How to Be an F1 Driver

by Jenson Button

  With that in mind, those outside the top three are forced to revisit their expectations of what it means to win and also, it follows, to lose. So losing, then, is no longer ‘not winning’, it has become ‘doing worse than expected’.

  So if you approach the weekend knowing you’re capable of fifth, and you finish ninth or tenth, or you don’t score any points at all, that’s horrific. That’s losing. It’s all about your expectations of yourself, the car, the team – about what you know you can achieve in the circumstances versus what you actually do achieve.

  What really hurt was when you were expected to fight for a position and you were a long way off. Or if the car just didn’t perform. An accident? Well, shit happens, as Forrest Gump said. But when you’ve actually got a serious issue with the car and it’s just not working, that’s like shit that shouldn’t happen. It’s the point at which you start having meetings that go on forever, sucking up time and brainspace, hoovering up all the heart and passion you had for the battle. You never see teams more collectively despondent than when technical gremlins have ruined the weekend.

  As for how you feel as the driver when you don’t do as well as you’d hoped? How do I feel? Well, the answer is pretty down and frustrated. I don’t normally raise my voice, but it has happened and it’s happened in situations like that, because what really grinds my gears is hearing that we’re quick, that our car is great and that we should be winning. You go through four or five races, and each time they say the same thing. ‘Yeah, we’re this quick, we’re this good, we’ve got the best car.’ And yet you keep finishing eighth.

  It was at times like that that I may have let my frustrations get the better of me. ‘Solve these problems, and stop saying we’re good when we’re not. We clearly do have issues, and instead of sticking our heads in the sand we need to work out what they are and how we can solve them, because right now it’s embarrassing.’

  Jenson’s pissed off. Jenson hardly ever gets pissed off.

  ‘We’re tweaking. We’re tweaking.’

  ‘No, we need to make a big change. We need to make a big change in order to find our performance.’

  Then we get to Monaco, and, ‘This is the one for us, we’re going to be quick here, because we don’t have the power, but it doesn’t matter so much around Monaco.’

  Except that you go and finish worse than you did the last race.

  ‘Come on, guys, we’ve just proved that we don’t have the best car.’

  By which time they might decide to listen, and you’re already several races behind.

  In many ways I think it’s realising where you are that’s the most important thing in F1. We’re the fifth-best team but we have issues and we’ve got to work on it. And that means accepting that you’re the fifth-best team, not thinking you’re the third best. You’ve got to realise where you stand and what you need to do to improve.

  I remember being at BAR, Honda or Brawn and knowing what the other teams were up to. Little details we could find out about them, what they were bringing to the next race, what improvements they’d made to the car, major set-up changes, things like that.

  Then I moved to McLaren. I was, like, ‘So, do we know what other people are doing? Do we understand how their car’s going to look?’

  They looked at one another. ‘No. How are we going to know that?’

  ‘Well, every other team I’ve been at has had an interest in other teams. They make sure they know what other teams are up to.’

  They said, ‘No, we’ve never done that.’

  I think it was because they thought they were the best, so why would they need to understand what other people were doing? But in the smaller teams, there was always a way of finding out what other teams are doing and learning from it, which was always quite fun.

  After all, the competition never stops, because there’s always something to play for. All the teams get money for taking part in the Championship. It’s not quite as clear-cut as saying that the better they do the more money they get, because Ferrari always gets the most thanks to a special ‘Ferrari’ payment, but it more or less runs along those lines: the top ten get an ‘equal share’ payment of around $42m, and then there are performance payouts, a ‘Constructor’s Championship bonus fund’, ‘historic payments’ and the aforementioned ‘Ferrari payment’ to take into consideration.

  It’s all very complicated, which I’m sure suits a lot of people fine, but what it does mean is that a top four Championship place is worth a lot of money (Ferrari will get well over $200m), while a number ten place should be worth at least $50m.

  Anything below that, though, and you might want to think about taking on a paper round to help with the rent.

  It is, of course, a vicious and ever-decreasing circle, because the less money you’re given, the fewer resources you have to develop the car for the next year. One bad year and a team can find themselves spiralling out of control.

  All of which is a roundabout way of saying that even if you’re having a terrible season and it feels like the best thing to do is concentrate your aim on the following season, you can’t. You have to keep on pushing.

  Okay, maybe – now I come to think about it – if there was a massive rule change coming, then perhaps the team might think, ‘Hang on, there’s no point in working on this, we should develop the new car more, spend more time on that.’ But aside from that scenario you’d work tirelessly all the way through the season to develop your car because, firstly, you can’t afford not to and, secondly, because you can carry most of that development work into the next season. The tub might be different, but a lot of the stuff you will test and if it works, you’ll put it on the next year’s car as well.

  I think that I found it easier to deal with loss, defeat and failure when I was younger. These days, if I have a bad race it hurts on some kind of weird primal level because I start thinking, ‘Okay, am I as good as I used to be? Am I over the hill?’

  This happens in Super GT now, of course. Not long ago I had a bad weekend, running in fifth, my pace not quite what I wanted it to be, and then ended up in a crash with someone and came away with no points.

