Is Jenson Button really the stuff of champions?

Jenson Button won the F1 championship, but that doesn't make him one of the racing greats

Oct 23, 2009

Comments on this story (18)

Motorsport Writer

Jenson Button is the 2009 Formula One World Champion of drivers. Good for him.

He won more races than anybody else and he scored more points than anybody else.

Any way you look at it, he won the title fair and square.

But as world champion, he's in pretty select company and the question today is one that must be asked: is Jenson Button the equal of Ayrton Senna? Is he the equal of Alain Prost? Jackie Stewart? Jim Clark?

He's in the company of Michael Schumacher, a giant. Is Jenson Button a giant?

Nigel Mansell would have eaten glass and walked through hot coals to win his world championship. Would Jenson Button?

Jacques Villeneuve went through Eau Rouge flat out on a dare, knowing full well he would probably crash and maybe even kill himself (he did, but didn't). Would Jenson Button?

I don't think so. I don't think Jenson Button thinks so either.

The news stories following last Sunday's decisive Grand Prix of Brazil, in which he locked up the title and his employer, Brawn GP, won the constructor's championship, all reported this:

"Button kept saying, over and over: `I'm world champion. I'm world champion.'"

Translation: "What a surprise? How did this happen?"

To review: Prior to this season, Button had started 154 Grand Prix races and won exactly one – and that one, like this championship, was a fluke. It was the 2006 Hungarian GP and virtually all of the front-runners slid off in the rain. He beat Pedro de la Rosa and Nick Heidfeld, two other guys who've never won an F1 race either.

Button then spent two unproductive seasons (2007 and '08) with the Honda F1 team, seasons in which he was publicly chastized by two former English world champions, Mansell and Damon Hill, for not producing.

Then four things happened:

1. Honda gave up on the 2008 season halfway through in order to start work on the 2009 car;

2. Honda pulled out of F1;

3. Ex-Ferrari chief engineer Ross Brawn bought the team, essentially a turnkey operation featuring a car that was well ahead of everyone else's;

4. The FIA approved a controversial rear diffuser (a section of a car's underbody that improves the aerodynamics) on the Brawn car that had been protested by Red Bull, McLaren and Ferrari.

So Button went into the '09 season in a car that was six months ahead in research, development and testing, and which featured a ground-effects tool that none of the other top teams had.

As a result, Button proceeded to win six of the first seven races of the season. All well and good. But then, something happened. The other teams caught up in R&D and diffuser design – and the result was that the bottom just about fell out of his season.

In the remaining nine races, he was on the podium exactly once – in Italy, where he finished second to his teammate, Rubens Barrichello. But otherwise, he was Back There.

Except, other than in Belgium (where he crashed), he was always in the points and able to pad his early-season total – an eighth-place finish here, a sixth there with a couple of sevenths and fifths mixed in.

By the time they got to Brazil last weekend, Button had enough points that the title was his to lose. He then had a terrible qualifying session (as did several of the other top runners) and started 14th.

Now, following that disaster, many of Button's fans contend that he went out the next day and drove the race of his life to wrap up the championship.

Excuse me?

At the start of the race, there was carnage on the first lap and cars were going every which way. By the time they brought out the safety car to settle things down, Button was up to ninth but hadn't done anything except avoid being hit by the other crashing race cars.

When the race restarted, Button "sliced his way past" (a phrase used in several reports) rookie Toyota driver Kamui Kobayashi and Renault driver Romain Grosjean, who is so bad that even I could probably pass him.

So one of the most experienced F1 drivers out there proceeds to make mincemeat out of a couple of neophytes and the crowd roars. Wow.

Button is all the way up to sixth. I can barely contain my excitement.

Now, he did move up one more spot because he eventually finished fifth, so he got past somebody. But I can guarantee you it wasn't one of the really fast guys because they were passing him.

Lewis Hamilton, for instance. He started 17th and finished third. Sebastien Vettel, who started 15th, finished fourth. Button's 14th-to-fifth run doesn't look all that hot in comparison, does it?

Look, I don't want to be too hard on the guy. Jenson Button is one of the two dozen or so absolutely best race car drivers in the entire world. But there are F1 drivers and then there are a very select few who are a cut above the rest and guess who isn't one of them?

Toronto Star