Button

Frome, a small town in Somerset, was where Jenson Button was born on 19 January 1980, the fourth child of Simone Lyons and John Button, a former rallycross driver. His father was a known figure in British motorsport during the 1970s, piloting a distinctive Volkswagen Beetle before switching to a VW Golf. Button’s parents divorced when he was seven, and he was raised by his mother alongside his three older sisters, though he later lived with his stepmother, Pippa Kerr.

Racing was an early obsession. At eight, his father bought him his first kart, and he began competing at Clay Pigeon Raceway. In 1991, at age 11, he won the British Cadet Kart Championship, winning all 34 races that season. He went on to win the European Super A Championship in 1997, becoming the youngest driver to do so, and also took the Ayrton Senna Memorial Cup that year.

Jenson Button’s route to Formula One began at eight, on a kart track in Somerset, and accelerated with a perfect season in 1991: all 34 races won in the British Cadet Kart Championship. By 1997, at 17, he became the youngest driver to win the European Super A Championship, adding the Ayrton Senna Memorial Cup that same year. He moved to cars in 1998, winning the British Formula Ford Championship and the Formula Ford Festival at Brands Hatch. That success earned him the McLaren Autosport BRDC Young Driver of the Year Award, which included a test in a McLaren F1 car. In 1999, Button stepped up to British Formula 3 with Promatecme. He won three races—at Thruxton, Pembrey, and Silverstone—finished as the top rookie and third overall in the standings. He also placed second at the Macau Grand Prix, losing by 0.035 seconds. The results opened the door: Williams signed him for the 2000 season, making Button, at 20, one of the youngest drivers on the grid.

He arrived in Formula 1 as the sport’s youngest-ever British driver in 2000, a prodigy from Williams with a permanent number 22 and a reputation built on a single dominant season in British Formula Ford. Over 18 seasons and 309 starts, Button’s career became a masterclass in adaptability. He drove for seven teams—Williams, Benetton, Renault, BAR, Honda, Brawn, and McLaren—surviving ownership changes, engine swaps, and a car that went from backmarker to world-beater. That transformation peaked in 2009, when he won six of the first seven races for Brawn GP, capitalizing on the team’s double-diffuser innovation, and secured his only drivers’ championship. He added 15 wins, 50 podiums, eight poles, and eight fastest laps across his career, with his finest seasons coming at McLaren, where he finished runner-up in 2011 and won memorable races at Canada (2011) and Brazil (2012). He retired after 2017 with a reputation for smooth tire management, late-race strategy calls, and an ability to extract results from cars that often lacked outright pace.

The 2009 season was Button’s apex, a statistical outlier in a career defined by consistency rather than dominance. Driving for the Brawn GP team, he won six of the first seven races, a start that included victories in Australia, Malaysia, Bahrain, Spain, Monaco, and Turkey. He secured the World Drivers’ Championship at the Brazilian Grand Prix with one round remaining, finishing the season with 95 points, six wins, and nine podiums from 17 starts. The 2011 campaign, his second with McLaren, offered a different kind of peak: he won three races, including a famous wet-dry victory at the Canadian Grand Prix that is often ranked among the sport’s greatest, and finished runner-up in the championship to Sebastian Vettel. Across those two seasons, Button took nine of his 15 career wins, 17 of his 50 podiums, and both of his championship top-two finishes. No other period in his 18-year career matched that concentration of results.

Married twice, Button first wed Japanese model Jessica Michibata in December 2014 after a relationship that began in 2009. The marriage lasted barely a year; they separated in December 2015. A few months later, in March 2016, he began a relationship with American model Brittny Ward, whom he married in March 2022. The couple have two children: a son, Hendrix Jonathan, born in July 2019, and a daughter, Lenny Monrow, born in December 2020. The family resides in Los Angeles.

Beyond the cockpit, Button is an endurance athlete who competes in triathlons and mountain bikes. He also maintains a personal automobile collection and supports Bristol City Football Club. In August 2015, while still married to Michibata, the couple was burgled at a rented home in Saint-Tropez; thieves stole belongings worth approximately £300,000, including a £250,000 engagement ring, with reports suggesting the pair may have been gassed through the air-conditioning system before the robbery.

After retiring from Formula 1 at the end of 2017, Button did not drift far from the cockpit. He returned to the World Endurance Championship in 2018, driving for SMP Racing in the LMP1 class and finishing on the podium at Le Mans in his class. In 2021, he entered the Extreme E series, founding his own team, JBXE, and competing as a driver. That same year, he made a cameo in NASCAR’s Cup Series at Circuit of the Americas, finishing 18th. More recently, he has taken on a senior advisory role with the Williams Formula 1 team, the very squad that gave him his debut in 2000. He also serves as a brand ambassador for several commercial partners and remains a regular presence in the paddock, though he now splits his time between Monaco and Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

By the time Jenson Button retired at the end of 2017, he had started 309 Grands Prix, won 15 of them, and stood on the podium 50 times. His 2009 world championship with Brawn GP remains one of the most improbable title runs in the sport’s history: a team born from the ashes of Honda, a car designed in a single winter, and a driver who had been written off by much of the paddock. That season alone—six wins, four poles—rewired how he was perceived. He was no longer the playboy who had lucked into a Williams seat at 20; he was the man who had outscored Lewis Hamilton over three seasons at McLaren, the driver who could nurse a set of tires and a fuel load like few others.

His legacy is not built on raw speed alone. Button was a tactician, a smooth operator whose style aged better than most. He was awarded an MBE, won the BBC Young Sports Personality of the Year in 2000, and received the Laureus Breakthrough of the Year award in 2010. He remains a senior advisor to Williams, the team where his F1 career began.