But half a dozen years ago a group of Toyota mechanics were ambushed at gunpoint early one morning while traffic heading towards the Autodrómo Carlos Pace was at a standstill.įour miles away lies Morumbi, another suburb and a different world, where plush apartment blocks decorate the skyline, rising out of verdant avenues encircling the local Jockey Club. During the four days of the race meeting, pairs of armed policemen are stationed every 50 metres. It was from there that the raiders appeared to come. Stray dogs lie in the entrances to the narrow alleyways and most of the available surfaces are covered with graffiti in the distinctive Gothic style favoured by São Paulo's wielders of aerosol cans. Built into the side of a hill, they are joined by elevated walkways and identified only by numbers: Bloc 6, Bloc 7, and so on. The Avenida Interlagos, which leads from the main entrance down the hill to the cast-iron bridge over the river and thence towards the city centre, is bordered on one side by a variety of small businesses and on the other by a tumbling jungle of three-storey concrete apartment buildings painted buff with rust-coloured doors and shutters.

It is a mixture of favelas – shanty towns – and apartment blocks. Interlagos is a suburb of São Paulo, built amid the endless sprawl on rolling hills above the stinking Pinheiros river. The world champion and his companions were in an unmarked and relatively inconspicuous car, leading to suspicions that the armed men may have been tipped off by a colleague inside the circuit. The attempted hold-up, or kidnapping, or whatever it may have been, took place at dusk, a few hundred metres from the circuit's main entrance, on a busy road where several such incidents have occurred since the Brazilian grand prix returned to São Paulo in 1990. Formula One drivers tend not to frighten easily, but Jenson Button's experience while trying to leave the Interlagos circuit on Saturday night, after qualifying for today's penultimate round of the 2010 world championship series, was great deal scarier than heading into the circuit's first turn in the middle of a howling pack of racing cars. Being confronted on your way home from work by half a dozen men with automatic weapons and bad intentions is another.

Guiding a 750-horsepower projectile around a grand prix circuit at 200mph is one thing.

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