He’s got all the talent but, well, you know how it is. He just can’t convert his abilities into victories. He can’t do it when it matters...

This is a conclusion we reach quite often, now that we’re all experts in the psychology of sport. There’s a washer loose in the plumbing of his skull; that’s why, despite all those gifts from the gods, he just doesn’t win.

We tend to put it down to a moral failing. Those people who have every talent except the talent for having talent. What a terrible waste, what a shattering disappointment, especially to us. These people become part of the sporting round, the potential champion who strikes the glass ceiling of his own mediocrity, or the brilliant colt that just didn’t train on.

You know the sort. Archetypes of British life. Graeme Hick. Mark Ramprakash. Jenson Button.

How Button must be loving this Formula One season. Even if nothing more goes right for him, he has made his point. All those who said that he was a second-rater, all those who said that he didn’t have what it takes, all those who said that he had everything except a certain quality of vertebra, have been shown to be completely, totally and 100 per cent wrong.

It took Button 113 races to find a victory. After nine seasons in Formula One he still had only that lone win to show for it — and that one was a bit of a fluke, nothing more than one of those strange consolation prizes in the game of life. There was something ever so slightly pathetic about Button, still turning up, chugging round in the middle of the pack, neither good enough to win nor bad enough to sack.

Occasionally you met a Button apologist, who said that, no, he really was a great driver, he really did have all those things required of a top driver — skill, nerve, ambition and so forth. He was just on the verge of cracking it. Such people were always good for a laugh; if he was any good, he’d have done it already.

Now look at him. Four races, three wins and a third place; runaway leader of the drivers’ championship, the man to beat. The man who made an audacious and brilliant pass on Lewis Hamilton, of all people, last weekend. The fastest, the winningest, the best. That’s Button.

Of course, this is Formula One, which is not as other sports are. There has been no change in Button. The fact is that, for the first time in his life, he has a faster car than the other drivers. That does tend to make a difference. But the point to relish here is that once he found himself in this better car, Button has grasped every opportunity that has come his way.

Not jaded by his years as a backmarker, not demoralised by all that time back in the peloton, not weakened by all his time among the betas and the gammas of the dominance hierarchy. Button has seized his day with glorious elan.

The as-yet-un-ennobled Sebastian Coe screamed in his Olympic 1,500 metres victory of 1984: “Who says I’m f***ing finished?” All that is discernible in Button is a quiet hint of amusement behind the designer stubble. It means: “Who says I’m a f***ing mediocrity?” It’s a question he has won the right to ask.

Can a man change his stars, father? The question of that daft and lovely film, A Knight’s Tale. Button has changed his all right. But there are others who have changed their stars without a car to help them. At base, they have all done the same thing: they have shown the world that whatever the reason for their comparative failure before the changing of the stars, it was nothing to do with any hard-wired fault of personality.