Revealed Why I was never best buddies with Lewis Hamilton
First extracts from Jenson Button’s brilliant new book,
In 2007, the rise of a rookie called Lewis Hamilton at Mclaren-mercedes was making waves. The press amused themselves by asking me questions about Lewis. How did I rate his chances? How did I feel about him? Diplomacy won the day, but of course I was sore. Who wouldn’t be? People were going wild over a British driver and it wasn’t me.
Having almost won the championship in 2007, he did it for real in 2008, and it was tough for me to see that, not because I begrudged him his success or was especially jealous of him, but because we were both British drivers and our backgrounds and trajectories had been so similar – my dad had tuned his kart engines, for God’s sake. I knew that given half a chance I could be just as competitive as him.
By 2009, I’d been eyeing up Mclaren’s car, and I wanted Lewis as a team-mate. You could come up with all sorts of psychobabble reasons why I wanted to partner him, but it would boil down to just one: I am a sportsman. I feed off competition and I wanted to pit myself against the fastest driver on the grid. I wanted to see if I could beat him.
Lewis was very friendly and welcoming, and presumably confident enough in his status at the team that he didn’t need to feel put out – at first, anyway.
Midway through that first season, I was ahead of Lewis in the points. Did he like being beaten by his team-mate? Probably not, but he’s a competitor and I’m sure that, like me, he relished the challenge. That’s why we do what we do. Personally, he was fine with me, but you could just tell he was a bit peeved. I don’t think that I was to his taste, if I’m honest.
And things took a bit of a turn for the worse in Turkey, when we almost had a collision that led to a minor falling-out between us. We were on course for a one-two, so with the lead to ourselves, I closed in on him until we were just a second apart. What I didn’t know was that he was being asked to conserve fuel. As I came up behind him, he radioed in to his team, saying, “Jenson’s closing in on me. If I back off, is Jenson going to pass me or not?”
“No, Lewis, no,” came the reply. But, of course, I didn’t know any of that, and slipped past him. That made him mad and he came back at me, pulling alongside and staying side-by-side as we roared through turns 13 and 14. Crossing the startfinish line, you couldn’t get a credit card between us.
For a scary moment it looked like there might be a double-wipe-out as our tyres rubbed coming through turn one, but he managed to get past me to claim the win, me in second.
On the podium, there was what the media called some “frosty” body language and a “muted” celebration. In fact, he came straight out and asked me about it: “Did you pass me against team orders?” He was the winner. Jesus. “No,” I told him, “I did not pass you against orders. I was never told not to pass you.”
That sent him off thinking that the team were taking my side against his, though he never did explain why they would want to do that, given that we were on course for a one-two and, apart from our respective race engineers, nobody in the team would give a flying f--- who came first and who came second.
It was a bit weird, slightly unnecessary and a little more proof that all was not well behind the smiles.
As time went by, we remained friendly, though we were never best buddies.
In 2011, we voiced cartoon versions of ourselves for an animated series, Tooned, which portrayed us as bantering rivals. The rivalry was real – and much more healthy than the one he had with Felipe Massa and later with Nico Rosberg (I never lobbed a hat at his head for one thing) – but there wasn’t a great deal of banter.
In 2012, at Spa, I stuck the car on pole, while Lewis qualified seventh. He’d been using the old rear wing, whereas I’d gone for the new wing.
Afterwards, and I didn’t find this out until later because I’d never got round to following him on Twitter, Lewis tweeted: “Damn, WTF! Jenson has the new rear wing on, I have the old. We voted to change, didn’t work out. I lose 0.4 tenths just on the straight.”
There were a couple more tweets as well, the final one being a show of support for me, which was decent of him. So far, nothing much to see here.
Personally, I wasn’t gasping in horror concerning his use of “WTF”. I like to see drivers expressing themselves.
That would be the end of our story were it not for the fact that the next day he tweeted a screengrab of our respective telemetry – in other words our technical readouts – which showed his lack of straight line speed compared to mine. Quite what was in his thinking, I couldn’t say. Certainly, any displeasure he was showing was aimed at the team, not me, but I ended up being collateral damage because you don’t make telemetry public. You just don’t.
The screengrab showed the kind of things you work hard to keep
hidden from your rivals. I made my feelings known about that. The official version was that I was “disappointed”. Had I gone with my unofficial reaction, it would have made “WTF” seem very tame indeed.
But, at the same time, I knew it wasn’t personal. Bit dumb maybe. But not a “I hate Jenson” thing so much as an “I’m fed up with Mclaren” thing.
Later in the season, it was officially announced that Lewis was leaving to partner Rosberg at Mercedes. That was a shame for me; I’d enjoyed our rivalry. Off the track, however, he was still being a bit weird.
After Japan, he had another one of his weird Twitterfart moments: “Just noticed @jensonbutton unfollowed,” he wrote. “That’s a shame. After 3 years as team-mates, I thought we respected one another but clearly he doesn’t.”
Of course, the flaw in his logic was that I’d never followed him in the first place so could hardly be accused of lacking respect by unfollowing him. And, anyway, I did respect him.
Fair play, he realised his mistake and put it right: “My bad, just found out Jenson never followed me. Don’t blame him! Need to be on Twitter more!”
Needed to be on Twitter a bit less, if you’d asked me.