How to Be an F1 Driver

by Jenson Button

  As for me, the helmet I’d take with me to the afterlife would be my 2009 Monaco-winning helmet. It’s the only helmet I’ve got stored in a Perspex case, and is one of two helmets that are supremely precious to me. That’s because it was such a special race. I’d gone into it as Championship leader, not done as well as hoped in practice, and in qualifying was trailing Rubens and Sebastian. Until I put in a late lap – the lap, the lap that I’m still likely to say is my favourite-ever, depending on when I’m asked and how I’m feeling at the time – which put me on pole.

  After that, I won the race only to park in the wrong place, which meant I had to run down to the podium. And then I partied with Prince Albert at the after-race knees-up, and then on Monday we invented Super Monday. Special, special, special.

  The other helmet is the one I was wearing in Brazil that same year, when we actually clinched the World title.

  Overalls

  We used to have baggier overalls with pockets in them and a Velcro belt. You’d do a photo shoot and have your hands in your pockets looking like something out of the Littlewoods catalogue.

  I’m taking the piss but I liked that, actually. I liked the fact that you had something to do with your hands. Here I am standing looking out over Monaco harbour, what should I do with my hands? Oh, I know, I’ll store them in this handily placed pocket.

  Other than that you don’t really need a pocket. I’m sure in the days of James Hunt and Co. they required pockets for a packet of 20 Embassy and a gold-plated Ronson lighter, but these days there isn’t quite the need, and with the emphasis on keeping things lightweight, they’ve got rid of the pockets, and the Velcro belt has gone, too.

  I’m not so bothered about the Velcro belt but I do mourn the demise of the pockets. I think that removing the pockets has made the job of looking cool in overalls – which is, after all, a driver’s primary role – that bit harder.

  At least we’re all the same now. The worst thing was that it was one of those marginal gains (more of which later) that took a while to catch on. We at McLaren lost our pockets early doors, but not everybody did. Other drivers would see you coming in the paddock and deliberately put their hands in their pockets, openly mocking you. I think most people are the same nowadays, thank God, but it was tough.

  Obviously, your suit is plastered with sponsors’ logos. But so is your underwear, so that if you unzip the top bit of your overalls there are more logos underneath, like a Russian doll. Mind you, it’s frowned upon, unzipping your overalls. The teams like you to keep the overalls zipped up, ostensibly because it’s smarter but who wants to bet that it’s really to do with sponsorship. We prefer to unzip them, though. Firstly, because they can get a bit hot, and secondly because zipped up they don’t leave a lot to the imagination.

  4. THE NOT-SO-GREAT AND SOMETIMES DOWNRIGHT YUCKY SHIT

  The fear

  Yup. It happens. It really does. I remember my second-to-last race in 2016. Brazil, it was, the penultimate race of the season – the race before Abu Dhabi, at which I was due to retire.

  It was wet, which should have been perfect conditions for me, and one of those races that I could wring the neck out of and maybe do a little better than expected. I certainly hoped to beat my teammate at the time, who was Fernando.

  Turn one, it hit me. I had a bit of wobble, figuratively and literally. The circuit was treacherous with rain and I was sliding all over the place. This was the race I mentioned earlier, where Max Verstappen really showed his skills in the wet. Well, as he was doing that up front, muggins here, the former wet-race specialist, was sliding all over the place at the back, feeling very much not in control of his car, desperately trying and failing to find grip, and feeling…

  Fearful.

  For the first time ever, I was scared.

  I didn’t tell anyone at the time. I’ve hardly told a soul since. But I suffered a loss of nerve that day. It was because I knew I was retiring, and as a result all I could think about was hurting myself. The race was super wet, a tough circuit that even though it had been so good to me over the years was still a dangerous one.

  This is not something you’d normally think about. Usually, in fact, you’re not thinking in those terms at all. I’ll talk about distractions in a bit but I can save you the bother of reading that section by saying that you don’t let anything distract you when you’re driving. It’s not a case of having to consciously banish distractions. They simply don’t occur to you. You’re a driving machine and that’s it.

  But here I was, thinking. I was thinking, There are two races to go. I don’t want to hurt myself. Not when I’ve achieved so much, come so far.

  I was scaring myself, that was the problem. My head was not in the right place, and I think that’s probably the most dangerous scenario. You tense up, and when you tense up like that it’s so easy for the car to snap. A bit of oversteer, a bit of understeer, it just goes. You might be going through a corner, hit a river, and if you snatch at the steering you lose grip and it’s bang, gone, you’re in the wall at 150mph. I didn’t want to finish my career like that, or possibly not walk away from something. Ask me my scariest moment in a race car and that was it.

  And here’s the kicker. Because it was a wet race I was finding it tough to drive the car, which was exacerbating the psychological issue, which made it even harder to drive the car, and because of that I couldn’t get heat in the tyres, and because of that it made the driving more difficult, which in turn made the psychological issue worse.

  As soon as you get tyre temperature in the wet, things get easier, you can start pushing the car and taking risks, but I couldn’t even get to that stage.

  It’s not uncommon. I’ve heard it said by other drivers that the fear kicks in once you decide to retire. For that reason I think it would be better if you decided, announced and did it all in one go, but of course it can never work like that for many reasons.

