the pace went really. And it is the smallest of set-up changes that made a massive difference in qualifying. I suppose you could say it was a slightly wrong call - but when you make a set-up change like we did with the tyre pressures it should not be that big. But we found that it was.

Q. Did the whole situation of waiting for qualifying to run disturb you in any way?

JB: No, I was very relaxed and pretty happy. Q1 was good and the car was working really well in Q1. I was really happy. I knew we had to make some improvements because the rear tyres were getting damaged very easily. I thought we could make those improvements and the car worked really well in Q2. So it was a massive surprise to me in Q2. I was pretty relaxed. It was horrible to see, obviously, all the people having issues and also [Vitantonio] Liuzzi's accident. The circuit was very wet when we restarted a couple of times so they did the right thing to postpone and we did not start until 4pm really, when the rain stopped. And that was the correct thing to do because there was so much standing water in corners and also on the straight, which is the scary place if you are aquaplaning.

Q. Were you and Rubens running the same pressures in Q2?

JB: I don't know. You will have to ask the engineers. I haven't asked the question yet, I have been too pissed off to ask any serious questions. But we will run through all the information tonight. We've had to do our fuel load so that is what we have been concentrating on most of all, for tomorrow. It could be wet, it could be dry tomorrow. It is a tough one but we have the option to choose fuel loads, and we will see hopefully quite soon what people are running. That is the only positive you can take from starting where we are.

Q. You have said you would prefer a dry race, but with rookies around you like Romain Grosjean and Kamui Kobayashi, would it not be easier to pick them off in the wet?

JB: Yeah, but it is very difficult to see where you are in the wet. It is difficult to overtake because of the spray, especially when there is a lot of spray because the tarmac here gives a lot of spray.

That is why it is frustrating I am so far back because I enjoy the wet, and we have been good in the wet this weekend. So it is very frustrating. But in the dry I know we have a good straight-line speed, so that will help us quite a bit. Also the cars in front of us are more competitive in the wet than in the dry. There are quite a few people in the top ten or in front of us, top 13, who will not have the pace we have. In the dry we will have good possibilities to overtake. In the wet it is difficult, but if it is wet and it is drying or if it is raining during the race, everything like that is good for me because anything can happen and it mixes it up a little bit.