We were hoping for another opportunity to run a Jessiqa Pace shot this week (LAT)

Speaking of the championship leader, I think it’s time for a lot of us, me included, to reexamine the curious case of Jenson Button. His 153-race career in F1 coming into the season earned him heaps of scorn as an overhyped, underperforming poster boy for the theory that not every world-beating junior standout is future world championship material.

To be fair, there was plenty of reason to get excited about him early on: a British national karting star before he was ten years old, winning at every level up to the world championship. British Formula Ford Champion in 1998, third overall and top rookie in British Formula 3 the following season despite racing a less than competitive package, winner of the AutoSport McLaren BRDC Young Driver Award, followed by impressive F1 tests for McLaren, Prost and finally Williams, where he beat out Bruno Junqueira for the seat alongside Ralf Schumacher. He was hailed as Britain’s next great F1 star. He didn’t win that first season in 2000, but the publicity machine insisted he would, and soon.

Then it all went sideways. Transferred to Benetton the next season to make way for Juan Pablo Montoya at Williams, the results never came. Then to BAR, where he became a number one driver for the first time and finished third in the championship. But he still had not won a race, and the whispers grew louder: flash in the pan, not a leader, not fit enough, yadda yadda yadda. There were rumors that Button enjoyed the playboy grand prix lifestyle more than doing the hard work required to succeed amid the technical grind and political backstabbing of F1. In both 2005 and 2006 there were ugly contract fights involving Williams and BAR that portrayed Button as selfish and mercenary. His first win finally came in Hungary three seasons ago, followed by another fallow period with Honda that made the win look more and more like a fluke.

Looking back through assorted press reports from back in the day, I was struck by something. No matter how his race went, Button demonstrated a trait many single out when discussing the strengths of Michael Schumacher: Button never threw his team under the bus, even amid the Honda disaster of 2008. It was never “me” and “them” but rather “we.” And now that Button has been a fixture in the middle seat at the post-race television interviews, there is no gloating from him, either. Perhaps we should all have looked deeper into why Ross Brawn decided to keep Button as one of his drivers for the debut of Brawn GP this season, that Brawn wasn’t just looking for someone to keep the seat warm until the car was good. It appears now that Brawn knew exactly what he had.

Jenson Button was always thought of as the guy just taking the money and wasting his talent in F1. And putting aside the ugly scenario surrounding his Spanish win at the expense of teammate Barrichello, Button has shown himself to be the faster man in an identical car. So all credit to Button, who is in the process of proving that, in a car that he can work with, he may be every bit as good as advertised a decade ago.

Now it’s on to Turkey with it’s awesome high-speed, four-apex Turn 8. Once again the teams will be bolting on new aero packages in the hope of reeling in the Brawns. We’ll find out whether Ferrari is for real, while McLaren-Mercedes, Toyota and especially BMW-Sauber need to come up with something special, and quickly.

Oh, and one final note to the poster at SPEEDtv.com who thought my mentioning the prominent Martini billboard in Monaco featuring American model Jessiqa Pace once in each broadcast amounted to an obsession: apparently the drivers found her photo distracting enough to ask that the billboard be moved before the race. They don’t find you and me and a hundred million other live worldwide television viewers to be intimidating, but a photo of Ms. Pace was? I rest my case.

Play Super 7 Sweep Fantasy Racing powered by Wind Tunnel!