Jenson
Button

Jenson Button was born in Frome, England, on 19 January 1980. He started karting at eight and in 1997 became European Super A champion, the youngest driver and the first Briton to do so. In 1998 he won the British Formula Ford Championship, and in 1999 he finished third in British Formula 3.

Aged 20, he made his Formula 1 debut with Williams in 2000 and finished eighth in the championship. He then drove for Benetton, and in 2002 for Renault, as the Benetton team had been renamed. From 2003 he raced for BAR. In 2004 he scored his first podium in Malaysia and his first pole position at Imola, and with ten podiums he finished third in the championship. In 2005 he was disqualified from third place at the San Marino Grand Prix because his car was underweight, and he and his team were banned from the next two races.

At Honda, the team that BAR became, he won his first race at the 2006 Hungarian Grand Prix, in the rain and from 14th on the grid, in his 113th start. Honda withdrew from Formula 1 at the end of 2008. Ross Brawn took over the team as Brawn GP, and in 2009 Button won six of the first seven races. He secured the world title with fifth place in Brazil, with one round still to run, and Brawn also took the Constructors' Championship.

In 2010 he moved to McLaren, where Lewis Hamilton was his team-mate. In 2011 he took three wins and finished runner-up with 270 points. His last win came in Brazil in 2012, and his last podium was third place in Australia in 2014. He ended his full-time career at the end of 2016 and made a one-off appearance at the 2017 Monaco Grand Prix, standing in for Fernando Alonso, who was racing in the Indianapolis 500. In total he made 306 starts, with 15 wins, 8 pole positions and 50 podiums. In 2018 he won the Super GT title with Naoki Yamamoto in a Team Kunimitsu Honda. He also raced in the World Endurance Championship, finished third overall in the 2024 24 Hours of Daytona and ended his professional career after the 2025 WEC round in Bahrain.

Source: Wikipedia, “Jenson Button”. Text licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.