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So nice guy Jenson Button does have a glint of steel behind that smile. Push him and he does push back, after all.

We all knew he had the boy-racer name, the looks and the lifestyle of a Formula One driver. What we did not know, not for sure, was whether he had the mettle of a champion.

That is, not until the man once derided as a “boy-band member” gave his answer yesterday, with striking conviction amid the heat, the drama, the breathtaking tumult of Interlagos.

This was the way to win a Formula One championship; at one of the great circuits, teeming with noise and excitement, in a race which had a couple of crashes, a shoving match and a driver on fire within minutes of the start.

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Button’s gift is to make the experience of driving a Formula One car seem extraordinarily smooth and simple, but this was a day that reminded us of the risks, the dangers, the dash of lunacy required to go wheel to wheel at 200mph.

Take Kimi Raikkonen who was struck on the first lap, lost a wing, came in for repairs and was splattered with fuel when Heikki Kovalainen pulled away with the hose still attached. The next thing Raikkonen knew he was on fire.

“I ended up with some drops of petrol in my eye and then I was engulfed in flames and blinded,” Raikkonen said. He did, of course, just carry on.

No wonder Damon Hill once said that a driver had to be “bonkers” to win a world championship, and pointedly questioned whether Button was too equable, too accepting, too sensible to follow in the path of the greats.

Where was the ruthlessness of Michael Schumacher, the aggression of Nigel Mansell or the sense of destiny claimed by Lewis Hamilton?

Button never claimed to be anything other than a good competitor trying his best. “I am out to prove that you can be level-headed and win a world championship,” he said as far back as 2004.

Level-headed he remains, but yesterday he was also required to look inside himself and find the courage to race on the edge.

But it was the making of him.

The championship did not come to Button; he went out and grabbed it in a way that few had predicted and even less thought possible during the last few weeks when his early-season sprint had slowed to a painful crawl.

Even within his own camp, they had started to worry about the caution, more so after a disastrous qualifying session on Saturday had put him in fourteenth place.

“Destroyed,” Ross Brawn, his team principal, said of his driver. “I felt sick,” Button confessed as he watched Rubens Barrichello, his team-mate, put himself on pole.

We had wondered whether we were watching one of the great sporting chokes.

We thought this might be a collapse of Jean van de Velde proportions, albeit at high speed and with sweaty palms clasped to a steering wheel rather than a golf club.

Button was on the ropes but he came out swinging — although one might also say that he did not have a whole lot of choice.

He arrived at the circuit in a feisty mood. He put on a tape of himself overtaking Raikkonen at the first bend here in 2006. He watched it, then rewound the tape and watched it again.

It would provide the blueprint for how he was going to storm up the field. Three of his four big moves came with the same late braking manoeuvre at the end of the long pit-lane straight, when the cars slow from 200mph to 65mph in a matter of yards before sweeping down a hill of startling steepness, the famous Senna Esses.

They were the moves which answered the claim earlier this season from Flavio Briatore that Button was “a nice guy but a ‘paracarro’”, the Italian for kerb stone.

They were Button’s riposte to the claims that he may become champion but he had forgotten how to drive like one.

“You see I do have that fighter’s instinct,” he said afterwards, although it has often seemed too well hidden.

He had charged up through the pack, from fourteenth to fifth, avoiding (but only just) the slightest mistake, which would have had drastic consequences.

Of course, the man from Frome must share the honours with Brawn, the engineering genius who saved the team from being closed down altogether and then put together a car that left its rivals trailing in the first half of the season.

Brawn is now assured of management guru status in Britain, in a way that Sir Clive Woodward and David Brailsford have enjoyed. Businessmen will pay fortunes to hear how he crafted a title-winning campaign out of the remnants of Honda.

Thanks to Brawn, Button was chasing the championship for the first time in his tenth season.

A driver who had taken 113 races to win his first grand prix could barely believe his luck.

Few would begrudge him the good fortune, even if they will say that this triumph was about the excellence of the car as much as the driver. Button is no one’s idea of the quickest man on the grid — most would take their pick of Fernando Alonso or Hamilton — but, as he had tired of saying in the last few weeks, this is a team sport.

It is an uplifting tale, not least for the man who put him on the road to a driving career — his father John, the former rally driver who named his son after a former colleague Erling Jensen. It was a name that gave him a lot to live up to, but he delivered in the end.

John had watched all but one of his son’s 168 races, including those when Button Jr finished to accusations that he was too laid-back ever to be a champion, and that he would not be able to bring the big prize home.

“All those people were saying this, that and the other and he has laid that to rest in one race,” John said, wiping away tears.

“This morning his engineers told him that fifth was possible. He said ‘no I am going for the podium’ and that summed it up.

“I knew the mood he was in. I said to the mechanics ‘can you fit a rubber bumper on the front because I think he might need it’. It was like karting moves.

“This was the drive of the year. I couldn’t watch some of the moves. It was like watching a horror film, peeping through my fingers.

“To think a few years ago people were saying he can’t do it, that he’s not aggressive enough. That was very important how he did it, how he won the title. Now they can all shut up.”