  But it wasn’t the crash that annoyed me; it was the fact that I was off the pace. I left thinking, What am I doing?

  And Am I as good as I used to be?

  And Is all this worth it, for how I feel right now?

  You end up asking yourself not just if you’re not the driver you used to be, but how much less good you’re prepared to be before you jack it all in. I find myself wondering how mentally tough am I to accept that dip in quality? Can I accept that dip in quality? Can I accept any dip in quality?

  After all, I’m a driver who asks a lot of myself. My biggest and toughest rival is the guy in the mirror.

  It’s one of the reasons fitness is so important to me. A lot of sportsmen as they age will let their fitness go, and that to me goes hand in hand with throwing in the towel, which I’m not prepared to do yet.

  On the other hand, do I want to be that guy who carries on well past his sell-by date, churning out less and less impressive results?

  Sometimes you see amazing comebacks. David Beckham appeared in a Manchester United Treble Reunion match and scored a brilliant goal with the last kick of the game. But for every one of those there’s a dozen failed or fizzled-out comeback stories, and while there are always highs, it’s the lows that hit you hardest.

  I feel that now, in Super GT. In 2018 we won a race and carved out a Championship win, which was amazing. But it’s the lows – like that zero-pointer – that really hurt me.

  3. HATS AND HELMETS: THE FACTS

  Fact: a helmet is not a hat

  Actual conversation: ‘You know that hat you wear, with all the colours on it?’

  ‘My cap?’

  ‘No, it’s not a cap. It doesn’t have a peak. The other one.’

  ‘Um…’

  ‘Oh, you know the one. It’s got all the colours on it.’

  ‘Oh, wait.
Is it quite a bulbous thing, made of like a hard shell?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘And it has a visor that comes down over my eyes like this?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘That’s a helmet.’

  ‘Yes, that’s it. Your helmet hat.’

  Fact: snapbacks are taking the piss

  Monaco, 2017. I was making the grand comeback, as detailed earlier. The team presented me with two caps to wear. One of them was a baseball cap, the sort I’d been wearing my entire career. The other was like a baseball cap, but a sort of flat-peaked and starchy version. The kind you see in gift shops at theme parks – like a baseball cap before it’s been properly worn in.

  I looked at it, the way you might regard a dead rat on your dinner plate. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘That’s a snapback,’ I was told, like I was in the presence of something new and great. And now it made sense: the caps that I’d seen Lewis and Daniel Ricciardo wearing. They weren’t just nobby-looking box-fresh baseball caps, they were actually supposed to look like that. Jesus.

  ‘No, mate, I’ll have the cap,’ I said.

  Apologies if you’re a snapback cap fan – each to their own, and I’m not immune to terrible fashion choices myself – but to me they just look bloody stupid. They don’t even look like they fit properly. They blow off too easily because the huge peaks act like sails. Some people even put their ears inside them, for the full ‘I bought this in the Harry Potter Experience’ effect.

  No, for me it’s the baseball cap, arched peak. In fact, I employ someone whose sole job is to arch my baseball cap peaks to the right angles.

  Fact: a helmet can save your life

  I’ve definitely had my life saved by a helmet. Not necessarily through crashing – although who can say to what extent a helmet saved me during my crash in Monaco qualifying 2003 – more through strikes. I’ve had bits of metal hit my helmet, and on one particular occasion very early in my career I was testing with Williams in South Africa, hurtling down the back straight when a bird hit me. It didn’t dent the helmet but it scratched the visor and it did my neck in.

  ‘I’ve hit a bird,’ I yelled over the talkback.

  ‘You shouldn’t do that, young man,’ came the reply (different times, different times…).

  I was a bit sore afterwards and I had bits of bird dribbling down my visor, which was fairly upsetting, and of course I felt terrible for the poor old bird whose death was the very definition of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But I was alive, which was the main thing.

  Years later, at Brawn, there was a terrible incident during qualifying at the 2009 Hungarian Grand Prix where part of the suspension came off Rubens’ Brawn and struck Felipe Massa in the Ferrari on his helmet, just an inch above the eye and knocking him unconscious. The thing was, it went through his visor and gave him a head cut and bone damage to his skull.

  He was fine eventually, thank God, but as a result of that accident they introduced a carbon-fibre piece that sat on top of the visor and made it smaller. It was an interim measure before they could introduce a regulation to make the visor slot even smaller, which they did eventually, so the visor slot is tiny.

  The helmets we used were made of carbon fibre so not only are they very light – about 2kg – but they’re safe, too, which is in fact their primary function: safety. You would be amazed if you picked up a crash helmet how light they are, but also how robust. It brings it home to you when you’re driving around and see people on bikes, especially some of the ‘biker’ type helmets you see, that would be less than useful in a crash and would be better suited to a mantelpiece than your head on a freeway.

  The funny thing is that a helmet has to dent on impact otherwise your head takes all the impact, your brain moves and you get brain damage. There has to be some flex in the helmet in order to absorb the impact.

  Fact: it makes a driver cross when someone puts his helmet down the wrong way

  So say if you’re at a photo shoot, suited and booted, you hand your helmet to the PR guy and he plops it down the wrong way up. Not only is there the risk that the paint will get scratched, but it’s a respect thing – respect the lid.

