How to Be an F1 Driver

by Jenson Button

  No?

  All right, then. How about…

  THE OCCASION

  Qualifying. Sorry race-day fans, but it’s qualifying. The reason why is because you’ve built up to it. You’ve gone through testing, you’ve gone through practice and, in theory, at least – this being the perfect lap, after all – you’ve fine-tuned and perfected the car to within an inch of its life. So you might have had too much understeer in practice, and that was a pain, because if you’re anything like me, you hate understeer. But you’ve adjusted that. It might have been bouncing too much in the high-speed corner. But you’ve tweaked the suspension to deal with that. You might have had second thoughts about the tyres you’re using, but you’re happy now.

  In short, you’ve achieved all you can with the car to make it as quick as possible. You have confidence in yourself and in the car and now, for the qualifying session, you’re going to give the engine full power, because you never do for testing or practice, you always leave a little juice in reserve, never maximum power, only for qualifying and the race. For the first time all weekend you’re really going to let the tiger out of the cage.

  Lastly, as this is the ‘perfect’ lap, and I get to choose exactly when I get to drive it would be first thing in the morning. Nothing to do with the temperature or the height of the sun or anything like that – just because I want to get on with it. Nothing grinds my gears more than race day when you wake up at 8am and it feels like hours before you even get to the warm-up lap.

  THE CAR

  I need a car that has a really good strong rear stability in order to banish that pesky oversteer. That’s the ideal – a car that gives good front grip so the more you turn the wheel, the more front grip you get – the kind of grip that pulls you around the corner as though the car is on rails.

  It’s a balanced car, that’s what it’s all about. When I brake, I brake hard and then come off. But I’m modulating a little bit, balancing the car as I come off the brake pedal, and when I go on the throttle, I’m modulating again, so I’m playing with the steering, I’m trying to be as smooth as I can with the steering wheel. But when I’m throttling, I’m gradually finding the grip, so I get on the power, feel just a little bit of wheel spin, hold it there until the wheel spin stops and then I’ll come on with more power, more power, more power.

  All my movements are through my pedals, if you like. So I brake and then I modulate that and then throttle, I’m modulating all the way through the corner.

  Lewis, on the other hand, is the opposite. Lewis arrives at a corner, bang on the brake, and whether he’s braked in the right place or not, he just immediately comes off the brake, no modulation and the throttle, gets to the apex and he gets to an exit, and he’s like – bang – there’s nothing, it’s like his legs are just, like bang, bang, bang, and it shouldn’t work – it’s a style of driving that’s completely opposite to mine but it works because he does everything through the steering wheel, so instead of modulating these pedals, which is what I’d do, he’s modulating the steering; he’s accelerating and controlling the car through his hands rather than his feet.

  Honestly. It’s amazing. You open our data, it’s, like, oh my God, it’s crazy how we’re so different and yet we would do pretty much the same lap time.

  WEATHER

  It’s dry and the temperature is low. With low circuit temperatures, you get more grip, the engine runs better. So an ambient temperature of 15 degrees would be ideal, I guess. The circuit would end up being 22 degrees, probably.

  In winter testing you always go really quick because the circuit’s cold. Then you’d go back to the same circuit when it’s hot, it’s often windier too, and you go slower. And yes, while we’re on the subject: wind can make a lot of difference with aerodynamics. Say if you’ve got a headwind in a corner, you’re going to get a lot more front grip, whereas if you have the wind behind you, you’ll get understeer through that corner.

  At Suzuka, because of the way the circuit’s designed, you get a tail wind on the straights, so you go quicker on the straights, so you’re gaining time there, and then you turn, and you’ve got all these S-bends and you have a head wind all the way up the S-bends, which is amazing, because you get so much downforce on the car.

  It’s like it’s on rails the whole way around Suzuka. It’s one of the reasons I love it so much. You gain a second a lap time if you have the wind in that direction, whereas if it’s blowing the other way you get a headwind on the straight, so the car goes slower and you get a tail wind, up through the S’s, and you’ve got no grip.

  Suzuka is the extreme but that happens on a lot of circuits. If the wind changes it’s tough and you can also get gusty weather as well. I’ve had times on a qualifying lap where suddenly I’ve lost all my grip and they look at the data and they say, ‘Yeah, it’s a gust of wind, you just got unlucky.’

  I’m like, ‘You’re kidding me, no one’s going to believe that it was a gust of wind.’ And lots of drivers say it and you think, Is it true or not? but normally it is. You can get real unlucky with a nasty gust of wind.

  CIRCUIT

  Friday is when you first start driving and normally the circuit at this point is very dusty. ‘Green’, they call it, which means it’s not at its best and won’t be until you get to qualifying.

  It’s another reason that qualifying is the best time to drive, because by then the circuit is what they call ‘rubbered in’. See, all the teams have brand-new tyres so the rubber goes down and cleans the circuit and gives the track grip. This is why it’s so great in qualifying. It’s hit that sweet spot you want. Whereas for the race it’s very different, because in the race, you get a lot of the tyres throwing the marbles off.

