On Saturday evening on the way from the Interlagos circuit to his hotel in Morumbi, Jenson Button and the other occupants in the car in which was travelling were attacked by armed assailants. Vodafone McLaren Mercedes had provided both Jenson and team-mate Lewis Hamilton with bullet-proof vehicles driven by police drivers, who had been trained in avoidance techniques and were armed. The police driver of Jenson’s vehicle reacted swiftly and, using avoidance techniques, rapidly forced his way through the traffic, taking Jenson and the other occupants of the car away from any danger and back to their hotel. Neither Jenson nor the other occupants of the car – his father John Button, his trainer Mike Collier and his manager Richard Goddard – were hurt. The Sao Paulo authorities have also acted efficiently and will be providing additional security to transfer Jenson and other senior Vodafone McLaren Mercedes personnel to the Interlagos circuit for Sunday’s Brazilian Grand Prix.
The attack is not the first in F1 in Sao Paulo and there are bound to be questions asked about whether it is wise to continue visiting a facility where F1 people are targets for local thieves and hoodlums.
joeblogsf1 
Curious, Joe — have you felt safe covering races at Interlagos? This is precisely the kind of incident that has prevented me from seriously considering a trip to the race in the past, much as I would love to see the circuit.
Colin,
Safe is not a word I use about the area where these attacks always happen… But what do you expect if you take rich people into a poor place where they have guns…
Very concerning, well done Joe on beating every news website to the case, as always, glad to hear everyone is alright
Not a good day for Jenson.
That’s a total disgrace. Poor guy must be so angry right now, I really feel for him.
Sadly these kind of things happen frequently in São Paulo and even more so in Rio de Janeiro.
Those who don’t have trained drivers and bullet-proof vehicles just hand over the car, the money and anything else the robbers want.
That way you get away alive.
This is insane. F1, or any other form of outside racing (read Indycar) cannot subject themselves to terrorism. The implications speak for themselves. The Brazilian GP needs to be dropped from the series a.s.a.p.
This’s just another example how thing are going in Brazil and you’re spot on mate. F1 should left SP long time ago… It’s a shame the track is terrible no room for the team develop work and F1 is still racing in that shit facility. Give a chance for a new markets such as USA, Bulgaria and others place uo to host an F1 GP
Wow Joe, good to hear that ‘our Jense’ is ok, but that sort of protection isn’t available to everyone. How do you feel about having to work in such a dangerous place ??
Cities are dangerous places, Cynthia.
This is what happened when F1 goes outside Europe. There is no single non-european event without problems!
If Bernie likes the local circuit promotor then it does not matter if its in the Lebanon. Interlagos is a great ciruit with poor facilities, this does not matter though.
However it did matter for the BRDC. Funny that, maybe they upset him somehow!
Good ole Bernie.
It’s excellent to hear everything turned out well, but if questions are going to be asked about Brazil, they could very well be asked about any other country on the calendar.
It was probably just someone out to film Operación Fangio II: The Brazilian Job.
Maybe they should pull the race of the callender until they get their act together.
Joe, are there other places in the season that are as bad as this or is this the only one?
Craig,
Brazil is the worst. End of story. I have been worried in Mexico and Johannesburg and Sao Paulo. That is all.
Ivan you need to open up your mind a great deal. The only place renowned for such violence is Brazil in the F1 calendar, isnt ?
Joe, how do you journalists take care of your own safety there cause I don’t think the thieves targeted Jenson in particular. Toyota staff were subject to the same attack years ago.
Besides, that raises big questions about the organisation of the world cup and the olympics by Brazil. The latter is a further nightmare because the athletes are so many and the competition facilities are so much spread that it’s a nightmare and I’m not even talking about the spectators safety.
They heard Jenson was hiding a very valuable “good setup” under his nomex overalls, and figured they could flip it to his fans for a tidy sum?
