Star of the Race
Robert Kubica, BMW, 2nd
Kubica came alive at Interlagos and delivered a podium that had only looked likely after qualifying in the wet on Saturday. It was an impressive error free drive and at times in the race had Mark Webber worried.

Overtaking Move of the Race
Lap 6, Jenson Button on Romain Grosjean
Button produced four great overtaking moves during the course of the race - on Grosjean, Nakajima, Kobayashi and Buemi. Grosjean's was the best because it was the riskiest and also because he overtook the Renault driver at a place nobody else did, in a way nobody else did. He swung out wide at Lake Descent then switched to draw alongside Grosjean at the inside of the next turn, then left him room on the inside for Ferradura. Other drivers might have been tempted to move across earlier and risk getting tagged - as he had been at Spa - but Button found grip on the outside of Ferradura and was away.

Vettel's pass on Barrichello at Ferrardura was also impressive, but at that stage the cars were mismatched with the Brawn far heavier than the Red Bull.

Winners

Jenson Button, Brawn, 5th
He may have qualified badly on Saturday, but in reality it was only Rubens' good luck that got the Brazilian through into Q3. Had Kamui Kobayashi not made an error on his final qualifying run then Rubens would have been starting the race from P.11, just three slots in front of Jenson. He ended up Q2 in P10.

Button was extremely sensible on his opening lap and decided to follow Grosjean through Turn 1 and see what everyone else was doing. It proved to be the perfect strategy and then once the Safety Car disappeared it was all systems go.

After dispatching Grosjean and Nakjima it was bad luck to come up against Kamui Kamikaze who clearly had decided the he needed to make a name for himself in his debut race. At first he was robust in his defence of P6 which is fair enough. But then he started to move around in the braking zones, which is the kind of sin that you can get away with as an experienced driver who's proven they know the art of F1 driving, but when you're a rookie it can be taken as "I don't know what the hell I'm doing."

With Kobayashi dispatched it was a clear run for four laps only. Jenson had the bad luck to find a heavily fuelled Mark Webber emerge in front of him and instead of pitting on Lap 32 was forced to come in three laps early and as a result emerged into a gaggle of Buemi, Raikkonen and Grosjean.

So it wasn't all plain sailing for JB and though the BBC commentary team did their best to point out that Jenson had "everything falling into his lap". It didn't. His one huge bolt of good fortune was the Sutil, Trulli and Alonso incident. Now that was handy.

Mark Webber, Red Bull, 1st
Mark's qualifying form was brilliant and only low fuel in Barrichello's Brawn robbed him of pole position. In the race he was lucky that the stewards they'd drafted in were busy looking elsewhere on the opening lap. His move to block Raikkonen into Lake Descent was potentially worthy of a drive-through penalty; replays showed that he moved over to cover the inside line, stopped, then realised Raikkonen had a lot more speed than he originally thought and he had to move again, at which point the Ferrari front wing went CRUNCH! Like penalties in the Premiership - we've seen them given, we've seen them not given. What was astonishing was that they decided to look at Vettel spinning round Heikki Kovalainen and not this.

Webbo put his head down, kept close to Rubens and eked out two more laps of fuel from the Safety Car period than was predicted at the start, thus giving him an advantage at the first stops that he never lost. A thoroughly professional job done.

Lewis Hamilton, Mclaren, 3rd
At last Lewis Hamilton got onto the podium in Brazil. Even with that dinger of a KERS button Lewis wasn't able to make the same moves as Jenson Button or Vettel in the race, but he finally threw it up the inside of Rubens on Lap 62. Barrichello left him precious little space against the pitwall and in squeezing him so hard broke Lewis's wing endplate and punctured his own left rear.

Mclaren now lead Ferrari in the constructors'

Sebastian Vettel, Red Bull, 4th
Interviewed after the race it was impressive to see that Sebastian Vettel was more articulate in his adopted language of English than Jenson Button is in his native tongue. Yet the big surprise of the race was how long it took him to get past Kazuki Nakajima who supposedly had a car set up for the wet.

It was always going to be an uphill struggle after qualifying in P16 on Saturday and the disappointment of dropping out of the title battle is probably exacerbated by seeing his team-mate win the race.

Kimi Raikkonen, Ferrari, 6th
The flame-grilled Finn made a fantastic recovery to claim P6, considering his team-mate didn't have to come in at the end of Lap 1 and still finished 37 seconds behind him. Raikkonen has every right to be aggrieved by Webber's swerve on the back straight that took away his front wing. It looked a bit rude. Though you could argue that he was pretty lucky that his own chop across Adrian Sutil's bows at Turn 1 didn't result in him being tagged and turned round.

