“No regrets at all” – Why Button is happy with his decision to retire from racing

Jenson Button is now an ex-racing driver. That’s an ex-professional racing driver, after climbing out of his Jota Cadillac for the last time at the Bahrain World Endurance Championship round on Saturday night. And the Briton is quite happy about his decision to pull down the curtain on a career that took him to the heights of the sport in Formula 1 and then onto a meandering path in the years that followed.

Button has no regrets about stopping racing at the age of 45. He’s got too much on his plate at a time when his children are growing up to devote the time and energy required for a professional programme, the kind of commitment he’s made over the past two seasons with Jota in the WEC’s Hypercar class.

“It’s 100% the right decision,” says the 2009 F1 world champion, who has recently dovetailed racing with TV punditry and an ambassadorial role for Rolex. “I look forward to the races because I love racing cars, but I also look forward to flying home and seeing the family. That’s the thing – I am away so much. This year has been really busy for me, but these last few weeks I’ve got to spend some proper time with the kids, and it has been amazing.”

Button has ticked a few boxes since he quit F1 at the end of 2016, and racing in the WEC with Jota was one of them. When he signed up to drive one of the British team’s Porsche 963 LMDhs for 2024, he hadn’t undertaken a full season of racing since 2019. It was about time he did, he reckoned.

After the second of his two seasons in the SuperGT Series in Japan in ’19, he fulfilled a few ambitions – racing in the NASCAR Cup and driving for a team bearing his own name among them – but Button wasn’t, he says, “getting the best out of myself”.

“When you jump in something and have one shot or two shots, it’s never going to be what you hoped for,” he explains. “You need to spend time on it. That was the reason, I thought, 'you know what, I need to do a full season'.”

Button's final race as a professional driver was in the #38 Cadillac V-Series.R with Bamber and Bourdais

Photo by: Shameem Fahath / Motorsport Network

Button insists that the decision to bring a halt to his career at the end of the 2025 WEC campaign was made earlier this year, but the two years for which he signed up with Jota always appeared to be part of some kind of end game. Ahead of his first race in the Porsche at Qatar in March ’24, he told the world that he expected to be doing WEC “for the next couple of years”, while also revealing that he didn’t want “to be racing for many more”.

The WEC, a series with the Le Mans 24 Hours at its centre, was where Button wanted to make his curtain call. He’d sampled the championship and the big race over the 2018/19 WEC superseason with four appearances for the privateer SMP Racing LMP1 squad driving its AER-engined BR1. He then returned to Le Mans aboard the Garage 56 Chevrolet Camaro LS1 NASCAR Cup Car in 2023. He left the French enduro that year with the mission of getting in a Hypercar in the WEC. “I want to be in one of those!” he said to himself at the time.

Button is a true enthusiast for endurance racing. It is where he ended up in his immediate post-F1 career. “I left F1 to go racing,” he says of his ambitions to do what he calls “other stuff”.

"When you win a championship like Super GT, the feeling is the same as winning the title in F1. You’ve won! It’s not a case of F1 being better, so it therefore feels better. It doesn’t. The emotion was the same" Jenson Button

“A lot of people thought I should have stayed in F1, a lot of fans and friends, and even my wife,” he recalls. “My thought was, I’m done here now. Let’s go and see what else there is.”

The idea was to have a year off in 2017 before getting out there to race other things. He stayed with McLaren for that season as its reserve driver, though not with the expectation that he’d ever get called back to race an F1 car again. It was Fernando Alonso’s desire to spread his wings that resulted in a recall for a one-off at Monaco when the Spaniard ventured to the Indy 500 for the first time.

So, many years on, Button feels happy to reveal that he didn’t want to do it: “Eric Boullier [McLaren’s racing director] rang me up and said, ‘You’re racing in Monaco’. I called my manager and asked if there was any way I could get out of it!”

Button partnered Yamamoto in Super GT in 2018

Button knew he would be back in a racing car, but it wasn’t his intention to drive in F1. He’d already pretty much decided where he wanted to go – the Super GT Series in Japan. It was an ambition born of a try-out in a Honda NSX Concept GT at the Japanese manufacturer’s Thanks Day at its home track, Motegi, in 2015.

“I tested the car when I went to the Honda Thanks Day,” explains Button, who also had talks about joining Honda sister marque Acura’s IMSA SportsCar Championship programme with Penske. “I said to myself, ‘Oh my god, this car is so cool. I was kind of hooked on it. I really wanted to go and race that car.”

A one-off outing as a third driver at the Suzuka 1000Km in the summer of 2017 with Mugen was followed by a full programme with Team Kunimitsu alongside Naoki Yamamoto the following year. He won the championship with his new team-mate at the first time of asking with the NSX GT500 contender.