Seriously though, that’s one huge, and mainly very poor city they got there, despite Brazil being a genuine economic miracle since they flunked their last miracle (Brady bonds, anyone?) but it’s a very very populous country . .
Joe, “[. . .] whether it is wise to continue visiting a facility where F1 people are targets for local thieves and hoodlums” . . .
I think that’s a sad thought, whch in my view shouldn’t be acted upon, or pursued.
Picking on Jenson’s police protected armoured ride is not a hoodlum’s regular target. Not your average random thuggery.
These are unfunny times, and waiving a billion dollar circus whose stars are these days molly coddled mommy’s boys even compared to not very long ago, was maybe waiving a red ra -cough, not going there- a bit much for someone’s taste.
Doesn’t sound so much random to me, as a statement. “I’m suffering, so i’ll try to hurt the rich boys’ games”. If so, i hear them loud. Pity, because there’s much more to say about social mobility and socio-economic progress in Brazil in 15 years than there is to say about the UK in 40 or more.
– j
Ivan,
think about these new out of town circuits, plunking a bit of Tilke in the desert or a pencilled city . . .
doesn’t it make you think of the “gated communities” which sprang up like topsy in the early 80s in the US?
Chris Rehm,
Your comment is tortological: when you add “The implications speak for themselves” you make a strong inference as to what “subjecting . . to terrorism” [sic] means: i.e. it has specific results. You then suggest a specific result, taking the GP off the calendar. In other words, i read you as saying “capitulate now”. Which is the opposite of being preventative.
This was almost certainly a very rare politicised attack.
I wholeheartedly reccomend this man’s insights: http://www.schneier.com/
– j
John,
You are talking rubbish
Before someone gets on to me about this, I am not suggesting there was a plot to target Jenson’s car, nor ruling out plain random chance.
My thought was simply that you need to be very out of it not to spot an armoured car up close, to not notice (armed?) escort occupants, and to still proceed with your attempted heist. But, let’s say you are high as a kite, and you’ve gotten right up to the vehicle which from afar you’ve identified as containing some rich people, then you make any kind of connection to the F1 circus, or are just frustrated, so you get even more hyped, angrier, and think f’kit, and take out your frustration.
That there is a even tenuous connexion to the F1 circus in motivation here, i’m speculating because i expect the race has blanket media coverage locally, because the occupants may have been recognisable, because there has to be some logic, even subconsciously, why anyone would proceed with a unwinnable attack. Even people truly out of it act on internal logic.
@Ivan,
Your opinion is ill-conceived. As Joe explained, this is a problem particular to Sao Paulo and the reasons are known to everyone.
To sugget Europe is the only continent in the world where F1 should reside, because such incident don’t take place there, is living in a fantasy world.
Don’t be naive, especially when you are posting opinions on a site known for its content and visitors.
Dammit,
i just read the official statements elsewhere:
“armed would-be assailants made an attempt to approach”
is the operative phrase.
How armed?
From what distance?
No attack was initiated then?
Was this a marked or unmarked car?
Were they simply fans?
Were they in fact moving away from something else, a possible threat?
So, i can scratch a lot of my theorizing above about motivations for an attack which never took place, but keep my “this is overreaction” tone nicely tuned as to the commentary.
John
Six blokes with machineguns. How much evidence do you want? The driver took out several cars getting out of the incident
Ivan,
I have to disagree with you. I considered Australia, Malaysia, China, Canada, Singapore, Japan, and Korea are very safe. I have never been to Turkey nor the Middle-East so I cannot comment on those three tracks.