  Fact: helmets mean a lot to a driver

  Obviously, we have no input whatsoever in the livery of the car. Nobody asks a driver what colour they’d like the car or where they think the sponsor logos should go. When it comes to helmets, though, we have most of the input and it’s a right and privilege that we guard jealously and treasure because it’s the only personal thing that we have. The only thing that we can actually sit down and design ourselves.

  Me, I go for a bright colourful design. I’ve got my Union Jack on the back and it’s me all over. Daniel Ricciardo’s is always fun, He was sporting a half-pink, half-blue number the last time I saw him, and very fetching it was too.

  Daniel’s been able to benefit from leaving Red Bull, of course, which is the only team who have any direct input into their drivers’ helmets, and then only because they pay them to have the Red Bull logo around it. At McLaren, we had certain parameters, so you had to have a white ring around the helmet for the sponsor’s logo but the rest of it was your choice: your colour, your design.

  The genesis of my helmet design comes from karting days. In 1994, I was literally handed a helmet with a Union flag on the back and sides, and I liked it so much I used that design – or variations of that design – in karting, Formula Four and Formula Three. It was only when I got to Formula One that a helmet designer at Bell Helmets told me I couldn’t copyright the design, which meant that anybody could wear my helmet. And since the whole idea was to create something unique to me, that felt like defeating the purpose.

  Instead we came up with the ‘JB’ design, which looks almost like a Union flag. It did by then anyway, and I thought it was really cool, so that’s how the JB started.

  A lot of my career was with Bell Helmets, and then the relationship went sour for one reason or another, and so I started working with Arai helmets, who were like, ‘Why don’t we change the design a bit?’ And I began with this guy, Uffe Tagström, a Finnish guy who also designs Kimi’s helmets, and what he did was to integrate the JB flag design, along with a little Johnnie Walker figure, who were one of the main sponsors, and that was pretty much the basis for all of my helmet hats from then on.

  I’ve changed the colours a few times – I’ve had red and white; silver, red and white; pink, and the Brawn colours, which is what I have now – and I’ve added bits to it, so now there are dragons on the back, while at times I had the Ichiban team triathlon logo on the back, and I had a Papa Smurf on the back for a couple of years after the old boy passed away.

  The sponsors are painted on if we know we’re going to keep them all year, otherwise it’s stickers. I’d say we get four or five helmets a year. Well, that’s nowadays, in Super GT. But when I was in F1, it was 18 helmets a year, a helmet per race, each of which would be bagged up and put away after the race. I was never superstitious about my helmet. I’d rather have six helmets that each won one race than one that won six, but that might be because I love collecting them, which I think is common to all drivers. I make sure that I hang on to all of my winning helmets so I have all 15 of my wins. Others I’ve given away to charity, and I’ve given a fair few to friends and family and there’s a bit of swapping that goes on between drivers.

  You have to be choosy, mind. I only want to swap helmet hats with certain drivers, and they would be drivers with whom I have some kind of history, either because we were mates off the track, or because we had some great racing on it.

  Tearing one off

  That time the bird hit me, and I had bits of bird sliding down my visor? That’s when I needed the tear-offs, which are removable plastic strips on the top of your visor that you rip off to remove the oil, dirt, bits of rubber and occasional dead bird that you may encounter during the drive. There are four of them, and it’s a rare race that you don’t use all four. It’s designed to make
it easy to remove with your gloved hand, so you just reach with your opposite hand, pull it off and then you…

  Ah, well, therein lies a tale. Because in ye olden days we’d just toss the used bit of plastic out of the car, but I think it was Valtteri Bottas who threw one out of his and it either went into his airbox, or the airbox of the car behind, and overheated the engine.

  No doubt this sport that prides itself on detail and perfection decided that maybe it wasn’t the best idea to have random plastic booby traps flying around the track like discarded McDonald’s wrappers, and so we were asked to get rid of it in a pocket in the car, which meant that all the teams were testing various sticking pocket things and it was all a bit of a joke. So they’ve gone back to chucking them out of the car.

  Meanwhile, on a car with a roof and a windscreen, the tear-offs will be on the windscreen itself. Big, family-size tear-offs. At Le Mans you have something like 16 tear-offs on the screen and at every pit stop one of the mechanics will lift the wipes, tear off the plastic and suddenly you have a brand-new pristine-clean windscreen. It’s ace.

  In motocross they have one on a reel on the helmet visor, which sounds like a good idea, because at least you don’t gets bits of plastic flying around, and after all, it’s that bit better for the environment. But I guess in Formula One it would be (official reason) aerodynamically inefficient and (unofficial reason) just not cool enough.

  Meanwhile, I’m often asked if I’d be buried with my helmet hat and the answer is no – because I’ll probably be cremated. But it’s certainly true that if you see the funeral of a driver, you generally see their helmet on a stand. You might wonder if it’s in bad taste, especially if the driver died racing. After all, the helmet didn’t save them. But I don’t think it matters, really. It’s more about the symbolism. The fact that they died doing something they loved, and that being a racing driver was very much a part of their identity.