  It’s not a problem if you’re on the racing line, but if you stray off that, there’s no grip at all. Again, it makes it interesting when you’re overtaking. Say if you overtake someone and push them on to the marbles, they can’t get you on the exit because they’ve got dirty tyres.

  ACING THOSE CORNERS

  And of course the first corner is great. Because like I said, that’s the one where you get a feel for the car, for the race and for the task at hand – the one that gives you that confidence going into the rest of the lap.

  The only one that’s really tricky to do is Monaco, because the first corner has a brick wall in front of you. Well, a metal Armco barrier. After that, with Monaco, as with any other circuit, it’s a case of pushing the car to the limit, constantly adjusting the drive to take other elements into consideration.

  For example, you know how the car feels, but you don’t know what the wind’s doing; you don’t know if the circuit is as clean as it was the last lap around or as clean as it was that morning.

  Every corner is different, so you’re always thinking on your feet. You know that if you brake too late then it’s game over, but at the same time you’re braking as late as you dare and then dealing with whatever happens next, a slight lock-up front or rear; you’re adjusting the brake pedal to stop the lock-up because if you’ve locked up, you will just career straight on, but if you can stop the lock-up, you can get around the corner and not actually lose any time.

  On the way out, the quicker you get to full throttle, the quicker you can exit the corner and carry that all the way down the straight. Slightly too early, though, and you’ve lost the rear end. It’ll snap and you get that oversteer and even though it won’t spin, you might just be controlling oversteer all the way out and you’re not getting that drive out of the corner. So it’s a tricky balance between not exiting quick enough and exiting too quickly, which can cause loss of traction and lap time as well.

  YOU GET LOADS OF PRACTICE

  Knowing the circuit well is, of course, essential, and that comes with experience rather than simulator time, which is only helpful to a degree. In a simulator you can tell which direction you’re going in, but you don’t get the same sensation, you don’t get the feel of the asphalt, you don’t get the buffeting.

 
; So it’s the practice on the circuit itself which is most important. And you do get a lot of practice: two one-and-a-half-hour sessions on Friday and then an hour session on Saturday before qualifying. If you want to, you can do a lot of laps.

  The idea is that you do runs with low fuel, with high fuel, on new tyres, old tyres, to get a real feel for the race and for the circuit. Now if, for some reason, you’ve had an issue that means you miss half of your practice, it always makes it a bit trickier, there’s a lot more pressure. So practice, practice, practice.

  THERE’S NO TRAFFIC

  Not just in the race but in qualifying, too. Say you get a car that’s done his lap time already and is still driving round. They think they’re getting out of the way and not causing you any lap-time loss, but sometimes they are. So if they’re 200 metres in front of you in a high-speed corner, they’re still hurting the airflow on to your car, which changes your balance a little bit. They’ll say they’re not affecting you, and people watching it won’t think that they’re making any difference, because it looks like they’re miles in front. But take it from your old pal Jenson it does make a difference because of that all-important airflow.

  So it’s always better when a car sees you coming, pulls over and doesn’t get in your way. It’s when they go through a few corners with you behind thinking, Oh he’s far enough behind, that’s when it hurts you. Not just because of the aero, actually, but it’s also a mental thing. If there’s a car in front, it’s frustrating. It disrupts your focus at the very moment you want absolute concentration.

  NO DISTRACTIONS

  There are none anyway, to be honest. You get in the car, you close your visor and you forget about everything else – and that’s just natural because you’re doing something that you love and something that you feel you’re the best at.

  The only thing that does cause an issue is if you’ve had a bad practice. For example, if you’ve crashed or missed most of practice because you’ve had an engine failure or an issue with the car. Then you’re going into qualifying, thinking, Shit, I don’t really understand where the braking points are. I’m not sure what tyres I should be using.

  Some of the issue is the circuits getting grippier throughout the weekend, and if you missed Saturday morning practice you might not know if you should use the same gear as you did in practice in a certain corner, or a higher gear if the circuit has gripped up. The best thing to do is just relax: you’ve been in this situation before and you’ll adapt very quickly, but it’s difficult to tell yourself that in the heat of the moment, when the seconds are counting down to your first lap in qualifying. It feels like turning up to deliver a speech without having rehearsed it enough. You can do it. You know you can do it. Just that you wish you were word perfect. You’ve got that nagging feeling that you should have done more.

  As a result, you have to take a step back a little. You’re more cautious, which means you brake a little bit earlier and you’re less aggressive with the car, because you’re not sure what it’s going to do.

  Otherwise, though, all things being equal, and assuming you’ve had a decent practice session, by the time you get to qualifying, you’re confident, you know you can do a good job, and no, you don’t think about anything else, and I never have. I have never got into a racing car thinking about the outside world. I mean, the team and the people I have around me wouldn’t allow it anyway. Everything is done for the express purpose of aiding my focus. My manager Richard would never talk business. If my mum was there, she’d never talk about family stuff. It would just be ‘good luck’, and I’d get in the car.