As a Brazilian I feel very sorry for Jenson, and very ashamed to what happened. I do not appreciate comments of European superiority and also think that Europeans should reflect more about the impacts of their external policies over third countries, in present and also historically. Why do you guys think South America is mostly poor? basically because it had all its wealth (i.e. diamond, gold, silver, suggar, coffe and bananas et cetera) stolen by Europeans and Americans. what it did create? a unbalanced society. It is whose fault? everyone! this is why some drivers do this:
Barrichello – http://ibk.org.br/en/index.php
Senna – http://senna.globo.com/institutoayrtonsenna/ingles/home.asp
Massa – http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/brazil_41392.html
As a voice of my country I hope you guys can have a second thought on why there are poor people in third world countries and why these people need have guns and rob other people.
it much better than turn your back to Brazil. sorry for any writing-English mistake I may have committed.
I think F1 should stay in Brazil, but I believe that F1 drivers and the F1 community should do more to help the local community so we can irradicate incidents such as this happening again. This also entails working with the local police and the Government too.
It’s the huge disparity between F1 – a billion dollar business – and people stuggling just to live and eat every day.
We should not be walking away from countries, especially when it is the West’s fault that Brazil and other former third world countries countries are as poor (as in the general population rather than the minority in government/business/ drugs etc who are bringing in the big money). We need to be working together and doing more to give back to the Brazillian community, and ensuring revenue from the event is used to improve the lives of the women, children and families living in appalling conditions.
” … a poor place where they have guns …”
Outward flow of brains and capital from PIIGS countries will continue and within a few years one or more will be … poor.
Brains and capital do not dissapear into thin air but flow into BRIC countries, all of which including Brazil are getting richer, a trend that will continue through the coming decade.
Peaceful Brazilians (most) live in the real world i.e. have not surrendered their right to bear arms to repel aggressors.
Visitors may contract security to get the same results, and Jenson’s case is no exception.
there are a few sets of traffic lights leaving the track on the one road back to all the hotels. it’s a bit of a gauntlet everyone has to run and F1 personnel are easy targets, easily identified by big bright car parking stickers in the front windows.
it’s not safe, but even having been through it myself, i don’t think we should stop coming here, they just need to put measures in place to improve security in this one stretch, which runs down the side of a very poor area.
as for security at other races, there are no problems either inside or outside of europe (unless you are quite stupid in places like hungary). to suggest that races outside europe may be more dangerous, you’ve clearly not been to a race at singapore, japan, malaysia, bahrain, australia, canada etc
Sort of makes you wonder that if it was one Bernard C. Ecclestone and not Jenson Button involved in the attack whether or not this race would still have it’s GP after today.
Saddly, methinks this could be the beginning of the end for the Brazilian GP. 😦
The features writers are going to have so much fun when the Olympics come to town – all the petty crime related stories surrounding FIFA 2010 South Africa seem to have been well-buried, but I doubt the editors will be so successful when the five-ringed circus comes to town!
As for Jenson’s poor showing in Korea and yesterday’s qualifying: my guess for what it is worth is that he lacks genuine motivation for these last few races as he knows he is not in a position to really defend his championship (Lewis being consistently 3/10’s faster throughout the season) and wants to see the No. 1 on his car for as long as possible. In other words, his mind is not focussing on the racing as much as the might have been. Evidence for this? The second half of last year.
This latest incident will, for sure, play on his mind and affect his performance, particularly as the only goal he has is to help Lewis…
Joe,
maybe i was talking rubbish.
when i commented, there was no quote available from JB saying, “As soon as I said that the driver looked across, and when they saw him look they started running towards the car.”
There was scant to zero detailed incident information as the story broke.
At that time, i thought there was widespread presumption as to mens rea and no actus reus.
Now Reuters is reporting Sauber engineers robbed at gunpoint.
Otherwise, sorry i waffled beyond my point, which was broadly, anything can happen, who knows what brought this on.
– j
Joe, as a São Paulo citizen who walks on the streets everyday, I can secure that this is not a town where if go outdoors I’ll be attacked.
It happens duo to missing governamental policies and investments on education, jobs, etc. specially from the local administration.
But I have already heard lots of people saying that in Manhattan, if you enter an empty street, you’ll be robbed. But USA is a rich country, so nobody gets to worried or scared, nobody talks a lot about there. Just about the poor friends of South.
