Last year, at the 2000 British Grand Prix, Jenson Button was the star of the show, the center of what was known as 'Buttonmania'. On that occasion, he lived up to the hype - qualifying sixth and finishing fifth. What a difference a year makes... While Button was qualifying 18th and running yet another obscure race among the backmarkers, to finish 15th in this year's British GP, Roger Horton caught up with the bright young hopeful for a chat about his despair and optimism, the present and the future

Jenson Button breezes in, shakes hands with the handful of journalists sitting around the table and prepares himself for yet another round of questions. This is Silverstone, his home race, and there is more than the usual interest in the young Briton, who last year took the Formula One world by storm in his debut year, but this season has been a regular fixture at the rear of the grid, battling for race positions with the Minardis and Arrows.

"How has your season been so far?" comes the first question. Button winces and tries to force a smile. "Oh my god, can't you just copy it from somebody else?" he replies with some exasperation, but then with the same fortitude he has displayed all year, he launches into his answer. He is clearly on auto pilot, as he trots out the reasons for Benetton's poor season; it is a well rehearsed little speech, and most of those covering the F1 scene have heard it all before, and then some.

Like most things Jenson Button does, he handles his relations with the media well. It helps that he is quite obviously a well brought up young man, who has a natural charm and honesty. What you see is what you get. It is also obvious that he was born to drive F1 cars. Grand Prix racing is his natural environment, an environment where you express yourself by driving an 800 horsepower car through the sweeps and curves of Spa-Francorchamps, and where he has proved that he can do it faster than almost anyone else alive.

Last year Button stunned the F1 world when, on his first ever visit to this classic 6.9 km Belgium track, he placed his BMW-Williams third on the grid. Behind him were both the Schumacher brothers, David Coulthard and Jacques Villeneuve. It was a very special performance, reminding many of four-time World Champion Alain Prost's style, where his deft touch and super sensitive feel caressed his car through the high-speed turns, scrubbing off the very minimum of speed.

Just three races later he would do it again, when he qualified and raced to a fifth place finish at Suzuka, once again convincingly outpacing his teammate Ralf Schumacher - the very same Ralf Schumacher who is now being touted as the next World Champion, destined perhaps to wear the mantle currently worn by his elder brother: the mantle of the best driver in the world, bar none. Ralf stayed at Williams and flourished, Jenson was 'loaned' to Benetton and has struggled.

"It has really been a struggle to get a setup that suits my driving style," he said at Silverstone. "Magny-Cours was a step forward, but we obviously need to continue making these steps as quickly as we can."

It is a song he has been singing all year. As far back as the second race of the year in Malaysia, Button was saying that if the performance level of his car stayed as it was then, his year would be a disaster. Well it has and so it is - no matter how much PR spin is applied to massage away the plain facts that are there for everyone to see.

In Melbourne, the two Benetton cars qualified sixteenth and seventeenth, with Button ahead of his teammate Giancarlo Fisichella, a feat he would achieve only twice in the first eleven races. There, Button was 3.143 seconds slower than pole man Michael Schumacher's Ferrari. At Silverstone, where Jenson was again the quickest of the two, he qualified eighteenth, some 3.676 seconds slower than Michael Schumacher, who was once again on the pole.

For the record, the team's average qualifying time behind the pole sitter's time is some 3.107 seconds for the first eleven races of the season. There are, as they say, lies, damn lies, and statistics. But no matter how you crunch this particular set of numbers, it is hard to see any evidence that overall, the Benetton package is improving relative to the rest of the grid, in qualifying at least.

All this wouldn't matter so much for Jenson Button if he were at least ahead of his teammate more often. He is, after all, the only other guy driving the same equipment, uncompetitive as it currently may be. The qualifying score going into Silverstone was nine-one in favour of the Italian, not a figure, I suggested to Button, he could be happy with.

"Nine to one is it?" he muses, as if this comes as news to him. "Nine to one," he repeats almost to himself. "Well that is on Saturday. The races are on Sunday which is the most important thing, and it's something that people have to understand. You don't win everything on Saturday." Just for a moment an edge has come into his voice that suggests we are on a subject he finds a little uncomfortable.

"But it's true," he continues. "He has been quicker than me in qualifying and that is something I am trying to work on now."

As is now well known, Benetton introduced a new package for the French Grand Prix that will hopefully provide a basis for improvement in the second half of the season. Button, though, says that for him, a major breakthrough came during the European Grand Prix at the Nurburgring when they tried a radical new setup.

"We tried a setup in the Nurburgring warm-up which we didn't expect to work but it did," he says. "We worked on something new because my main problem was in braking. It wasn't a problem in braking late, it was a problem in braking too hard and then the front wheel would lock, so I couldn't get the car as low as I wanted and that makes a big difference with the aerodynamics. But we found a way of doing it now, and I have worked hard on my own braking technique, and it has really made a big difference."

So with such a run of poor results this year, and with the inevitable speculation mounting that somehow he would lose his place in the team, or once again be 'farmed out' to suit the needs of F1's almost constantly changing pecking order, did he ever lose any of his own self-belief?

"On the speed and driving side - no I didn't," he replies. "It was difficult with setting up the car; my inexperience really did show this year. When I was working with an easier car last year, a car that was further up on the grid that really suits my style, it wasn't a problem. But when you get into a car that doesn't suit your style it's very difficult to work with when you're inexperienced.

"But I have learnt so much this year about how to work with the car, and hopefully it will help me over the next year and a half with the team. So much in Formula One is about having the right mental attitude, it's huge, much more than I ever thought. It is very very important to be positive, even if things aren't going very well."

Insiders at Benetton were voicing concerns after Monaco that there were too many people around Button and that he was being distracted at the races. Also, his new high-profile lifestyle, with an expensive boat moored in Monaco's famous harbour and a luxurious mansion in England, were causing him to lose his focus on the task at hand - both charges that he is well aware of, but refutes totally.

"I have two managers, or rather partners as people know, and my father comes to the races as well," Button explains. "I don't think that they cause a problem, but other people see that I am with them a lot after testing or the races. The last few races you could say that I haven't had so many people around me, but I don't think that was causing a problem anyway."

"I am," he adds firmly, "very focused on my goals in Formula One, which is to win races and be World Champion. I am never going to be not focused, because winning is what I want more than anything."

So does it concern him when some people write these sorts of stories about him?

Button: "It doesn't upset me, no. When I am winning I will remember the people who wrote stories like that, so I haven't got a problem with it at all. It doesn't affect my confidence because I am confident in what I can do, and I always will be."

Under the terms of his current contract, Button is tied to Benetton through to the end of the 2002 season. Then, the theory goes, Frank Williams can choose to exercise the option he holds on Button's services for the next two years. Can he look that far ahead and think just which car he might be driving in 2003?

Button: "I think that if Benetton were winning and at the front I would want to be with Benetton, and if Williams are winning, which I think definitely they will be, it would be a good team to race for, but if I have a possibility with any team that's winning, and that would give me a chance of winning the World Championship I would take it, definitely. It's not just Williams, there are other teams also."

But before he can position himself back into a winning team, Jenson Button must turn around the perception that he has somehow lost the plot during his second year in F1. The signs in recent races are positive; he started ahead of his teammate at Silverstone but once again he had a troubled race, losing his power steering early on and struggling home to finish in fifteenth place.

As a rather frustrated technical director Mike Gascoyne reflected afterwards: "We chose the wrong tyres and we weren't quick enough anyway, although Giancarlo and Jenson got about the most out of (the package) as they could anyway."

And that is the story of the race and the season in a nutshell.