  There are no media commitments. Oh, there might be a picture with the king of Spain or something like that. But you wouldn’t even think about it; it’s just part of the day, like having dinner or a massage; it doesn’t really mean anything to you. You just get straight into the car and that’s what does mean everything to you. Recently there was a thing where they took away the grid girls. It was like, what grid girls? You get out to the car on the grid, you talk to your engineer, your physio gives you all your kit to cool down, you drink, you go to the toilet, you rest, you return, ten minutes to go, National Anthem, get in the car…

  And you don’t notice the grid girls. It just doesn’t happen. You’re fully focused on the job in hand, which is thinking through the start process: what could go wrong? What’s going to go right? How can I get the best out of myself and the car I have? World hunger, the plastic in the ocean. You don’t think about it.

  And it’s funny, because doing a triathlon I’d think about everything because I was trying to take my mind off it. But in an F1 car? Fuhgeddaboutit.

  I remember one time leading with maybe 15 laps to go and I found my mind wandering a little. I was thinking ahead to crossing the line, imagining the emotions, thinking about the team, even thinking about having to get out of the car and do the interviews.

  And then suddenly I was like, Snap out of it, Jenson, we’re not there yet.

  Still, that was an isolated occurrence. And most of the time I was fighting, anyway. It’s very unusual to find yourself on your own on the circuit with no one to overtake or no one trying to overtake you, it was always a battle.

  And that, after all, is what makes the perfect lap. Whether you’re up against the clock or an opponent, your teammate or yourself, it’s about pushing it – it’s about taking it to the limit.

  HOW TO BE A NORMAL JOE

  1. HOW TO MOVE ON (AND GROW UP)

  It wasn’t because I wasn’t quick any more, because I was. I was still quick, I still had the pace, and I still felt that even though the years of winning races, let alone Championships, were most likely behind me I was still doing a good job.

  It was just that the life had taken its toll. The old boy not being there was a big part of it, but on top of that I was just tired. I mean, proper tired. Mentally drained. Which drained me physically as well. And what I didn’t want to do was let that fatigue affect the job I did. Although tired, I still enjoyed all aspects of life in Formula One, but I didn’t want to end up not enjoying it, making a half-arsed job of it. I didn’t want to end up not giving it 100 per cent.

  Thus, I got to the point three years before I retired when I said to my mates and my family that I couldn’t do it any more. ‘I just want to stop racing.’

  I’d had offers to race for other teams – three different ones in all – but nobody was able to offer me a car that could win races, or even be on the podium, so it just wasn’t worth it. Yes, there would still have been the competition with my teammate; there would still have been the sponsor work that I enjoy. But that’s not enough to compensate for not being competitive, and I definitely wouldn’t want to race in F1 if I wasn’t winning races. There’s little point. The bottom line is that it’s stress I don’t need for too little reward.

  I’m asked now if I’d return if I was offered a drive that would guarantee me wins, and the answer is that I’d probably have a go, yes. If you have the opportunity to win, you take it. I can’t see Lewis retiring if he’s in a winning car, it just doesn’t happen like that. Why would you want to? If you’re mentally strong enough and you can take it, and – importantly – you’re winning, then you’re going to have more highs than lows, and that’s going to make it worth doing.

  What I’d find more difficult to replace is that raw passion and excitement that a 24-year-old would bring to the game. So while on a good day I’d be great, I know that if I had a bad day I’d let things get to me the way they wouldn’t have done 15 or so years previously. I’d be questioning myself. Why am I doing this? Why am I putting myself through all this? Whereas a young kid is going to be, like, Right, that was a tough race, next time I need to do a better job.

  And, to be honest, I know that in racing the bad days are going to outnumber the good days by a ratio of two to one (depending on what you’re driving, of course). I look at where I am right now, settled in LA with a fiancée and a baby, and I know that I don’t really wan
t those bad days in my life.

  Could I have taken time off? I guess so, but I’ve seen others do it and they’ve never been quite the same – even Michael Schumacher when he came back was not the same force by any means.

  And so I left. Boom. Decided to explore my love of racing in other avenues, concentrate on different aspects of my life. And because everything had been done for me in F1, because all I’d had to focus on was driving, fitness and engineering, I suddenly had to become a grown-up. It was like my life had been in a state of suspended animation between the ages of 19 and 37. Big wake-up call.

  But I did grow up, and I learnt so much. It was simple things. Putting down roots. Making a home. As I said, I’d never paid a bill in my life and suddenly I was pulling out my hair because they were coming out of nowhere. Before, when somebody else was doing all that for me, I didn’t really notice where the money was going, but now my eyes were open to how much I was paying on, say, storage or car insurance, and I could see that there was lot of money being wasted. It’s been a bit of an eye-opening experience.

  Mainly, though, and at the risk of coming across all Californian for a moment, I’ve grown as a person. In fact, I think I’ve improved more as a human being in the last two years than I have in the rest of my life. And that’s all down to taking a step back from Formula One, changing my priorities, finding love with Brittny, being a dog-owner, becoming a father…