The biggest gainers included
Jarno Trulli, who had been forced to start from pit-lane after
Toyota had to pull his car from
parc ferme to replace the damaged suspension that caused the Italian to fall at the first stage of qualifying.
Nico Rosberg, who had his times stripped for missing the weighbridge, and Tonio Liuzzi, who had opted for an engine change, also closed on to the tail of the field, which numbered just 15 after the first lap carnage.
The casualty list grew further under the safety car, as Button pitted for a new front wing, only to find water leaking from a damaged radiator. With a top-up prohibited by the regulations,
Honda had no choice but to withdraw the luckless Briton.
Button was classified with three laps under his belt, half the number allocated to former BAR team-mate
Takuma Sato, who greeted the restart by making contact with Midland's Tiago Monteiro. As usual, views on where the blame lay differed according to which camp was asked, with Sato claiming that Monteiro left him no room after turning in on the
Super Aguri, while the Portuguese accused his rival of failing to brake hard enough into the tight right-hander. Whatever the cause, the field was inching perilously close to the single figures that had caused such uproar in 2005.
What made things all the more galling for Midland and Super Aguri - which had collided on more than one occasion in the past - was the fact that this was a race in which both could conceivably have scored points. With Montagny already out, Super Aguri was going home empty-handed, while Christijan Albers' Midland was showing the scars of battle and would require four pit-stops before eventually succumbing to gearbox failure.
Monteiro soldiered on to lap nine, the rear diffuser and sidepod on his M16 leaving a trail of debris into turn one for the three laps after the collision, while Jacques Villeneuve made it to lap 23 before his
BMW locked solid and left him a spectator for the second time in two weekends.
