How to Be an F1 Driver

by Jenson Button

  And that’s what it’s like to win.

  Have a signature celebration

  I did the winner. Arms up, number one finger. I’d do that to my dad and he’d do it back to me in reply. I’d be out of the car in five seconds (see above, and see also, ‘we don’t talk about crashes’) arms up, finger aloft. Even in the excitement of the moment, with my helmet on and well-wishers jostling me, I could always pick my dad out in the crowd. It was that father–son bond.

  That and the fact he always wore a pink shirt.

  Mind how you go in the podium room

  In the last six years or so they’ve had cameras in the pre-podium room. There you are, about to bowl into the podium room for a breather before the trophy ceremony, and the steward reminds you, ‘Don’t forget the camera’s there, don’t swear.’

  Other good things to remember about being in the pre-podium room when you’re being observed by the entire TV-watching world: don’t go flinging your cap around like a spoilt child. If you have an issue with another driver, don’t air it there and then. You know, the basics.

  Before the days of cameras in the podium room? Now, that’s a different story.

  At Suzuka in 2011, I’d started in second behind Sebastian in a Red Bull but got up the inside of him on the straight down to turn one. I was about to put him in my mirrors when, bosh, he pushed me into the grass, allowing my McLaren teammate Lewis to overtake me on the outside which, if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know is right up there in the ultimate indignity stakes, along with taking out your teammate and crashing under the safety car.

  I thought Sebastian should have been penalised for that. He used the SMIDSY defence: Sorry, mate, I didn’t see you. So I went up to him in the podium room afterwards.

  ‘Right,’ I said, ‘so that’s how it’s going to be is it? We’re going to be pushing and shoving each other off the circuit.’

  ‘Hmm,’ he said with furrowed brow, ‘What do you mean?’

  I said, ‘Turn one, you pushed me on to the grass.’

  He said, ‘There was no penalty. This means I did nothing wrong.’

  I said, ‘Mate, you know you did something wrong.’

  He still looked confused.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Fine. If we’re going to be like that, fair enough, let it be.’

  Now, as confrontations go, it was hardly Bromley Wether-spoons on a Saturday night, but that was about as angry as it got. And it was all forgotten about in the next nanosecond because even though I’d won the race he’d won the Championship and we both had the all-important business of celebrations to attend to.

  Thinking about it, there were quite a lot of times in 2011 when I spoke to Sebastian. I might had had a word with him after the incident at Spa in 2010, when I was defending my Championship and holding second in the race, and he lost control and virtually T-boned me, putting us both out of contention and thus putting a massive dent in my chances of the Championship.

  He was one, like Max, who calmed down as a driver. I think he probably just realised that he was messing up too much. He was in that period of his career where he was super quick, but was in the habit of pushing it too far and making mistakes.

  In Max’s case, he had the team saying to him, ‘Max, you can’t do that, you can’t just throw the car up the inside and cause accidents’, and whereas before he was just shrugging his shoulders and refusing to change his driving style, he’s taken those comments on board, is finishing every race and doing a bloody great job.

  The art of champagne spraying is all in the thumb

  The champagne we have for Middle Eastern races is actually rose water. It doesn’t fizz properly and it tastes horrible, but you still have to play the game – you have to swig it, even if it tastes horrid.

  Watch Kimi Räikkönen, who likes a drink, when he’s on a podium in a Middle Eastern race. You can see his face, it’s like, Ugh.

  Personally, I love a swig on the podium, even if it is only just rose water. I think it’s an important part of the show. And if it is champagne then you’re so dehydrated after a race that two swigs of it and you’re anyone’s. You’re suddenly a very cheap date.

  They take the cork out for you in Formula One, which is luxury, a blue-chip valet service compared to Super GT where you’re expected to remove the cork yourself. Now, as a veteran of Monaco Super Mondays, I’m a dab hand at removing corks so it’s not a problem for me, but there’s a driver called Nick Cassidy who struggles to such an extent that even the presenters have started taking the piss out of him.

  I feel for him, actually. You want to be able to go out and enjoy yourself on the podium without having to deal with the extra stress of extracting a cork from a bottle. What’s more, it’s fizzy sake most of the time. Last year our team appeared on the podium four times, and it was sake each time. It’s sticky, sweet and seriously strong but I stick to my ritual of always taking a swig.

  My teammate Naoki Yamamoto doesn’t touch alcohol but won the Super Formula Championship last year, and every single driver on the podium covered him with champagne, poor guy. Or was it sake? Either way, he wasn’t happy.

  In Formula One, all you have to do is stick your thumb over the end, and it’s so big – a jeroboam, which is four bottles in one – that spraying is awesome just as long as you make sure to a.) get your thumb right over the end when you shake and then b.) release a tiny bit to spray, being careful to angle it.

  Obvious, you’d think, but in the heat of the moment it’s easy to get it wrong and I’ve seen some drivers shake it up without their thumb over the end, going, ‘Wahey!’ as it hiccups out of the bottle in a foamy waterfall, completely oblivious to the fact that they’ve just ruined the spectacle.

  So, no, you have to remember your thumb placement, you have to keep on shaking it as you spray and you have to make sure that you soak as many people in the vicinity as you can.

