Why Button is embarking on his new challenge in the WEC

"I want to be in one of them!” That was Jenson Button’s thought at the Le Mans 24 Hours in 2023 as he thundered down the Mulsanne Straight and held on for dear life through the Porsche Curves aboard the Garage 56 Chevrolet Camaro LS1 NASCAR Cup Car.

And by “one of them”, he meant one of the cars from the Hypercar class that kept buzzing past in the battle for overall victory last June. The 2009 Formula 1 world champion has got his desire for this year as part of his first full season of racing since 2019 by taking on the World Endurance Championship with the Jota Porsche team. 

“I always loved Le Mans and going there again in a relaxed way was super-cool,” says the Briton. He enjoyed what was his second outing at the 24 Hours aboard the Hendrick Motorsports-run Camaro, but driving the car that filled the grid spot reserved for an innovative machine left him wanting more. It fired his aspirations to go back in something that was “fighting for the win”.

In fact, Button was talking about that in the build-up to Le Mans. A full season of racing was on the cards for 2024, he told the world last May, and sportscar racing was his target: a programme in either the WEC or the IMSA SportsCar Championship was something he was looking at. By the time he travelled home from Le Mans, he was already in negotiation with Jota about joining what even back then seemed certain to be an expanded assault on the WEC with a pair of Porsche 963 LMDh prototypes.

Button at Jota turned out to be an easy fit. He already knew a lot of the players involved. Included in their number were team bosses Sam Hignett and David Clark, as well as Tom Wagner, the boss of Knighthead Capital Management, the private equity group that rescued car hire giant Hertz and then lent its colours to Jota for its WEC programme.

Knighthead is also the owner of Birmingham City, the Championship football club that brought in Wayne Rooney as manager late last year – unsuccessfully so, it should be added, because he was quickly pushed out of the door. There was form there for recruiting a big name for its sporting endeavours.

Button will be contesting his first full-time programme since 2019 when he joins Jota to race its 963 in the WEC

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

Don’t forget that Jota also had talks with both Sebastian Vettel and Robert Kubica about racing for its team in 2024. At one point a super-team involving Button, Vettel and Kubica appeared to be a possibility. 

“Even at Le Mans last year we were talking about it,” recounts Button, who will share the #38 Jota Porsche with Oliver Rasmussen and Phil Hanson. “It was going to happen; it was just putting pen to paper.”

The deal was done some time before it was revealed to the world in December, he continues, “just not ready to be announced”. 

Button’s interest in Le Mans predates his first outing at the French enduro in 2018 aboard one of SMP Engineering’s AER-engined BR1 LMP1 prototypes as part of a truncated assault on the 2018-19 WEC superseason. He reveals that he used to watch the race on TV as a child in the 1980s.

"I have to say the Hypercars are the coolest looking cars ever – if I’d had to draw my dream car when I was a kid, it would have been a Hypercar" Jenson Button

But his time racing in the WEC with SMP and in Super GT for the Team Kunimitsu Honda squad, with which he won the 2018 title in his first season sharing with Naoki Yamamoto, fostered a love of endurance racing. (He doesn’t mention his one-off assault on the Spa 24 Hours, then a touring car rather than sportscar race, aboard a Rafanelli BMW 320i during his Formula 3 year in 1999!) He likes the atmosphere of sportscar racing, the fact that you have to leave the ego that makes you a success in single-seaters at home.

“As a racing driver, you are inherently selfish, as my wife pointed out when we first met,” he laughs, adding that in F1 “you have to be like that” but that endurance racing is “a little bit different. I had a taste of it in 2018 and 2019 in Super GT and WEC, and I love that atmosphere within a team: how you are wanting your team-mates to be as quick as you if not quicker, because that’s what wins you the race.” 

He also loves the new era of sportscar racing: “I have to say the Hypercars are the coolest looking cars ever – if I’d had to draw my dream car when I was a kid, it would have been a Hypercar.” And just how competitive it is: “Le Mans was insane last year, so good. With more cars on the grid this year, it will be even better.”  

Button only had one crack at Le Mans in a prototype with SMP: he cut short his involvement with the team after four races to concentrate on Super GT, which meant he didn’t contest the second edition of Le Mans encompassed by the superseason the following year. At the end of that year, he then quit Super GT.

Button got the taste for sportscar racing when he raced for SMP in the WEC alongside Super GT programme

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

“The racing was great and I loved my team-mate Naoki,” he says. “But travelling to Japan that often and with most of the team not speaking English kind of made it a lonely period.”

Since then Button the racing driver has enjoyed a nomadic existence, trying a bit of this and a bit of that. There was an outing with his own JBXE Extreme E squad, as well as one in the British GT Championship in the team that formerly bore his name as Jenson Team Rocket RJN. He also had a go at rallycross and took in the Baja 1000 off-road classic in California at the end of his second season in Super GT.

