Anthony Hamilton, Lewis' father, is becoming more and more Mr Angry. His stares around the McLaren garage if things aren't going ideally for Lewis to win. And so his face was etched with fury as Ross Brawn's strategy put his two cars in front of McLaren a third of the way into the race - and it became increasingly obvious that that was where they were going to stay.
Lewis did a fine job. Button was driving as quickly as he needed to to stay out of reach of the closing McLaren with eight laps to go. And the occasional spurt from Button put him just far enough down the road to make it obvious Hamilton would not catch him.
Hamilton, however, was determined that, if he could not catch and pass Button, he would at least be right on his tail as they crossed the line. And so he pushed.
The difference in the two cars, McLaren v Brawn was obvious - and it wasn't about raw speed. It was about handling.
For the past few races, Button has had an evil handling car. Well, to be fair, it's only been evil compared to the Brawn-on-Rails he had at the beginning of the season. It is notable that the tracks where Button has had the most trouble have been the low-downforce tracks. This is completely in keeping with his driving style: whereas Rubens likes the back loose, Button hates it. Low downforce means the back swings like a pendulum around the front end. And all around Monza, Button's tail was wriggling around like a wriggly thing, especially on worn tires when the weight came down.
Hamilton likes his car neutral: he likes to drift the car, all four wheels working together. That's one reason why resolving the balance problems that McLaren took half-a-season to identify have made such a difference to Lewis's results. But in Monza, the front was just a little light. That helped with straight line speed - but meant the car had a tendency to go, every so slightly, straight on.
Lewis dealt with that until, with the car running on almost empty tanks and worn out tyres, the whole car was just a few kilos too light. He took the same line across the kerbs as on previous laps and the front didn't come back into line. That spat him across the track and into the barrier at around 210kph. Backwards.
The difference in making the corner and not was, probably, two or three centimetres : a fraction lower on the kerb than on previous laps and he would, perhaps, have got away with it.
If Anthony Hamilton had had his angry face on before, at the pictures of the disassembled McLaren, he developed a thunderous face. Someone was going to be in for it, it appeared. True, the initial reaction to the accident was that, for Hamilton to have had a crash there, all on his own, something must have broken. But the on-board footage clearly showed that the car did not turn in, bit onto the new high kerb and spun around the left-front wheel as its pivotal point.
Jenson Button continues his role as the nice man of racing: the only person more obviously pleased to see Rubens on the top step was Rubens himself. It is difficult to remember when two team mates were so obviously having such a good time - even when fighting tooth and nail for points. It's not a done deal but it's becoming almost remote that another team will catch Brawn for the championship. And it's a fairy tale: as Rubens said in the post race press conference " I think it is a winning year whatever happens. We have got to remember that it is not long ago we had no jobs."
The banter between the team-mates, and the easy hugs and chatting shows the strength at Brawn. There are no mind-games here. Sure, sometimes one of other has been disappointed and moody but nothing more than human nature would dictate.
And it works: the two of them have support teams that work independently but with total access to each other's data. Rubens says that, if one side of the garage finds an advantage, they volunteer it to the others. Other teams, as we know, either don't release data between drivers or, if they do, bury it in information so that the strategic advantage may not be lost.
And so, the two "nice men of racing," as Rubens calls them, find themselves with just 14 points between them at the top of the table. There are four races to go. Either of them could all but lose their chance with just one bad result.
Although, in theory, the two Red Bull drivers could challenge the Brawn pair, the reality is that it would take a couple of DNFs or at least nil points finished for both of the Brawn drivers for Vettel or Webber to catch up - and they have had so many engine problems this year that they can't afford a blow up.
That's what happened to the BMWs on Saturday. Both of their cars let go in qualifying. That's put them on the edge of using up all their engines, like Red Bull.
Increasingly, it's looking like Toyota have applied serious constraints to their development and, after their two drivers beat nine-bells out of each other in Monza, it's not at all certain that either of them will have a drive next year - even if Toyota remain in the championship. Still, as both drivers said "That was good fun and I enjoyed it." 11th and 14th. Well, at least they didn't total the cars.
Certainly BMW's performance did nothing to encourage any prospective purchaser in the team - although one of the more complex rumours is that the new CEO of Lotus is Swiss (that's not a rumour - he is) and that he and the Chairman of Proton which owns Lotus were seen in quiet discussion with Peter Sauber - also Swiss. Proton is majority owned by the Government of Malaysia - which also majority owns Petronas, Sauber's major sponsor. There is one small piece missing from the jigsaw: a few weeks ago, a Formula Three team did a deal to use the name Lotus on a possible Formula One entry. They haven't entered, but they do have the name that's been held in private ownership since the racing team went into liquidation in the early 1990s.
Next Monday, Renault go back to Paris. Not to their factory but to the World Motor Sport Council for a hearing on the allegations that Nelson Piquet was ordered to crash in Singapore last year. Reports say that Piquet has been given assurances that he will not be subject to any form of punishment in respect of any evidence he may give.
But the final aspect of the Monza weekend belongs to a team we have not even mentioned yet. Kingfisher / Force India. As their number one driver leaves at the moment the car comes good, they stood no chance. Right?
Totally wrong: no KERS but Sutil stuck the car on the front row for qualifying. He was a bit tardy off the line and ended up behind Kimi. For the entire race, he was faster than Kimi but not fast enough to pass. A fluffed pitstop cost him a couple of seconds that might - just might - have been enough to have jumped Kimi in the pits. It wasn't to be. Sutil probably decided that, until the last moment, being behind Kimi was safer than being in front of him: after all, there have now been two occasions when Kimi has harpooned Sutil when the young driver was in front.
Stepping into the second car was Vitantonio Liuzzi, widely considered to be a talent that got away from F1. He, too, brought the car up to the pointy end in qualifying: P5. And, having made it around the first lap without incident, put the hammer down racing competitively with Alonso - who also had KERS for this race.
The Force India cars proved that a brilliantly handling car is at least as fast as a KERS-powered shopping trolley, regardless of whether it says Ferrari or Renault on the front, and whether the driver in the KERS car is a former world champion.
A gear-box failure put Liuzzi out. But he had demonstrated something important. He can step into a Formula One car and make it go faster than Fisichella could make the Ferrari go on his first drive in that car.
Can this season generate any more of the good news stories and great surprises that have already marked it out as one of the best ever?
After all, Rubens won his third Monza race - still four seconds a lap off the record he set in 2004 and which still stands. In qualifying, the difference between P1 and P20 was just under 0.9 of a second (although pole does not actually follow the absolute fastest in qualifying - in which case the difference would have been less than 2 seconds). Never before has F1 been so competitive.
And never before have the little teams had the chance to come good part-way through a season. It looks like a budget cap is pointless: if the teams can't test, they can't spend much money. When Fernando Alonso did a street run last week in front of 170,000 fans, he had to do it in last year's car: if he had used this year's it would have counted as testing.
What started as a season if annoyance and acrimony has turned into a season of excitement and fun. What's happening off track is, as it should be, a sideshow now.
For the first time since the mid 1980s, it seems, the racing is the thing.
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