Jenson Button believed Rubens Barrichello was the ‘best teammate’ he ever had in one specific area

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Formula 1 world champion Jenson Button had one of the longest and most impressive careers in the sport’s history.

Button earned his first F1 race seat at Williams under strange circumstances back in 2000, despite limited experience racing single-seater cars at that point.

He finished third in the British Formula 3 Championship the year before, but that was enough to convince Frank Williams to offer him a test and he saw off the more experienced Bruno Junqueira in a shoot-out ahead of the season starting.

Button ended up bouncing between teams fairly regularly during his career before eventually settling down at McLaren for the final seven years of his time in Formula 1.

When he wasn’t moving around the paddock himself, those in the car next to him regularly were, but it meant Button could test himself against some of the best racers in his era of the sport.

That includes Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso at McLaren, Ralf Schumacher and Giancarlo Fisichella in his early years and Rubens Barrichello during the most important season of his life.

He raced alongside the talented Brazilian at Honda for a year before the miracle of Brawn GP took place in 2009 and helped deliver Button his unlikely F1 world championship.

Jenson Button says Rubens Barrichello was his ‘best’ F1 teammate for developing a car

Button was recalling how Brawn GP’s first testing runs went much better than expected, describing the car as potentially ‘the best’ he had driven in Formula 1 at that point.

In his book, Life To The Limit, he wrote: “In the afternoon I collared Rubens only to learn he had been having the exact same experience as me.

“Both of us were barely able to control our excitement, the whole team buzzing with it.

“And for that, we started running high fuel, just so the teams wouldn’t know how much speed we had.

“Not only did we have pace in hand, but we didn’t have a single reliability issue. No bodywork that needed altering, no valve that needed replacing. It looked like a work of art and drove like one too.

READ MORE: When Michael Schumacher once tried the ‘most dangerous’ overtake Rubens Barrichello had ever seen in F1

“Leading up to the first race of the season, we worked on the car, Rubens and me.

“He was good at that, probably the best teammate I ever had in terms of understanding and improving a racecar.

“I remember after his first day of testing he walked into the garage and started telling the engineers all about the car, I was like, you’re going to need to step up your game JB, this was a guy I could learn from.”

How Jenson Button won the 2009 Formula 1 championship alongside Rubens Barrichello

The work Barrichello and Button did behind the scenes at Brawn GP set them up to spring one of the biggest surprises in F1 history.

Hamilton had won the title the previous season with Ferrari clinching the Constructors’ Championship, but neither of them expected what they saw from the brand-new Brawn GP team that year.

They nailed a loophole in the regulations that allowed a double diffuser on the car and while others also tried it, Button and Barrichello benefitted from it more than any other driver.

READ MORE: Jenson Button shares why winning the F1 world championship wasn’t exactly what he ‘dreamt of’

Red Bull got increasingly quicker as the year went on, and this was the year before Sebastian Vettel went on a run of winning four titles on the bounce.

However, Button’s six wins in the first seven races built up enough of a buffer to prevent the promising German from catching him.

It was reminiscent of how Max Verstappen secured last year’s title once Red Bull lost their advantage over the rest of the field in 2024.

While Verstappen joked he could have won his fourth title in a McLaren, Button was simply delighted that he had finally been given a car with championship-winning potential.

The Brit is unlikely to ever underplay the role Barrichello had in helping extract the maximum out of the Ross Brawn-designed machine that year.