  Of those who finished, I came last. Fernando, miles in front, was over a second faster than me. I was embarrassed with my performance; I was gutted. Coming in and seeing the team, was the most embarrassing to me. Crashing: shit happens, you say sorry. But to put in such a lacklustre performance was just mortifying. I didn’t tell them that I was scared. I just said I didn’t turn the tyres on, which I couldn’t, because I didn’t drive fast enough to turn the tyres on. I don’t mind saying that I don’t think anyone’s better than me in those conditions, but that day, nobody was worse than me. All I could think was that a year ago I would have destroyed that race.

  Nerves

  Not to be confused with the above, but I do also struggle with nerves, excitement and adrenalin – it all comes at once. How do I deal with it? I don’t think I do. I think I just breathe and tell myself, You’ve got this. You know what you’re doing.

  It’s the same with anything I do: triathlons, racing, presenting. And I think it’s because you care. That’s why you get nervous. Which means, of course, that it’s a good thing to get nervous: it’s because you care about what you’re doing. It also means that when you do achieve something it’s going to mean so much more to you.

  For that reason I’d never want to get rid of my nerves completely, even if I could; they help you feel present in the moment, they’re how you understand that you’re doing something different and special. You should nurture and treasure them, not fear them.

  That’s the difficulty for some people, I think. They let nerves get in the way of Doing Cool Stuff. They don’t do the stuff because they’re too nervous about it.

  Me, I get nervous. No doubt. If it’s something worth doing I get nervous. And I also know that the only way to get over your nerves about something is to do it. I mean, it would be so easy to go through life and not be nervous, but that would mean never being out of your comfort zone, and then how would you get the best out of yourself?

  I do speeches onstage and in the first 30 seconds I can hear the trepidation in my voice. You might make a little slip-up or rush the answer t
o something. I say to myself, why the hell are you nervous? Just relax, breathe, take your time,

  Thing is, though, although I say that to myself every time, it doesn’t really get better.

  Panic attacks, fainting and other stuff I’d never have admitted to while in Formula One

  I nearly had a panic attack while driving once. It was in 2004, the first-ever Chinese Grand Prix. It was, and still is, hosted at the Shanghai International Circuit where there are four corners where the G-force is so intense that you can’t breathe.

  Fair play, I was warned. My engineer said, ‘You probably won’t breathe on those four corners, because the G-force is five-plus’ like it was nothing.

  I was like, Really? Come on... And then I went out, tried to breathe, couldn’t breathe, and got a bit… well, worried. Not panicked. That tale is to come. But certainly more than slightly concerned, a feeling that was characterised by a sense of incredible claustrophobia. I didn’t faint, though, thank God, because driving a car around the circuit in China is not a time you want to be fainting.

  The panic, though. That was another time. In 2014 I was fitness training someplace overseas that I won’t name for reasons that will shortly become clear. Perhaps training a little too hard, I developed quite serious back pain. So bad that I couldn’t walk, and if I lay down I couldn’t get up.

  So I took myself off to this little sports clinic they had in the hotel, where the nurse took a look and said, ‘Right, we’re going to give you an injection.’

  ‘Where?’ I said.

  ‘In here,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘whereabouts on the body?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘it’s in the bum.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, and assumed the position.

  In went the needle, and I can only assume she got it wrong. Well, something went wrong anyway, because all of a sudden I was in very serious pain.

  And I mean big pain. Proper searing agony.

  ‘I’m going to faint,’ I managed. ‘I’m going to faint, I’m going to faint,’ and she removed the needle but by then it was too late and I had indeed lost consciousness.

  My companion at the time said I had gone white and then purple and that I’d stopped breathing. I remember coming round and finding myself in a weird state of suspension between conscious and unconscious. I could hear things. I could hear people talking in the room. But I wasn’t there with them yet. It was as though I was underwater and very slowly moving towards a light-dappled surface.

  When I eventually opened my eyes, I was even more confused and that gave me a moment of full-on, almost-losing-the-plot panic, which I’m pretty sure is the only time I’ve ever properly panicked in my life. All I can say is that when it comes to panic you know it when you feel it, and I certainly felt it then.

  Still, I left it there in the clinic – or thought I had.

  Then, about five months later, it happened on a plane. Suddenly I felt terribly claustrophobic. It wasn’t as though I felt trapped on the plane. Maybe a bit. But it was more that I was trapped inside my own body. Gripped by an overwhelming urge to get out.

  I had a word with myself. Got through it. Feeling very rattled about it, though, I took myself off to the doctor. He gave me an X-ray.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing wrong with you.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ I said, squinting at the X-rays in search of strange shadows or bits of shrapnel.

  He said, ‘I’m sure it’s a mental thing. We can give you some drugs to sort it out, but to be honest it’s something you’ve got to deal with on your own. It might be tough and it might be freaky at times, but you’ve got to try and get a handle on it.’

  It’s a type of anxiety, he added. According to him it’s like a brain fart (my terminology, not his). It’s when you’re not doing anything and your brain goes into a kind of zombie slumber state. It’s like a form of accidental meditation. Then, when your brain kicks into gear, it feels as though it’s behind your body.

