WHY BUTTON’S MOTORSPORT JOURNEY IS FAR FROM OVER
Four years have passed since the 2016 Brazilian Grand Prix, a race that is widely remembered for Max Verstappen’s charge to the podium in horrendous conditions and Felipe Nasr battling into the points to save his Sauber team, while effectively sinking the Manor squad.
Jenson Button’s drive to finish 16th and last at the track where he had clinched the 2009 world championship, as McLaren team-mate Fernando Alonso salvaged a point for 10th, barely registered as a footnote. But the penultimate race of his swansong F1 season (he would return for a final time at Monaco in 2017, subbing for Alonso when the Spaniard was given permission to skip F1’s grandee race for the Indianapolis 500) served as proof to Button that he’d made the right decision in stepping away after 17 years.
In his book, How to be an F1 driver, Button revealed that he experienced the fear factor in Brazil for the first time in his career. Would it have been any different if he had been planning to stay on for 2017?
“It would have been completely different, definitely,” he tells Autosport. “My head wasn’t in it, and the stupid thing was, those were my conditions. Those were where I was at my best and I couldn’t show that because I was too scared. That proved that it was the right time. I look at F1 now and think, ‘I wish I’d done a couple more years’, but it’s easy looking back and saying that because you forget that I was really tired at the end of it and mentally, just drained. I needed to get out.
“Should I have gone back and done a year or two? Maybe, but I’ve had so much fun racing in Japan – it was a lot more relaxed and more fun.”
Fun has certainly been on