  That’s very important, that last bit, and you’ll need to be quick, catch them unaware, because what you’ll find is that while there are a lot of people on the podium at the beginning of the ceremony, they all disappear as soon as you pick up a bottle. In any case, you aim it at the other drivers on the podium. They also have another senior staff member from the team on stage – your engineer or the chief mechanic or something, it’s different every race – and so you’ll probably try and get them as well, and you’ll always try and really soak those guys, because you know they’ve got to go back to work and finish the debrief.

  I’m really good at that, even if I do say so myself. The trick is to grab it, turn, and shoot. Kapow. Don’t give them a moment to think. I’m not saying that I’m competitive about it (of course I’m competitive about it) but I think I’m pretty good at getting people without being got in return, not that it’s in any way an extension of the competition on the track (which of course it is).

  Plus you spray the guys below, of course. Guess who I’d always be aiming for? That’s right, my dad again! He was my bullseye. Even now I can picture his face down below, laughing.

  You have your interviews, too, of course. We’d have an ex-Formula One driver or a celebrity come up and do it. It was fun if it was a celebrity, but only if they knew a little about the sport, which was relatively rare; better was when it was an ex-driver, someone like DC who you could have a good crack with.

  Incidentally, it has to be said that in F1 our nickname game is pretty weak, with Christian names – Lewis, Kimi, Sebastian – being the most common informality, and initials like JB and DC reserved for the truly adventurous. That said, Team Button was responsible for one or two good ones, and having been the victim of them at school (‘Zipper’, ‘Jennifer’), I was more than willing to dish them out. Dad became ‘Papa Smurf’, named after he grew a Papa Smurf-like beard, but perhaps the best one was ‘Britney’ for Nico Rosberg, because he used to have long, wavy hair. I remember him walking into a night club in Tokyo, spotting our lot and looking very happy to see us until I stood up and yelled, ‘Britney
! Hit me baby one more time,’ across the club at him. The smile turned upside down pretty quickly.

  And of course now the world has turned and instead of being the one interviewed, I’m the one likely to do the interview for Sky. I did it at Silverstone, which was the first time I’d ever been on the podium at Silverstone – and if you think I failed to make that joke then you really don’t know me at all – talking to winner Lewis, as well as Sebastian and iceman Kimi.

  The good thing in a situation like that is that you forget that the whole world is watching, you just think of the people in the vicinity, and it’s a special atmosphere for all concerned.

  Post-ceremony you have the choice of either dropping your jeroboam over the side for the crew, which is a bit dangerous because it’s a long way down – unsure whether health and safety approve, not that I’ve ever checked – or carting it around with you as you go on to your next round of tasks. You give your cap and your trophy to a team member and will be handed another cap to wear (how many different caps does a driver wear during a Grand Prix weekend? About 50 million) for your post-race press conference, which you’ll do while soaked in champagne.

  There are lots of questions, obviously, but because emotions are so high it’s also a time that you should be at your most guarded, because the last thing you want as a driver is to let your feelings get the better of you and start going off-script and running off at the mouth. Keeping a lid on it at a time like that is far more exhausting than you might imagine.

  The whole thing, in fact, is incredibly tiring, and the likelihood is that you’ll be absolutely knackered by the time you reach the rest of your team. You’re probably more shagged out from the interviews than you are from actually driving the car.

  But if you’ve got any thoughts about coming down then the team will put you right about that, because those guys will be sky high with emotion and adrenalin, and it’s a very special occasion when you return to the fold. For your teammates, your arrival is the amazing encore and together you surf that celebratory wave. Which means draining the last of that bottle together.

  As for the empty. If you’ve won the race the chances are you’ll want to keep that bottle, and it’ll end up in storage somewhere, something to show your disinterested grandchildren. But if you haven’t won the chances are that you’ll give it away to the team. Same with your podium cap. Honestly, if I’d kept all the caps I’d been given I couldn’t keep up with the storage.

  Make sure you get to keep your trophy

  A lot of drivers have a contract which says the team keeps all the trophies. I know that because I had it at BAR and McLaren and, initially, at Honda as well, although things changed at Honda when it transpired that my teammate, Takuma Sato, didn’t like the number four, believing it to be an unlucky number. Having finished third in the previous year’s Championship, I was number three, and so he asked me to swap.

  I was, like, ‘Uh uh, I’m not just going to swap numbers, I finished third in the Championship, so I want the number three that I earned; you didn’t even earn the number four – you were eighth – you only got number four because I was number three.’

  Or words to that effect. I’m sure I put it more diplomatically than that. Or should I say that I’m sure somebody put it more diplomatically than that on my behalf.

  The team said, ‘Oh, go on, Jenson, just to keep the peace.’

  ‘No way,’ I said.

  They said, ‘Okay, what can we do to sweeten the deal?’

  I said, ‘Give me all my trophies. Whatever trophies I win this year, I get to keep.’

  And they said, ‘Okay. You’re on.’

  ‘Great,’ I said thinking what a result, because I didn’t give a damn about the number four; it was only a number; I just wanted something out of the deal.

