Clear: Taku made 'an unfortunate error'.

Takuma Sato effectively committed hari-kari in the British Grand Prix by switching off his engine on the way to the grid, his BAR-Honda team has revealed.

The Japanese driver was running through the usual pre-grid programme, which includes things like setting the engine mixture, when he inadvertently pressed the kill switch on the BAR Honda's steering wheel, something that is usually only used in extreme circumstances, such as if the throttle sticks open.

Sato was pushed to the pit-lane and eventually rejoined the race at the back of he field, which left him with a hard slog to catch up. His subsequent pace showed that he could have joined Jenson Button in the points. Taku was furious with himself afterwards, although the team played down his mistake.

"Obviously, steering wheels are fairly busy these days," race engineer Jock Clear told Crash.net, "And it's a tense time of the race. There's a lot to do when you come up to the grid, with your tyre warming and so on. Obviously, there are shrouds in place to make it particularly difficult to hit the kill switch, but ultimately it has to be somewhere close by, so you can hit it when you need it. Normally, it's for emergency use only, so it's an unfortunate error.

"He was just going through his start procedure. He realised what he'd done, so there wasn't any conversation really. There was no point in trying to deal with it at the time - we just had to get him back in the pit-lane and get it started as soon as possible and get it underway."

To his credit, Sato did not give up, and nor did he lose his cool and make any further errors.

"He was good and his pace was really competitive which, in that situation, is a bit unfortunate," Clear continued, "When you have the leaders behind you, you have to slow down a lot to let them pass. When you're only half a second slower then them, it takes them forever to get past unless you let them, so he was having to back off by five seconds to let them past, and then get back in the groove.

"Clearly, he didn't want to upset any of the leaders, so he made sure he stayed out of the way. But, when he was on his own, he was very quick, which is even more frustrating really."

Sato has yet to score any points this year, having lost his fifth place at Imola.