  ‘That’s the feeling you’re having,’ he told me. ‘It’s your brain trying to play catch up.’

  And he was right that getting a handle on it is very much something that I’ve had to sort out myself. Sure enough, I’ve found myself in a situation in which I’m struggling, like being on a plane or in a confined space, I sort of flash back to that moment in the hotel sports clinic, and I can sense a residual feeling of panic wanting to return. At these times I have to be careful to manage it, not let it find its full expression.

  It’s no longer an issue because I’ve learnt to control it, which is mainly down to controlling my breathing. Or, rather it was about remembering to breathe, because that, essentially, was the problem: I was not remembering to breathe.

  Like I say, I told no one. This is because, a.) if you tell someone that makes it A Thing, and I didn’t want to give it that lofty status, b.) I’m British and we tend not to discuss that sort of thing, preferring to drink tea, slice cucumber for our sandwiches and address the important subject of the weather, and c.) I’m a Formula One driver and if there any chinks in our armour we cover them up; we do our best to hide them, because our rivals certainly won’t be revealing their frailties any time soon.

  Because I was still racing in F1 I’d occasionally get this feeling while at work. I remember being on the massage couch with Mikey working on me, and having to get up and walk outside. I told him that I needed some fresh air, and I did, although I knew there was more to it than that.

  Sure enough, outside in the fresh air I felt no better. I was still thinking, I feel like I’m going to faint. (Only I know I’m not going to faint, it’s just that breathing thing again.) Except I think I’m going to faint. Which, of course, brings a whole new level of anxiety, in turn worsening the fear of fainting.

  I got there, though. As with other times. I overcame the feeling by remembering to breathe and relax. You’re thinking, Yeah, easy. It’s not. It took me over a year to get a handle on that little lot.

  ‘We don’t talk about crashes’

  It’s true. We talk about ‘issues in the race’. You know, if you get a puncture on the rear, you have to close and thus lock the differential or risk damage because one wheel’s turning a lot faster than the other. If you break a front wing, you need to let us know before you come into the pits. Things like that. Never If you have a crash and think your leg’s fallen off, this is what to do.

  What we did have, however, was a procedure for quick extraction out of the car. This came via an FIA ruling, which said that you can’t race unless you can get out of the car and put both feet on the floor in five seconds flat.

  It became a bit of a competition. The FIA steward would get to you and he’d been to five teams already and you’re, like, ‘What’s the time to beat?’

  He’d be, ‘Well, Vettel did it in three point seven.’

  So you’re, ‘Okay, let’s try and beat it.’

  You’d do it. ‘Go on then,’ you’d say, ‘what was my time?’

  ‘You did it in three point nine. Well done, you passed…’

  ‘Wait, wait, wait. Where do you think you’re going? Let me have another go…’

  And you’d do it in three point five. And your knees are sore and you’ve done your back in, but it was worth it knowing that you’ve won.

  Another thing: we were told not to exit the car until we were informed that it’s safe. Teams can tell from sensors on the car what sort of G the driver has pulled in the crash and if you’ve pulled 35G, which is the limit for possible distortion to the neck, you’ll need to wait for the all-clear to get out.

  So if your car catches fire, say, you get out in your five seconds. If you crash, though, and it’s a crash at speed, you have to wait to hear, and it may well be that you’ll need to be seen by medics and attended to by FIA stewards who will extract you from the car still strapped into your seat so that your neck doesn’t move (the in-car rig that allows this was introduced to the sport by the late, great Sid Watkins, the neu
rosurgeon who probably did more to improve safety in the sport than anybody else). They can do this in about four minutes flat. They help you out, in the seat, having spoken to you first ensure that you’ve replied to them in the correct manner and then they take you out.

  Crashing is a disappointment, of course, but I’ve never been upset with the team for something breaking, ever, even when I’ve had suspension failure and hit the barriers really hard in testing, which is a horrible feeling. The air is sucked out of your lungs, you’ve got nothing in you any more. It’s just that feeling of being winded. The worst, most horrible feeling.

  Not only that, but if you hit a tyre barrier at speed you’re never sure if you’re going to come out the other side. It doesn’t matter how hard you hit it, you can always see the worst.

  The real scary stuff is the car stopping so quickly, like when it hits something, because that’s when you pull the high G and your brain moves in your skull and you either get brain or neck damage or you’re dead. When you see a race car rolling it looks really bad, but of the ‘bad’ crashes it’s one of the safest, because you’ve got your roll protection, you’re wearing your helmet hat and the roll action is taking the sting out of the stopping.

  The first race that Brittny attended was the opening race of 2016 in Melbourne, when Fernando Alonso had a nasty crash. Got airborne, rolled it into a wall. But he got out. He was dazed, but okay because he didn’t hit anything hard, because although he came to rest against the wall, it wasn’t like he ‘hit’ it. You look at the crash, it looks bad. Just the state of his car afterwards. It looks like it’s been through the crusher. You might even think it looks worse than me hitting the wall at Monaco in 2003. But of the two mine was potentially much worse, because of the sudden stop.