The moment Jenson Button knew he could win the 2009 title with a Formula 1 team bought for £1

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Jenson Button’s championship win in 2009 is one of Formula 1’s greatest underdog stories.

The Brit had had a pretty eventful career before that season. Button earned his first F1 seat with Williams in ‘strange’ circumstances in 2000 as he felt he had missed out to Bruno Junqueira thanks to a peculiarly written engineering test.

The 44-year-old joined Benetton in 2001 before the team became Renault the following year. He moved to BAR Honda – later Honda – in 2003, where he would spend the next six years of his career.

His time with the Japanese manufacturer was full of ups and downs. Button was banned for two races in 2005 after his and Takuma Sato’s cars were found to be underweight after the San Marino Grand Prix.

The Brit won his maiden race at the 2006 Hungarian Grand Prix, but the following year, Honda would suffer a regression in performance and fell towards the back of the grid.

In 2008, Honda pulled out of the sport before being saved by ex-Ferrari boss Ross Brawn. Purchasing the team for just £1, Brawn GP rose from the ashes as the sport entered a new era of regulations in 2009.

Jenson Button knew he could win the 2009 championship after pre-season testing in Barcelona

The team went into the season as massive underdogs, with Button and teammate Rubens Barrichello not expected to be competitive. To everyone’s surprise, they were.

Button turned up to pre-season testing in Barcelona with low expectations for the Brawn GP 01’s performance. Little did he know that the car had serious pace as he blew away the rest of the field.

The Brit recalled to Sky Sports how his race engineer Andrew Shovlin told him he was six tenths faster than everyone went he returned to the pits. It was then that he knew he had a serious chance of winning the championship.

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“I drove the car at the last official test in Barcelona”, he said. “Everyone had been pounding around for days. I jumped in, went out, put a lap time in, and I remember coming back in and telling Shov, my race engineer Andrew Shovlin, chief engineer now at Mercedes, that it feels alright but the set up doesn’t feel quite right, we’re understeering here, snappy with the rear end and he looked at me smiling.

“Why are you grinning so much?,” I asked him. He said: “Because your first lap time was six tenths quicker than anyone has gone this test.”

“You’re kidding, right?” He said no. I said let’s get this car working – get the set up right and see what she can really do!

“At that point the team said maybe we won’t run low-fuel anymore, so we didn’t run low fuel all test but we ended up at the end of the day with the quickest lap by one second, so it was a shock for everyone I think. I think we knew we’d built this fantastic car”.

Jenson Button was one of many few drivers who beat Lewis Hamilton as his teammate

Button had never dreamt of winning the world championship, but that is exactly what he did with Brawn in 2009. Winning six of the first seven races of the season, the Brit fended off a charge from Sebastian Vettel in the second half of the year to win the title by 11 points.

His championship triumph earned him a move to McLaren alongside the 2008 champion Lewis Hamilton. The duo spent three years together as teammates but were unable to stop Vettel’s run of dominance in the early 2010s.

Button beat Hamilton in the standings in 2011 – the first driver to do so as the seven-time champion’s teammate up to that point. Nico Rosberg (2016) and George Russell (2022 and 2024) are the only other times Hamilton has been beaten.

Button finished his illustrious F1 career with McLaren in 2016, but it would end on a whimper as the team suffered a dramatic decline, with points finishes becoming hard to come by.

The Brit returned for a one-off appearance at the 2017 Monaco Grand Prix as Fernando Alonso’s replacement while he participated in the Indy 500. Since retiring, Button has gone on to regularly appear on Sky Sports F1’s coverage as a pundit.