Sebastien Buemi, Toro Rosso, 7thA strong race from Buemi who once more was miles ahead of his team-mate.

Losers

Rubens Barrichello, Brawn, 8th
Rubens got the glory pole position on Saturday but had already sold his soul to the devil by doing it on low fuel. Had it been wet on Sunday, the field would have spread more, and so it might not have been too bad a wheeze. But it wasn't wet.

There was a bit of mystery surrounding his fuel consumption, too. Barrichello had been predicted to come in at the start on Lap 21 and even though we had four laps behind the Safety Car, he still came in on Lap 21. Kubica managed to save an extra lap of fuel to come in on Lap 24 (not 23) and Mark Webber saved two to pit on Lap 26 (not 24). The significance of all this is that Rubens emerged into traffic that delayed him while Kubica and Webber easily jumped past into P2 and P1. From that point onwards he was destined to score P3 or worse, allowing Button the luxury of finishing seventh to win the title at Interlagos. The puncture at the end was self-inflicted - "You cannot believe this man's luck at Interlagos" sighed Leggard in the commentary box, failing to grasp that if you don't leave enough room for a car that's clearly going to overtake and it then hits you, its not bad luck, it's bad judgement.

Jarno Trulli, Toyota, DNF
Aaah, it was quite nostalgic seeing Jarno Trulli race over to have a go at Adrian Sutil after the Toyota driver made a serious error of judgement on the opening lap. It reminded me of the Piquet vs Salazar contest at Hockenheim (wonder whatever happened to that Nelson bloke?).

If you place yourself on the outside of a fast corner when you are trying to overtake you are always likely to be washed onto the kerbs or the run-off. Trulli's error was that he didn't compute that Sutil was working out which way Raikkonen was going to go when he tried to squeeze by.

Trulli's ire was certainly genuine (all $10,000 of it), but the stewards put it down to a racing incident, which was a good call.

Adrian Sutil, Force India, DNF
Remained remarkably calm considering he had F1's first road rage of the new millennium jabbering into his helmet. Alonso, who was the completely innocent party, calmly got into the truck

Kamui Kamikaze, Toyota, 10th
Kobayashi was both impressive and mental in equal quantities at Interlagos. He showed anyone who cared to watch that he had speed - which is probably the most important thing. He also ably demonstrated that he has no respect for F1 or his fellow drivers and that is dangerous. His swerve into Nakajima which left Kazuki's Williams in need of a lot of spare parts on the outside of Lake Descent, was not his first swerve of the day. He'd done it before running through the Senna Esses to keep Nakajima behind.

Worryingly the stewards didn't want to investigate that at all. A major accident involving a rookie in his debut race and they weren't even going to review it...?

Madness.

Heikki Kovalainen, McLaren, 49th
We'll probably find out when Heikki's sacked from the team that his Lap 2 fireball was a deliberate attempt by McLaren to impede their major rivals. This was a cynical attempt to turn Kovalainen's McLaren into a flame thrower and toast the opposition in the battle for third in the Constructors' Championship. And what an act of kindness from the Brawn mechanics to take his fuel rig off for him.

BBC Commentary
The row of seats on the pitwall occupied by the race engineers and team chiefs is known as the "pratt stand" but this was yet another GP when the commentary proved conclusively that they need a big one in the BBC booth. Leggard may have greater accuracy than Murray Walker but come back James Allen all is forgiven. Move over Crofty, you're wanted.

Meanwhile Jake Humphry, David Coulthard and Eddie Jordan did an impressive job of filling the gaps with commentary during Saturday qualifying delays. Jordan was at his mischievous best in Brazil, no other pundit could have the ability to run into a garage and grab a team principal or co-owner (in the case of Patrick Head) and drag him out for an interview. If they hand out broadcasting awards for making it up as they go along then this weekend's coverage has got to be in with a shout.

By the end of it, the BBC Sport boys were desperate to get out of the way of the scheduling juggernaut that is Strictly Come Dancing which is convincingly losing the television ratings battle on Saturday Night against Simon Cowell's X Factor. Jake knew that three guys under an umbrella wasn't going to help over much.

They finally escaped to BBC2 as Bernie delivered the comedy line of the programme. Told by Ted Kravitz that "everyone on BBC1 has gone off to watch Bruce and Tess" Bernie replied in his best deadpan, "I feel sorry for them, to be honest."

And by the way Leggard, Jenson Button's middle name is "Alexander"

Andrew Davies