Will Jenson Button Ever Become Formula 1 World Champion Again?
There was a magic about Jenson Button's title triumph five years ago that dictated that he should never win the championship ever again.
The 2009 Formula One season, affectionately known as The Brawn Year, was the ultimate sporting fairytale, with a plot that saw its protagonist rise from the edge of the abyss to the top of the world in a matter of months.
The Honda team—much like the newly-crowned world champions Mercedes, the squad's current incarnation—had long since targeted huge regulation changes as the ideal opportunity to emerge as title contenders, with Autosport's Jonathan Noble reporting halfway through the 2008 campaign that the outfit had pinned all their hopes on their 2009 car.
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The Japanese manufacturer, however, didn't hang around to see the results, pulling out of the sport in December '08 as the global economic crisis began to bite, leaving the futures of Button and his fellow driver, Rubens Barrichello—not to mention their hundreds of colleagues—in jeopardy.
After a period of great uncertainty, Ross Brawn—who initially joined Honda as team principal in 2007—completed a takeover of the outfit in March 2009, with the funky liveries which adorned Honda's previous cars replaced by an understated bland white and lime-green colour scheme.
Having set the pace in the latter stages of pre-season testing, Brawn GP and Button went on to win six of the opening seven races of the campaign, with that run of results allowing the British driver to place one hand on the crown before the season had reached its midpoint.
Despite registering only two podium finishes in the remaining 10 races, Button—having withstood pressure from Barrichello as well as the Red Bulls of Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber—claimed the title at the Brazilian Grand Prix, the penultimate round of the season.
In another life, Button might have retired then and there in the knowledge that he would never even match—never mind surpass—the achievements of that roller-coaster ride.
Indeed, he told the Daily Mail's Jon Wilde of his title-winning evening: "It should have been the happiest night of my life but it felt like a total anti-climax. I sat and thought about what was going to happen next. I knew that, from that point, coming second would never be good enough."
Yet naturally, Button continued his career, moving to McLaren for the following campaign, with the Frome-born driver adding eight more victories to his tally in almost five seasons—but he has not added that second world crown, with a distant second-placed finish to Vettel in 2011 his best position in the drivers' standings since '09.
At the age of 34—now no longer considered to be among the leading drivers on the grid—time is running out for Button, whose career may be brought to a premature end if McLaren succeed in their attempts to sign Fernando Alonso, who, according to BBC Sport's Andrew Benson, has agreed a "multi-year deal" with the Woking-based team which is "waiting to be finalised."
Should Button somehow survive the arrival of Alonso—or remain at McLaren by default if the Spaniard takes a sabbatical for 2015—he will probably have a maximum of one more shot at adding another world championship to his name.
And all his hopes, ironically, would depend on the company that deserted him at the end of 2008.
"F1 News: Honda release their first image of their F1 engine to be used by @McLarenF1 in 2015 http://t.co/ydSxBgZkhw pic.twitter.com/ldWWhx0piG
— Mobil 1 The Grid (@grid1tv) October 1, 2014"
Honda will return to F1 for the first time since that difficult winter next season when they become the power unit supplier of McLaren, re-establishing one of the most iconic alliances in the sport's history which in the late 1980s and early '90s saw Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost conquer all before them.
Despite having an extra year of research and development in comparison to Mercedes, Ferrari and Renault—Honda's return was first announced in May 2013, giving them plenty of time to prepare—it is unclear just how fast and reliable the power train will be once it hits the track.
If it proves to be an instant Mercedes-beater—or even just as fast as the Silver Arrows engine but with a much stronger reliability record—Button would have a half-decent chance of emulating Prost, a driver to whom he is so often compared due to his smooth style, and winning the title for McLaren-Honda in his mid-30s.
Should the Honda unit be more akin to those of Renault and Ferrari, however, the British driver would be resigned to spending the rest of his F1 career in the guinea pig role, dealing with the teething problems before the next generation come along and achieve considerable success.
With his future still firmly up in the air, however, what he may or may not achieve with Honda is almost irrelevant for the time being.
Although winning with the Japanese manufacturer would see the second phase of Button's career come full circle, the likelihood is that he will retire with the one world title under his belt.
A shame? Not really—the Brawn adventure was so wondrous that adding another chapter at this stage would spoil the story.
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