What Piastri would like to have in common with Button – but not Alonso

After a United States Grand Prix weekend in which Oscar Piastri's championship lead, once seemingly unassailable, began to look increasingly precarious, a penny for Jenson Button's thoughts – or even Fernando Alonso's. 

In 2009 and 2010 Button and Alonso looked all set to take the drivers' title until the competitive tide turned against them. Button weathered the adversity to see his name etched on the trophy, Alonso didn't.

While the connections between 2025 and 2010 are more tenuous – Alonso had, at best, the third-fastest car on the grid – let us not forget that as the championship wound towards its conclusion, it looked like a done deal. Such were the levels of certainty that the editor of one F1 website accidentally clicked ‘publish' on their pre-written “Alonso wins the 2010 world championship, details to follow” story mid-way through the Brazilian Grand Prix.

Red Bull and McLaren had faster cars that season but failed to make the most of their potential through inconsistency, mechanical unreliability, and, in Red Bull's case, warring team-mates colliding on track. Poacher's victories, and cynical team orders in Germany, parlayed Alonso into the championship lead going into the final round, only for Ferrari to fumble it in Abu Dhabi.

Hindsight enshrines pitting Alonso to cover Mark Webber as a mistake, but there were mitigating circumstances: Webber, second in the championship, theoretically represented the bigger threat. Sebastian Vettel, who went on to win, had been quick all season but never led the points until they were totted up after the final race.

As to the issue of whether Alonso enjoyed undisputed number-one status at Ferrari, the optics of this are fogged by the Scuderia's track record of manipulating race outcomes and by the events of Hockenheim, where Felipe Massa received the coded message “Fernando is faster than you”. But the truth is rather more nuanced: Massa's engineer, Rob Smedley, has subsequently spoken in more detail about the exchanges and revealed that Massa initially lifted his pace when told Alonso was faster. This, apparently, provoked outrage from the cockpit of the other Ferrari, whose occupant would rather Massa slowed down.

A poorly-timed pitstop left Alonso unable to stop Vettel from stealing the 2010 F1 title from his grasp

Photo by: Daniel Kalisz

The parallels between F1 past and present are more powerful when we consider 2009, where Button won six of the first seven rounds – and then only claimed two other podiums over the balance of the 17-race season, all the while anxiously watching a Red Bull driver, now armed with a faster car, creep up on his championship lead. There was even a side order of technical controversy surrounding the legality of Button's car, a sometimes tetchy relationship with a team-mate, and murmurings of unequal treatment.

The rose-tinted myth of the 2009 season casts Button's Brawn team as a fairytale story of victory against the odds after Honda hit the kill switch amid the panic of the global financial crisis. There's even a Keanu Reeves-fronted docu-series devoted to crystallising the story.

But while the team was indeed rescued from the brink of closure by some buccaneering entrepreneurship, the fact remains that the BGP 001 was among the most expensive F1 cars of all time up until that point, the product of three design teams working across three wind tunnels and pooling ideas to exploit loopholes in the new ruleset introduced for the 2009 season. And although the finished car might have been carrying inherent compromise on account of having to be modified to accommodate a Mercedes engine, the Brackley V8 was probably more powerful and reliable than the Honda one for which it was originally designed.

There are clear parallels here from 2009 with the silliness of early 2025, when McLaren's rivals sought to explain the MCL39's pace advantage via recourse to innuendo about illegalities in the rear brake drums

While the rebranded Brawn team was running on fumes, financially speaking, it had by far the fastest car at the beginning of the 2009 season: at the opening round in Australia, after a bare minimum of testing, Button and team-mate Rubens Barrichello qualified on the front row and Button was six tenths faster than third-place man Vettel. Attention naturally turned to the products of all that intensive research paid for by Honda before the budget evaporated, including the so-called ‘double diffuser' at the rear of the underfloor.

The new aerodynamic rules had been introduced to cut downforce and promote overtaking by increasing the width of the front wing, raising and narrowing the rear one, simplifying the diffuser, and banning complex airflow conditioners ahead of the sidepods. It was a belated recognition of the fact that previous attempts to cut downforce by raising the front wings had made them more vulnerable to wake turbulence, preventing cars from following each other closely around corners.

Honda/Brawn, along with Williams and Honda, had identified a loophole in the wording of the regulations governing the permitted size and scope of the diffuser, which chiefly described it in two-dimensional terms from a point of view looking at the underside of the car. Adding a secondary volume above the permitted area, fed by a gap invisible from below, enabled diffuser performance to get close to 2008 levels almost immediately.

Rear of the Brawn BGP001 and its double diffuser

Since the double-deck diffuser was clearly visible from outside the car, it caused an immediate kerfuffle as the have-nots cried foul. But here we are again in territory where myth trumps fact. The diffuser's function is to accelerate airflow from beneath the car, not just generating underbody pressure but working as part of a cohesive flow structure in which all the aerodynamic surfaces interact.

So the double diffuser wasn't a magic-bullet solution which accounted for half a second or more a lap in and of itself. Its benefit was that it was less prone to stalling, opening up avenues of development all over the car, from winglets around the brake drums to detailing around the front wing, where Brawn had much more sophisticated furniture which helped steer air around the front wheels. But because everyone was pointing at the diffuser and stamping their feet, they failed to see the bigger picture.

There are clear parallels here from 2009 with the silliness of early 2025, when McLaren's rivals sought to explain the MCL39's pace advantage via recourse to innuendo about illegalities in the rear brake drums. It's now understood that, besides clever suspension and brake design, McLaren has found a way to run lower rear ride heights without plank wear becoming an issue.

While all the blather about so called phase-change materials in the brake drums has subsided since chief conspiracy noisenik Christian Horner was removed from his position at Red Bull, it may also be connected with that team having found a similar solution to manipulating ride height via its latest floor upgrade, added in Monza. That was where Max Verstappen's competitive renaissance really began.

And while there was no ‘papaya rules' fluff ostentatiously governing parity between Button and Barrichello, they supposedly had equal number-one status. Not that Barrichello believed this, as evinced by several public flounces, most dramatically in Spain and Germany, where strategic calls and pitstop issues swapped the order of the cars while he was leading. Barrichello eventually won two grands prix during Button's mid-season slump.

Brawn's tight financial circumstances dictated a swathe of redundancies during the season and very little development, enabling rivals to catch up. After the Turkish Grand Prix, Button's last victory of the season, he led the championship by 61 points with Barrichello on 35 and Vettel on 29, this being an era where wins paid just 10 points. Eight rounds later, with two races left, Button had 85 to Vettel's 69. Button finally managed to put the title beyond reach next time out, with fifth place in Brazil.

Button held his nerve in the deciding rounds of the 2009 F1 title fight, sealing the championship in Brazil with fifth place

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

The 2009 season offers a more complex picture than history presents. How much, for instance, of Button's mid-season woes were in his head? Barrichello won two races at this point. Vettel's charge back into contention with an improved Red Bull was also disrupted by McLaren, which transformed its car with a new floor mid-season. Lewis Hamilton went from finishing a lap down in the British Grand Prix to winning in Hungary.

Right now the 2025 season is shaping up in a similar fashion, albeit with fewer disruptive third-party influences. The drivers' title is Piastri's to lose…

Piastri will be hoping to emulate Button's 2009 efforts

Photo by: Steven Tee / LAT Images via Getty Images