So there it is, the name of Jenson Button finally inscribed on the grand prix roll of honour at the end of a season that began with the rush of six wins in seven races and slowed to a crawl as it approached the chequered flag. There are many ways to win the world championship, and the 10th British driver to capture the title added to the suspense by taking the scenic route.
Button may still be on the right side of 30 but he has had to wait longer to secure his title than all but one of his compatriots. The task that took Lewis Hamilton two seasons, Jim Clark and James Hunt four, Jackie Stewart, John Surtees and the two Hills, Graham and Damon, five and Mike Hawthorn seven has occupied Button for a decade, longer than anyone except Nigel Mansell, who took 13 years.
This coming January it will be 10 years since tears rolled down Button’s cheeks as he fell into the arms of his father after being told by Formula One’s Sir Frank Williams that he was about to become Britain’s youngest-ever grand prix driver.
But it takes all sorts of experiences to make a world champion and Button’s path to the title has been strewn with obstacles, some of them self-erected. In retrospect his trials could be seen as a necessary counterbalance to the impression he can sometimes give of floating through life on a cloud of privilege and good fortune, with a yacht in the Monaco harbour, a yellow Ferrari and a string of girlfriends drawn from the ranks of pop singers, underwear models and the jeunesse dorée.
But Button is not burdened with a big ego, and a world championship is unlikely to change him.
”We always thought that Jenson was outstanding,” Patrick Head, Sir Frank Williams’s partner, said in Monaco earlier this year, when Button was in the middle of his early-season winning streak with the Brawn team. ”He’s always had great driving skill and now he has experience, calmness, judgment and other things. He’s also in the right place.”
Too often he had found himself in the wrong environment, creating a superficial impression of failure that caused him to be written off by two of the sport’s most powerful men.
The now disgraced Flavio Briatore sacked him from the Renault team in 2002 to promote his protégé, Fernando Alonso, shortly before Formula One mogul Bernie Ecclestone advised David Richards, the BAR-Honda boss, against reviving the Briton’s career.
In deciding to ignore Ecclestone’s opinion Richards set Button back on the path that would lead, seven years later, to his coronation as the 31st world champion in Formula One’s 60-year history. Even then, however, it was hardly plain sailing as Button navigated his way unsteadily through a series of setbacks.
A mini-scandal when his team was suspended for making illegal use of a hidden device in the car’s petrol tank and the messy aftermath of Richards’s mysterious sacking by Honda were followed by an expensively aborted second dalliance with Williams and a series of poor cars.
Among the most valuable weapons in a world champion’s armoury is the instinct for joining the right team at the right time, and until this year it seemed to be the attribute Button lacked. Williams let him go (in order to honour a pre-existing commitment to Juan Pablo Montoya) at the end of his first season, he was ejected from Renault just as the team were becoming competitive enough to win titles and, even when a period of improving fortunes with Honda climaxed in 2006 with his first grand prix victory, that glimpse of success proved to be a mirage as the team went into a sudden and disastrous decline.
His judgment was not always sound in his choice of personal managers and advisers, and it took him several years to settle on one whose advice led him in the right direction.
Through it all, however, his resilience earned growing respect from the paddock cynics. He stayed on good terms with Williams and Head, he refused to trade insults with those who denigrated his ability and he earned the loyalty of the Honda engineers and mechanics by never complaining when, instead of the Stradivarius he needed, they kept giving him plastic ukuleles.
Most of all, when Honda pulled the plug before the beginning of the present season, he refused to panic. He stayed put, voluntarily cutting his £12-million annual salary by about two-thirds and showing his confidence in Ross Brawn, his new team principal.
That public act of faith played a key part in restoring the morale of team personnel whose livelihoods had been threatened.
On the track he has shown that although some champions are bullies and others are stylists, his smooth precision puts him firmly in the latter category. It is no accident that he grew up admiring the calmness and consistency of Alain Prost whereas Lewis Hamilton adored the panache and charisma of Ayrton Senna.
And now he has proved himself to be anything but a flaky underperformer. In answer to those who claim that his run of six wins in this season’s first seven races, which laid the firmest of foundations for his title challenge, was the achievement of the car rather than its driver, he can point to Alberto Ascari’s six wins from seven races in 1952, Mansell’s eight of the first 10 with Williams in 1992 or Michael Schumacher’s five of the first six with Ferrari in 2002.
These things happen in Formula One, and the champion is the one with the skill and intelligence to take advantage of his circumstances, as Jenson Button has done at last. —
