Jenson Button: 15 F1 Wins, 50 Podiums and the 2009 Fairytale Title
Welcome to the Happy Hour Racing Formula 1 Driver Spotlight - where we pull one driver into the garage, look under the hood at their career, and tell you what makes them tick. This week: the 2009 world champion.
The Short Version
Jenson Button made 306 Formula 1 starts between 2000 and 2017 and won 15 of them, with 50 podiums, eight poles and 1,235 career points. He waited six and a half years and 113 races for his first win. Then, in 2009, he drove a car for a team that had been sold for a pound after its owner walked away, won six of the first seven grands prix, and became world champion. It is still the strangest title run in modern Formula 1 history, and he is the only person who has one.
Six Years of Waiting
Jenson Alexander Lyons Button was born on January 19, 1980, in Frome, Somerset, and came up through karting with his father John, a former rallycross driver, running the show. He arrived in Formula 1 with Williams in 2000 at age 20, which made him Britain's youngest grand prix driver at the time. He scored a point in his second race, finishing sixth in Brazil, and the hype machine started immediately.
Then came the long middle. Benetton in 2001, Renault in 2002, BAR from 2003. The talent was never in question, but the cars mostly were. His best early season was 2004, when he finished third in the championship with ten podiums and no wins, which is a fair summary of the first half of his career. BAR became Honda, Honda got slower, and by 2006 he had started 112 grands prix without winning one.
Win number one came in the rain at the Hungaroring in August 2006. He started 14th, the track was soaked, and he picked his way to the front while quicker cars fell off. It took him 113 starts to get there. Only a handful of drivers in the history of the sport have waited longer for a first victory and still gone on to win a championship.
2009, and the Team That Should Not Have Existed
In December 2008 Honda pulled out of Formula 1 entirely. The team had no engine, no budget and no obvious future, and Button had no drive. Team principal Ross Brawn led a management buyout, bolted a Mercedes engine into a car designed for a Honda, named the team after himself, and showed up in Australia in March 2009 with a rear diffuser the rest of the grid had not thought of.
What followed was the best start to a season anyone had seen in decades. Button won in Australia, Malaysia, Bahrain, Spain, Monaco and Turkey. Six wins in the first seven races, with a third place in China the only gap. The rest of the field caught up in the second half of the year and he did not win again, but he had built enough of a cushion. He clinched the title at the Brazilian Grand Prix and finished the season with 95 points to Sebastian Vettel's 84. Brawn GP won the constructors' championship in its only season of existence, then was sold to Mercedes.
McLaren, Hamilton and the Longest Race Ever Run
Most drivers who win a title protect it. Button did the opposite. For 2010 he left the champion team and signed for McLaren, where Lewis Hamilton was already installed as the home favorite. The paddock expected Button to get buried. Over their three seasons together, from 2010 through 2012, Button outscored Hamilton 672 points to 657.
The best of those years was 2011, when he finished runner-up to Vettel with 270 points and three wins. One of them is the race people still bring up first. At the 2011 Canadian Grand Prix in Montreal he started seventh, collided with his own teammate, served a drive-through penalty, pitted six times, and at one point was running dead last. A two-hour red flag for rain turned it into the longest race in Formula 1 history at four hours, four minutes and 39.5 seconds. He passed Vettel for the lead on the final lap and won it.
His last win came at Brazil in 2012. He stayed at McLaren through the lean Honda years that followed, stepped back after 2016, and made one more start in 2017 at Monaco, standing in for Fernando Alonso while Alonso ran the Indianapolis 500.
By the Numbers
Here is the Formula 1 career in the parts that matter.
Off the Track
Button's father John was the constant in his career, a rallycross driver turned race-day fixture in a pink shirt who was in the garage for the 2009 title. John Button died in January 2014 at age 70 at his home in the south of France, and Jenson has been open about how much that reshaped the back end of his driving career.
He married Jessica Michibata in 2014; they divorced the following year. He married Brittny Ward in Florida in 2022 after several years together, and they have two children, Hendrix, born in 2019, and Lenny, born in 2020. He is a serious endurance athlete who has raced triathlons and Ironman events, and he has a long attachment to Japan that goes back to his Honda years.
The racing did not stop when Formula 1 did. He won the 2018 Super GT GT500 title in Japan with Team Kunimitsu, ran three NASCAR Cup Series road-course races in 2023 for Rick Ware Racing, and shared the Garage 56 NASCAR Camaro at Le Mans that same year with Jimmie Johnson and Mike Rockenfeller. He then spent two seasons in the World Endurance Championship with Cadillac Hertz Team Jota, closing out his professional driving career at the 8 Hours of Bahrain in November 2025. For 2026 he is a Sky Sports F1 pundit and an Aston Martin Formula 1 team ambassador, and he says the only racing left on his list is historics, for fun.
The Bottom Line
Jenson Button spent six years being called the most wasted talent in Formula 1, then won a world championship in a car built by a team that technically did not exist four months earlier. Fifteen wins is a modest number next to the names he raced against. Being the one driver who turned the sport's most unlikely season into a title, and then beating Lewis Hamilton over three years at Hamilton's own team, is how a modest number gets remembered.
Shop Formula 1 Gear
Button drove for McLaren longer than anywhere else, and eight of his 15 wins came in that car. Everything below is real Formula 1 gear, in stock right now:
- McLaren F1 Lifestyle New Era 9Fifty Camo Baseball Hat - the team he spent seven full seasons with.
- McLaren Racing F1 New Era Shadow Beanie
- New Era McLaren Racing 9FIFTY Snapback Cap
- New Era McLaren F1 Team Snowflake Knit Hat with Pom
- Formula 1 Tech Limited Edition Belgian GP Hat - Spa is where Button took his last pole and converted it into a win in 2012.
Browse the full Formula 1 collection, the McLaren collection, or see the newest arrivals.
