Button's brains keep Brawn in front | Playboy is not just a pretty face | Win brings smiles all round | Brawn supremacy? More like Groundhog Day | Kevin Eason: Branson steals Honda's thunder | Hamilton shows mettle with third place

If you are looking for a tip for the Grand National, do not ask an executive from Honda. Try Sir Richard Branson instead. Timing is everything in sport and Branson has definitely got it, but the senior management at Honda appear to have all the gumption of a hapless City banker - except that the bankers got away with the money, while Honda just poured lots of its down Bernie Ecclestone's gold-plated drain.

When the history of the sport is written, there will be a page reserved for Honda's decision, announced only a couple of weeks before Christmas, to pull the plug on its Formula One team. The company, even by conservative estimates, spent the best part of £1 billion hopelessly trying to buy success and then, as a 10-year-old could have predicted, just as the good times were coming, they walked away.

As long ago as the Monaco Grand Prix last May, Nick Fry, then Honda managing director, was brandishing his chequebook as he hired the best talent in the paddock to add to his biggest signing, Ross Brawn, the best technical director of his generation.

Brawn joined at the end of 2007 after a decade of stunning success at Ferrari, immediately junked Honda's 2008 car, told Jenson Button to chalk off the season to experience and got to work on the machine that took the British driver to an astonishing victory in Australia yesterday.

That dull thud you can hear coming from Tokyo this morning must be a few of the top men at Honda falling on their swords after they read the race reports from Melbourne - because Honda is still footing the bill.

Honda executives, in a panic that the money they put into Formula One would be seen as frivolous in a time of economic stringency, sold the team to Brawn for a nominal £1 and then gave him £100million to fund this season. But who would remember that the white car that Button took to victory yesterday was paid for by Honda?

Very few, possibly because it had been hijacked by Branson, whose Virgin Group logo was the only corporate name on the car. Now there is a man who can spot a publicity coup a continent away.

Branson said that reports a few weeks ago that he would buy the team were fanciful - protesting then that he was unable to because Formula One offended his environmental principles.

Did we forget to mention that Branson runs an airline and made the 21,000-mile round trip to Melbourne to announce his new sponsorship of the team in a gas-guzzling jumbo jet?

He does not have the money to fund a £100million-a-year Formula One team, but is a genius at spotting an opportunity. The betting is that he paid peanuts, as little as £200,000, to get his name on Button's winning car this weekend - probably one of the best deals in sport as the story around the world became all about Branson, while everybody forgot poor old Honda.

Branson said that he could still take over title sponsorship, which, even at today's rates, should be worth between £10million and £20million-a-year. That would be a start on the road to independence from Honda for Brawn's revitalised outfit.

It will also be money well spent on a team that promises great things - just don't tell Honda. It will only upset them.