  So I got my trophies, which cost about £15,000–£25,000 each. Cool. What’s more it’s not like they deliver them to you in a bit of bubble wrap and brown packing tape. They come packaged in the most gorgeous box. All the trophies are different designs, but the one thing they all have in common is their beautiful presentation boxes.

  So a lot of the time – maybe even most of the time – the team will keep the trophies, and if that’s the case you do have the option to get a replica made at a cost of £15,000. Having been on the podium 50 times, I drew the line at spending that kind of cash on third- or even second-place trophies, but I do have all of my first-place ones. They’re pretty special.

  The World Championship trophy is different again, because the trophy changes hands, so you get the same trophy that everybody’s had, inscribed with the actual signatures of drivers such as Juan Manuel Fangio, Jack Brabham, Graham Hill, Jackie Stewart, James Hunt, Niki Lauda, Alain Prost, Ayrton Senna. It makes you feel giddy just to look at it.

  You have to give it back, though, of course – mine went to Sebastian who won it in 2010, and when I enquired about getting a replica made I was a bit put off by the £35,000 cost, thinking, Really? Am I really going to pay that much for a trophy? Until my manager, Richard, bought me one as a gift. Now that is a manager.

  The Championship year was of course a big one for souvenirs. I’ve also kept all of my helmets and suits from that year, and of the three cars that were made, I was given one. As I said way back, I took a pay cut to drive for Brawn, as a result of which there were various sweeteners built into the contract, a car being one of them. Mind you, they tried to wheedle out of it, and though the one I’ve ended up with is one of the proper three with a functional engine, they tried to palm me off with a replica version. ‘We’ll make you a fourth chassis,’ they said. Thing was, they didn’t want me showing other people the engine.

  ‘But I’m not going to take a fourth chassis,’ I insisted toughly (through a third party). ‘I want one of the three that we used.’

  ‘Oh, no, it’s not worded like that in the contract.’

  ‘I don’t care how it’s worded, you know what the deal was.’

  In the end they gave in and I got my original car. Ross Brawn has another one, and the third went to Mercedes, the engine supplier

  Not that I can start it up, mind you. You don’t just turn the ignition key on a Formula One car. No, it would cost me £50,000 to start it up, because I’d need the assistance of three or four people, all the computers and the electronics. It’s not the kind of thing you use for popping to the shops.

  Ideally I’d like to put it on show here in LA. There’s the Petersen Automotive Museum, which is the most beautiful car museum I’ve ever been to. Seriously, put this book down, Google it, you will not be disappointed. So it would be great if it could go in there. I’ll ship it over, they’ll look after it, free storage, people get to see it and I get to visit. Something else to show my disinterested grandchildren.

  Remember that you still have a job to do

  After a race, you go and see the engineers for a debrief while events are still fresh in your mind, and this is something you do whether you came first or last. If it’s the latter then you’ll be more than happy to escape the scorn and pity of the outside world and shelter among familiar faces in order to lick your wounds.

  If it’s the former, however, you might well stagger in, plastered already from your three swigs of champagne, at which point you’ll share it out into little plastic beakers from the water machine and everything’s great fun and very convivial.

  The crucial ‘but’ is that while you’re all in a celebratory mood, you still have to remember the debrief bit, because no matter how well the race went, there are still things to improve. You never just say, ‘Well, that was a great race, let’s do exactly the same thing next time,’ because firstly, there’s no such thing as a flawless Grand Prix weekend, even if you win, and secondly because the influencing factors are changing all the time. Maybe the pit stop wasn’t as quick as it should have been or, ‘Are you sure we should have been that late pitting on that set of tyres?’ So we’ll talk through those issues first, and then go through the whole pr
ocedure of the race, from the start to the last lap of the race.

  How was the start? Was the clutch working okay? Was the throttle working okay? How was turn one? How were the brakes? Oversteer? Understeer? Any issues within the car that you would like to change? It’s a whole menu of things that you run through which takes at least an hour and a half, and only then do you…

  Party afterwards

  Winning the Monaco Grand Prix is fun, because you go to a special after-party, a black tie do attended by the royal family. I ended up dragging everybody to a club afterwards, thinking, ‘Hang on a minute, I’m a bloke from Somerset, and I’ve just won the Monaco Grand Prix and now I’m in the Amber Lounge partying with Prince Albert.’

  And the whole time I was half-expecting my mum to shake me awake, going, ‘Jenson, Jenson, you’re late for school…’

  2. THE LOSING

  Losing’s a funny thing in F1. Even though the perception of the sport is that of the driver as winner or loser, it’s really much more of a team thing, so you do at least share that burden – maybe even more so than you share the glory of winning, if I’m guiltily honest about it.

  How do you define losing? That’s the first thing to consider. After all, you turn up to a race weekend knowing that one of the top three will win. You have to go back to the opening race of the 2013 season to find a race where the winning constructor was anyone other than Mercedes, Ferrari, or Red Bull. It was Kimi for Lotus, and that itself was a complete anomaly, the first time it had happened since 2009, when I won the Championship, when it was us, Red Bull, McLaren and Ferrari in contention. That’s very nearly a decade of total stranglehold at the top.