Last year there were a trio of NASCAR Cup starts – at Austin, the new Chicago street circuit and then on the Indianapolis road course – with the Rick Ware Racing Ford squad. They were followed by two outings aboard prototype machinery, the first since he stepped out of his SMP BR1 after Shanghai in late 2018. His path into them was smoothed by the contacts he made during the Garage 56 programme.

He turned out in a Porsche 963 with the JDC-Miller MotorSports squad at last year’s IMSA finale at Road Atlanta, the Petit Le Mans 10-hour race. The connection there was team regular Mike Rockenfeller, who was one of his team-mates in the Camaro. The driver coach on the Garage 56 programme was Jordan Taylor, son of Wayne Taylor and now once again one of the drivers for his father’s eponymous team.

That at least partially explains his presence on the grid at last month’s Daytona 24 Hours IMSA curtain-raiser aboard one of the Wayne Taylor Racing with Andretti Acura ARX-06 LMDhs. The deal for Button to join Jordan, Louis Deletraz and Colton Herta in the #40 car that finished third in the big race was done after he’d agreed terms with Jota, but the contact with WTR stretches back several years.

“I’ve been talking to Wayne for a while; Daytona is a race that I’ve always wanted to do – I’ve watched it for years,” he explains, “but it somehow never worked out.”

There had been contact with Acura in the past. Button might have raced in IMSA instead of going off to Japan to compete in Super GT with Honda, a manufacturer with which he was maintaining a relationship that straddled his final years in F1 with McLaren and six seasons in the 2000s. Honda’s Acura marque was about to kick off its Daytona Prototype international programme with Penske, and Button admits that he did have “a couple of meetings”. 

Button took an IMSA podium with WTR-run Acura at Daytona on his second outing with an LMDh car

Photo by: Jake Galstad / Motorsport Images

Suggesting that he had a straight choice between racing in Japan and the US after a year off post-F1, which admittedly included a return for the Monaco Grand Prix and a one-off with the Team Mugen Honda squad in Super GT, is too simplistic, he says: “I always wanted to go to Super GT. That was the one I was going to choose. They also paid me more!”

Once the Super GT box had been ticked, COVID and fatherhood had a lot to do with why Button didn’t have a proper programme for four seasons. But now the time was right to come back properly.

“I think but for COVID I would have been racing in something [full-time],” he explains. “From 2019, I’ve had two kids and they are now at that age where me travelling isn’t going to be so much of a problem. I’ve tried loads of different things, but you feel that you don’t maximise what you can achieve with one-off races. You don’t get the best out of yourself doing it that way, so I wanted to do a full season.”

"In the past three years I’ve trained more than I ever did in F1, and I don’t drink alcohol or eat sugar. I’ve been doing a lot of boxing and weights" Jenson Button

Button says that he’s “at the point of my career where I don’t have to go racing”. It’s not, he adds, “a job for me”. That’s a good situation, he reckons: “I can enjoy it more, not stress as much, but still fully focus because I still want to win.”

He believes he has a chance to do that with a Porsche customer team in Jota, one that led the Porsche charge last time out in Bahrain and took its turn in the lead at Le Mans.

“Jota is a pure, out-and-out racing team, which is what I love,” he says. “I wanted to be with a team that is out there purely to win. That’s what I wanted coming back.”

Button also believes that he can bring something to the table at 44.

“I’m still at my best, and I feel younger than I did in F1,” he declares. “In the past three years, I’ve trained more than I ever did in F1, and I don’t drink alcohol or eat sugar. I’ve been doing a lot of boxing and weights. In F1 you can’t do weight training because you’re worried about the weight you’ll put on, but with these cars weighing more than 1000kg, a couple of extra kilos isn’t going to make a difference.”

Button believes he still has plenty to offer and hasn't lost any performance over his recent seasons of sporadic competition

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

Button insists that he’s not back for a single season – some kind of farewell tour.

“I don’t want to be racing for many more years,” he states. “So I’m fully on it for what I want to achieve. I think I’m going to be doing WEC for the next couple of years.”

The try-it-and-see Jenson Button of the past few years is a thing of the past, he says. He no longer has a bucket list, though he hasn’t ruled out a NASCAR return. That itch hasn’t been scratched “because we never got a result, annoyingly because a couple of times we were quick”.

He doesn’t hanker after racing in the Daytona 500 – “ovals are not my thing” – and isn’t likely to be seen in a rallycross car again: “I did one race and said, ‘Thanks, this is not for me’. 

“I’ve done loads of fun things in the past few years, but you always come back to what you’re good at. This is it.”

Having previously sampled a 963 at Petit Le Mans with the JDC-Miller team, Button believes he's back doing what he's good at in high-downforce cars

Photo by: Jake Galstad