Renan do Couto,
Half the F1 circus has been attacked in the last few days. More and more stories are coming to light all the time, following the Button business.
This is wrong, I know, but this is not a reason to remove Brazilian Grand Prix from calendar.
joesaward,
there was no ‘attack’ and only “what looked like a handgun” and “what looked like a machine gun”
the real news here is that they were “approached and quickly sped off” you may as well claim Jenson was beaten and robbed.
They must have stuck out like a sore thumb in a shanty town in a merc with blacked out windows.
Mick,
Easy to say… Try doing it yourself before being critical…
Resolved (NOT): Throughout PIIGS recorded history not a single unarmed road user has ever been confronted by an armed aggressor. Such things happen only in BRIC countries…
Why have we just heard about Button and Sauber mechanics so?
http://www.vancouversun.com/sports/boss+dismisses+threat+Brazil+after+attacks/3791016/story.html
Bernie’s had a stein too many I sense…
Joe,
you said to Mick, “Easy to say… Try doing it yourself before being critical…”
I once “walked into” two kids running from a gang fight, who looked from afar they were in distress, running from something else, probably, probably were, actually i turned to them, concerned they were in trouble, only to be baseball batted by the one who came close enough. Broad daylight, nice neighborhood. I also had once to effectively take a sabattical to help unravel the defense of a friend and neighbor who’d been charged in complex circumstances but failed by the public defender system. I’d say that scratched the surface of my experience. My first noted experience informed my latter “sabbatical”, which got results, but not before i learned a lot about the differences in perception of law in society.
From a commercial perspective, i trade adverts, so i’m right on the case of editorial inflation. Not saying you did this at all, we were both in the dark time of your post, but generally it’s a thing i am maybe overly sensitive to. The Guardian, lead, front page with the word “carjacking” then qualified heavily, never used that word again. That’s a difficult context to manage.
It’s very well documented how fallible all our memories are, under pressure. Which i privately think accounts for the fact that lie detector tests even manage 50% rates; humans get confused under pressure. Ex post facto justification is a fact of history.
None of the trade press followed their compaints about the race location with the Reuters story, which would have added weight, had that been the idea, to discredit safety at Brazil’s GP. That lends something to the idea of sensationalism. Button has a near miss. Lowly engineers actually held up at gunpoint, no dice. See the difference in perception of what is important?
Questioning is not criticism. Criticism is not pejorative. Respect.
– john
I was there in 2007 and yes the track is located in the middle of a residential area, but the commute to the track is via a highway from downtown Sao Paulo, and when you turn off the highway, there are very few stop lights on a high speed road (50 mph) until you get to only one block away from the front entrance to the circuit which is the main grandstand across from the pits.
So if you drive in-and-out of the circuit grounds through that front gate and past the Carlos Pace bust statue by the small tunnel, that gate is literally one block from that 50 mph road to the highway. Using that route, anyone shouldn’t really have any problems getting to-and-fro the circuit, otherwise, they are simply getting lost in the wrong neighborhoods getting out of there.
But, Joe, good thing if it comes out it’s really the wild west out there. Forget the rest of the arguments, can’t run a gig if there’s a seige mentality and / or people get hurt. THAT’s the story, if you can break it! – j
Alberto,
we’re in this wierd situation where 50:1 income discrepancies, which are terifying in underdeveloped words, in the G7 economies seem like normal, but we forget we had high taxation for decades and to this day to pay off all the infrastructure and repairs to that which gave us brief normalization in our way of life. As it goes, my gross rate in the UK is 61%. Higher if it were from dividends. But we spend 10 times on welfare we do on defense, and that may be a good thing, but public opinion is we spend too much on defense. (compared with the USA hitting a trillion dollar defense budget, 50 times, for 8 times, per head). Just putting some arithmetic perspective.
