2009 Formula One champion Jenson Button described his former McLaren teammate Lewis Hamilton as “weird” off the race track.
Jenson Button, 37, recently wrote an autobiography called Life at the Limit. In it, the 2009 Formula One champion discusses many aspects of his life, namely his career in the world’s top open-wheel racing series.
Button won the 2009 Formula One championship in his lone season driving for Brawn. He won six of the first seven races of the season and went on to win the championship despite the fact that he finished no higher than 2nd place in any of the last 10 races of the season.
Button had driven full-time in every Formula One season from 2000 to 2016, winning a total of 15 races in the process. He spent his final seven full-time seasons driving for McLaren before being replaced by Stoffel Vandoorne this season.
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Button did make an appearance in this year’s Monaco Grand Prix as Fernando Alonso’s replacement when Alonso went to drive in his first Indianapolis 500, but he was forced to retire after crashing with Pascal Wehrlein toward the end of the race.
As referenced above, Button spent his final seven full-time seasons in Formula One driving for McLaren. He started driving for the team in the 2010 season coming off of his lone championship, replacing Heikki Kovalainen, who was never that great and finished his Formula One career with just one career victory and a top finish of just 7th place in the drivers standings.
In moving to McLaren, Button joined Lewis Hamilton, who had been driving for the team since his rookie season of 2007. The two drivers spent three seasons together with the team. Here is what Button had to say about the three-time Formula One champion in his book.
"“Of everybody on the grid, [Hamilton]’s the guy who really has that ‘gift’…Personally, he was fine with me, no issues at all at this stage of the game, but you could just tell he was a little bit peeved. That thing about it being his team? It was right on the money. And, if you ask me, he was finding it difficult to get a handle on the fact that it was our team now.”“So it was good that we were able to come in and lift the place, add a bit of much-needed levity. [But] I’m not sure that was to Lewis’ taste. I don’t think that I was to his taste, if I’m honest.”“[The McLaren-made cartoon series] portrayed us as bantering rivals. The rivalry was real, but there wasn’t a great deal of banter…Off the track, however, he was still being a bit weird.”"
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Jenson Button is known for keeping it real, and he showed that once again in this book when talking about Lewis Hamilton, who, for all intents and purposes, likely won’t have an issue with these harmless comments whatsoever. In fact, Button just recently made comments about not wanting to race in IndyCar since the series “scares the s—” out of him. So again, he keeps it real.