“I'm in a good position for sure. This race showed that we do have the best car. But I think we have the best package too.”
So good is his car that Button had no hesitation in proclaiming it the best he has ever driven. “Every single lap you drive in this car you have a smile on your face. I could have carried on for another 200 laps because I was enjoying myself so much,” he said.
An afternoon of deafening sport at Istanbul Park, where unfounded rumours swirled around the paddock that some teams might boycott the race over the budget-capping row, underlined not just the outright superiority of the Brawn package but also the frailty of Button's opposition.
Red Bull have the second-fastest car this year, yet the team based in Milton Keynes has shown it does not always know what to do with it, while its drivers are not in the same class as the Frome flyer.
On Saturday, Vettel got into pole position just ahead of Button in a car that was fuelled two laps lighter. He then blew his race on the first lap when he ran wide at Turn 10, presenting Button with a lead he never looked in danger of losing. On the pitwall the fluent thinking for which Ross Brawn, Button's team principal, is rightly famous, was lacking among the Red Bull brains trust. Instead of dumping the three-stop strategy they started him on - a plan based on Vettel leading from pole - they kept the German on a tactical programme that guaranteed he would neither win nor finish second.
The race in front of largely empty grandstands hammered home another theme this year, namely that Button is in a different league from Rubens Barrichello, his Brawn GP team-mate.
In Turkey, the 38-year-old Brazilian showed again why he is No2 in the Brawn team when, for the second time in seven races, he stalled on the grid by overrevving as the lights turned red. Having dropped from third to thirteenth in the first ten seconds, he then drove like a man possessed trying to recover. In the end, he retired with gearbox failure, making his the first Brawn car not to finish a race in 2009, but not before he had damaged his front wing in a collision with Force India's Adrian Sutil.
In contrast, Button started well and then cruised to the flag. He looked after his tyres beautifully and, even when Vettel pressed him during the second stint, he never faltered.
The threat to Button is supposed to be coming not just from Red Bull but also from Ferrari who have endured one of the worst starts to a Formula One season in the team's history. Matters improved somewhat in Monaco, where Kimi Raikkonen and Felipe Massa finished third and fourth, and there were hopes in Maranello that further progress would be made in Istanbul, where Massa has won from pole for the last three years.
The red cars showed good pace early in the weekend but with race fuel on board the balance went awry and Massa, who started seventh, had to settle for just one place better at the finish. Raikkonen lost places at the start and dropped from sixth to ninth.
Of the others, Toyota have fallen away after early promise with Jarno Trulli and Timo Glock back in the familiar territory of the middle-to-lower top ten - they were fourth and eighth respectively. Renault are struggling for pace with Flavio Briatore, the team principal, already giving up on any title pretensions, while BMW Sauber improved on their woeful performance in Monaco with Robert Kubica, the best of their pairing in seventh.
As for McLaren Mercedes, this season is turning into a dead loss as Lewis Hamilton's team struggles to find speed in a car that was born slow and has stayed that way.
Neither Hamilton nor Heikki Kovalainen, his team-mate, could make much impression from the nether reaches of the grid with the world champion just evading finishing a lap down in thirteenth place, while Kovalainen was lapped in fourteenth.
The former team owner turned pundit, Eddie Jordan, has suggested that this is the worst racing car McLaren have ever produced. The congnoscenti can argue that one. What we do know is that at the team headquarters outside Woking, Surrey, the McLaren intellectual big guns have already forgotten about this disaster and have turned their attention to next year's machine.
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