To the point, if you just came from a war which wiped a big percentage of a male generation, you can sell austerity pretty easily. No country i’m aware of has since managed such a feat who didn’t have a majority disenfranchised populus. None have done the development work to sustain a burgeoning / developing middle class in the past 60 years, in a way which would offer new stable paths. Not all BRICS, but possibly Brazil, has enough fiscal stability to try to do something good. The hope is they do that, not build new capitals. But they are this time more likely to be scuppered by G5 capital outflows looking for yield against locally depreciating currencies, so Brazil gets pumped and dumped, than Brazil is to fluff a development programme. Brazil learned some lessons, we’re in major denial.
Sorry guys, i’m not trying to hijack [splutter] the thread to politicks, so much as add some perspective to this is a amazingly expensive sport before you drop the flag. Every other sport only got expensive due to distribution deals. By comparison.
all best to all,
– john
Alberto,
you do spot the intended irony of the PIIGS nomenclature, don’t you (well documented as to origin, from the original broker note)?
It’s hard to say that those western counties who didn’t manage to anchor themselves in historical capital flows, gorged at an imaginary table. That social stability is already fraying, if you wish to refer to BRICS being so much more dangerous. Greeks burned in their bank where they worked as normal desk clerks and cashiers by protestors complaining they might have to pay tax. That’s not favela fracas, that’s viscious socio-economic violence. Might be a while since the kind was seen, but that’s frightened the willies out of me.
There’s obviously a major mismatch between what FOM thinks is good PR, and whatever the neigbors of some tracks think. Idealistically, that ought to be more reason to first sort this out as best as possible, and stay. But it may simply not be possible. The only reason i mention all this at all is because BE plays increasing amounts of pseudo-geo-politics. Links above suggest it’s on his RADAR but his SIGINT is way off.
all from me, good night all and stuff what’s going on with Webber, if he makes it he beat not just Vettel but the whole team, the lot. I’d like that.
– j
What a typically black and white view point from you Joe.
It would be a travesty if Interlagos was removed from the calendar.
Mef,
I agree, but it needs to be fixed. If someone gets shot going to the circuit, is that a great idea?
Sorry, i had said good night already, but my hours are off still . . .
Mef,
I didn’t think this was a black and white argument from Joe.
Rather, it came from the perspective of someone involved *there* *at that time* *hearing from the people around him* *who are in the paddock* *who are not having a good time* *who are emotionally stressed second, third hand, by such events*
“Black and white”, however, is writing off an experiential diary / dialogue / commentary / “blog” as having an implied *factual* bias directly influencing the veracity of a story. That was not so, despite you might think i thought so from my questions and the tone you may have read in my comments, where i placed too much emphasis on technical figurative but not literal interpretation, to my shame.
The mass media reactions to the news have been:
1. sensationalize the Button thing, in descriptive language, if not fact (The Guardian looses major points here)
2. bury the reported violent crime (mentioned above) which surely traumatised those involved who had it in their face, it can be surmised, and which is a good reason to support the reconsideration of a venue. Put Button in a $500K armored car, but can you do that for every regular bloke on the job?
3. bring to light this is a more widespread problem for the teams.
Sounds strong to me.
And that’s just the “meta”, whereas we’re discussing the “meta meta”.
There are all kinds of honest journalism. “Telling it how it is” does not need to be a reconstructed, editorialized romantic prose.
There’s no other source other than Joe, trying to do that. Tell it how it happens, i mean. Listen to a World Service broadcast sometime. Late at night UK time. The majority of the broadcast is eyewitness or experience witnesses *talking*. You get to make your mind up. Joe is in that frame, as a witness, albeit it’s not quite a war zone out there.
Good? Or Bad? Or Grey?
I say not “Grey” because it is only grey we find in our interpretations until we look from a firm place with a clear mind.
I hope those Sauber guys are OK.
– john
Now see how interesting… Bernie was robbed AND beaten in ENGLAND. The great and super safe continent.