Button looks back on his time in Japan with Honda, a marque with which he had an association in F1 that encompassed his final years with McLaren and six seasons in the 2000s, with fondness. The title was a significant achievement, he says: “When you win a championship like Super GT, the feeling is the same as winning the title in F1. You’ve won! It’s not a case of F1 being better, so it therefore feels better. It doesn’t. The emotion was the same. I loved that.”

But for COVID, Button reckons he would have kept racing regularly. Instead, he’s sampled the NASCAR Cup, raced for his own team in the Extreme E electric off-road series, and even in the British GT Championship with one of his own ventures. He did a bit in the branch of the sport that his late father, John, made his name in, driving in the Nitro Rallycross Championship. He also did the Baja 1000 desert classic.

Button is pretty happy with his career, with what he achieved F1 and in the years afterwards.

Button attempted to leave BAR ahead of the 2005 F1 season

Photo by: BAR Honda

“No regrets at all,” he says. “But all the way through my career I made mistakes, a shit load of mistakes in terms of the direction I took – though not quite as many as Fernando. But if I hadn’t made those mistakes I might not have won the world championship with Brawn in ’09.”

That’s a reference to his attempt to leave BAR for the 2005 season and return to Williams, the team with which he started his F1 career in 2000. The contract recognition board ruled that he was bound by the option BAR had on his services. He stayed as the team morphed into Honda and was in situ on the Japanese manufacturer’s withdrawal from grand prix racing and the Brackley team’s next transformation into Brawn GP.

Could he have won more titles? “I don’t know,” he replies to that question. “I’ll take the one – it’s never going to leave me.”

"Come January, I’ll be thinking what historic races are there I can do. I still want to go racing and have a bit of fun, and that’s it" Jenson Button

Button says that he “would love to have won Le Mans”, but concedes that he was “never in the right place at the right time”. But he reckons he sated his ambition to win a regular WEC round at Interlagos in July when the Cadillac V-Series.R LMDh he shared this year with Sebastien Bourdais and Earl Bamber finished second behind the sister car.

“It’s weird that at this point of my career and my life, Brazil felt like a win,” he says. “We finished second of the two cars, but I was so happy for the team. I wouldn’t have felt that 20 years ago; it would have been, damn, we didn’t win. But ‘we’ got the win and it was awesome. I celebrated the fact that we finished first and second.”

Button loved his time at Jota. He says he revelled in the atmosphere within the team. In fact, it was just what he was looking for. “I joined this team because I wanted to race for a private team; I didn’t want to race for a manufacturer,” says the Brit, who bowed out on Saturday racing in a helmet paying tribute to the design in which he karted as a kid. “I didn’t want all the extra shit that goes with it.

Second in Brazil "felt like a win" for Button

Photo by: FIAWEC - DPPI

“It was great when they said, ‘Oh, we are going to be the Caddy team’. It has been a bit busier: you are doing more simulator work, having more engineering meetings. But to be fair, it has been pretty relaxed.”

Button, the professional racing driver may now be a thing of the past, but he’s not hanging up his helmet for good just yet, nor probably any time soon. He’s promising that we’ll see him at the wheel of a racing car next year, most likely in one of his fleet of historic machines. He has two Jaguars, an E-type and a C-type that was once five-time world champion Juan Manuel Fangio’s road car, an Alfa Romeo GT Junior and a Lotus Cortina.

“Come January, I’ll be thinking what historic races are there I can do,” he says. “I still want to go racing and have a bit of fun, and that’s it.”

There might just be a future for Button beyond the historic ranks. He admits that a return to the NASCAR Cup isn’t entirely out of the question. “It’s very mechanical,” he says of NASCAR. “I could probably do that because I could jump in and feel what the car is doing.” He describes not getting a result during his three appearances with the Rick Ware Racing Ford team in 2023 as “frustrating”.

There are no other boxes he wants to tick, and that includes competing at Lydden Hill, the spiritual home of Rallycross. He’s driven at a venue where his father – runner-up in the 1976 British series – was a regular, and that’s enough for him.

“I drove there for a TV thing I did with DC [David Coulthard in 2015],” he explains. “I was put in a Volkswagen Beetle, similar to the one my dad competed in, except that it had four-wheel-drive and 700bhp. Dad’s was two-wheel-drive and had 250bhp. But dad did race against that car. It was a lot of fun.”

But he reckons he’s done with off-road driving. “I’m not very good on the dirt,” he concedes. “My style doesn’t work there.”

So, historic racing it is in the fleet he’s been assembling over time. No longer a racing driver proper, Button is still very much an enthusiast for our sport. His exploits since he left F1 prove that.

“It’s been fun,” he says. “It’s been a ride.”