JENSON BUTTON THE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP IS WITH YOU FOREVER

Motorsport News never wishes to blow its own trumpet, but readers’ Q&A guests surely don’t get much bigger than this. None other than Formula 1 star Jenson Button took time out of his busy schedule to answer MN readers’many queries.And Button’s schedule indeed remains busy even in F1 retirement, with a growing family, his own Jenson Team Rocket RJN GT team and plenty of his own, eclectic, activity behind the wheel.

He tells us about his and the Brawn team’s extraordinary phoenix-from-the-flames championships in 2009, that Canadian Grand Prix in 2011 plus much more besides, such as how he narrowly missed out on Ferrari and IndyCar drives, what he thinks of Lewis Hamilton and Michael Schumacher as well as his developing love for off-roading.

So let’s get right down to it, starting with his crowning glory.

Question: When you first sat in the Brawn, did you have any inkling as to what you would achieve?

Jimmy N Via Twitter

Jenson Button: “No, at that moment we were just happy to be going racing. We drove around the Stowe circuit at Silverstone, and up until that day we didn’t think we’d be racing in F1. When the car fired up, we had a tiny little tent like a go-kart tent that we were running the car out of, and cheers went up when the engine started and I pulled out.

“The great thing was with that little shakedown we didn’t have any issues, no overheating, you normally have a couple of little things that you need to resolve. [It was] great considering we had this engine in the back of the car that we hadn’t ever used before, the Mercedes engine, and it was bolted to a chassis that was made for a Honda engine so it had a spacer in there to make it fit. Even with that the car felt together. But we didn’t know what we would go on to achieve, no.”

Motorsport News: When did it first start occurring to you?

“The first test we went to Barcelona, it was the last test of the season, everyone else had been testing. I remember coming in and my engineerAndrew Shovlin, who is chief engineer now at Mercedes, just smiled at me. I said ‘oi, what you smiling at?’He said ‘how was it?’I said ‘it feels alright, it was a bit too much oversteer here, bit too much understeer here’, and he went ‘well you’re seven tenths quicker than anyone!’ “So we made some changes, we put a bit of fuel in it and we went out and I think we ended up half a second quicker then everyone even though we’re running higher fuel. But we still didn’t go into it thinking ‘we’re going to be world champions this year’, there was still a lot to do and a lot to understand about the car.Also as a team we hadn’t done