Why McLaren Must Stick with Jenson Button for 2016 Formula 1 Season
What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Or so the saying goes.
Though the final months of 2014 were by far the most demeaning of Jenson Button's entire Formula One career, a 15-year tale featuring as many setbacks as successes, it seems that period taught him the most valuable and instructive of lessons.
As he persuaded McLaren to choose him, and not rookie team-mate Kevin Magnussen, to partner two-time world champion Fernando Alonso for 2015, Button was reduced to making a series of public pleas—to the point where he was almost begging to stay on.
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Likening his situation to that of a son excluded from his family's Christmas party, per the Telegraph's Daniel Johnson, it was a low to which a world champion should never be forced to sink.
Remarkably, for a sport with no real relationship with its fanbase, increased public support for Button played an influential role in his eventual retention.
Despite McLaren CEO Ron Dennis telling Sky Sports' Pete Gill that Button signed a "two-year contract" to remain in F1 last December, BBC Sport's Andrew Benson claims the British driver in fact agreed to a "one-plus-one" deal, giving the team the power to replace him at the end of the current season.
With Magnussen, who settled for a reserve-driver role for 2015, lurking in the shadows and Stoffel Vandoorne, the team's latest apprentice, marching his way to the GP2 title, McLaren have at least three options for 2016, and Button is likely to be asked the same old questions until the end of season.
But this time, Jenson is unwilling to play the game—or at least in the way he did a year ago.
When asked about his future soon after July's British Grand Prix, the second Silverstone race in succession to be billed as his last on home soil, Button refrained from revealing details about his contractual situation or proposing reasons why McLaren should keep him, telling Autosport's Lawrence Barretto:
"I don't think either Fernando or myself are thinking about the future just now.
We're thinking about now and how to improve things. ...
It is wrong to think so far ahead. You have to think in the moment and to change things, we need to keep our head down and not look too far forward.
We know next year will be a better year and the year after will hopefully be better but who knows how good. No one knows.
It is important we just keep pushing and focus on now.
"
In other words, a team performing as abysmally as McLaren—who at that point had scored just five points in nine races—cannot afford to be distracted by their driver lineup when the fundamental issues with their Honda power unit must be addressed.
Having changed their lineup every season since 2012—Sauber are the only other team to employ at least one new driver in each of the last four years—McLaren have allowed themselves to be distracted all too often, creating a culture of short-termism and impatience.
It is, after all, no coincidence that McLaren haven't won a grand prix since Button's three-year partnership with Lewis Hamilton came to an end almost three years ago. Given their long-term plan with Honda, now must surely be the time to return a sense of continuity, stability and serenity to F1's sleeping giant.
Button's comments also offered an insight into his mindset at this stage of his life—and perhaps how his experience in 2014 has eased any dread regarding the end of his career, allowing him to recognise the value of, in his words, thinking in the moment.
It appears to have had an effect on his driving too, for Button has performed like a man handed a second chance this season, building upon the form that ultimately saved his skin at the end of last year.
Alongside Alonso, who has dismembered team-mates the quality of Giancarlo Fisichella, Felipe Massa and Kimi Raikkonen in years gone by, Button has fared superbly, with F1 journalist Peter Windsor claiming he's "never seen him drive better."
Indeed, even Button himself seems to believe that is the case, telling ESPN F1's Nate Saunders that his lap for 17th place on the grid at last weekend's Belgian Grand Prix was "as good as my pole position lap here in 2012."
McLaren's decision to re-sign Button, of course, was not solely due to his skill behind the wheel, but also his cerebral qualities, his popularity and his ability to mingle with sponsors and Honda—whose own F1 operation he represented between 2006 and '08.
The team's current lack of competitiveness, however, means they will not truly revel in the on- and off-track advantages of their all-champion pairing until McLaren are reasonably strong—perhaps 2016 at the earliest. It's a partnership Dennis described as "the best driver lineup of any current" F1 team, per GPUpdate.net.
It was at this stage in 2014, following a typically feisty but flawed display by Magnussen in Belgium, that speculation over Button's future intensified and the prospect of retirement became a serious possibility for the first time in his career.
But Jenson, at that point at least, wouldn't allow himself to contemplate the end.
"If I have to retire at the end of the season then so be it," he told BBC Sport's Andrew Benson at Spa-Francorchamps. "But I feel I have so much more to give and I can't imagine life without motorsport and especially Formula 1."
Little has changed over the last 12 months, and Button doesn't need, nor deserve, to go through all that again.
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