Formula One / Ralph Ellis / 15 September 2009 /

Brawn driver may be odds-on to win the Drivers' Championship but the time to ask for money is once the title is won, says Ralph Ellis

If you travel by motorway then Britain is a green and pleasant land. You drive past fields with cows, horses and sheep, punctuated by the occasional golf course.

Just for a change on Saturday I caught the train to work at Anfield. It's a very different picture crossing the country that way. The railway lines go through the grimiest bits of every town and city, and everywhere at the moment there are empty, desolate boarded up former factories and warehouses.

Maybe Jenson Button could do with taking that quick close-up of a nation in recession to remind himself how lucky he is. Instead, at a time when all his efforts should be focused on winning his first ever Drivers' Championship, he's got himself embroiled in a row about a pay rise.

Button, according to this morning's papers, is holding out in talks with his Brawn GP bosses for an extra £5million a year. The story is broken by the Daily Mail's Jon McEvoy, who was weeks ahead of the rest with the news when Ross Brawn first put together his rescue plan after Honda pulled out, so it can probably be trusted.

Button is refusing to sign a new contract until he gets what he wants with the threat he could walk away in the summer. He doesn't think he's being greedy because he took that size pay cut at the start of the season to help the team survive after Honda pulled out. In normal times it would be a fair argument. Button had signed a three-year deal worth £24million that he could have enforced, but sacrificed pay to get the team off the ground. Right now it's not so clever, and all the more so because the team's potential new owners McLaren are already lining up young German driver Nico Rosberg for a transfer from Williams.

He's still not poor and the time to talk money is after you've won the title, and not before. Is this a sign he's not confident it will happen? After finishing second in Monza, Button still holds a 14 point lead in the title race, but he is slipping backwards with every Grand Prix that comes and goes. The last thing he needs is a distraction. He strikes you more and more as a man who is looking for excuses and struggling with his nerves.

Apart from his pay, he's been grumbling that team-mate Rubens Barrichello, his only real rival for the title, has been withholding technical information. Ross Brawn has admitted having to referee between them after Button complained that Barrichello's highly experienced and ultra competitive race engineer Jock Clear was not sharing data from practice sessions. "We are now sharing," said Brawn. "It is imperative that all the information is on the table and it is a fair fight between them."

Button has been matched as tight as [1.18] to win the title, and even now because of his cushion, and the fact there are just four races left, he is [1.29]. Get in and lay that while you can because all the signs suggest there's trouble on the tracks up ahead.

Five things you might not know about Jock Clear

1. Born in 1963 in Portsmouth, his first sporting love was rugby - he played scrum half for England schools and later for Scottish Universities while he was doing an engineering degree in Edinburgh

2. He got a holiday job in the shipyards - and helped a friend there who was "doing up" an old F1 car to run in historic events. That fired a new passion for racing

3. His first job was at Lola cars, where he helped pioneer computer aided designs at the end of the 1980s.

4. He worked for Benetton, Lotus and Williams before joining BAR - later to become Honda then Brawn - at the end of 1998. He was race engineer to Jacques Villeneuve when he won the 1997 World Championship

5. His need for speed takes him ski-ing during time off together with his partner Carmel, and he's won top amateur downhill races.

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