Mark Hughes saw Jenson Button’s world champion pedigree back in 2000

You can almost hear the echoes of long-time Motor Sport Formula 1 expert Mark Hughes apologising to the magazine’s readership. Jenson Button, now a grand elder statesman of the sport, 2009 world champion, regular hero of festivities at Goodwood, was just 20 years old when Hughes wrote a feature eulogising the rookie star of the F1 season just passed. But, of course, there was a time when Stirling Moss, Jim Clark, Jackie Stewart et al were young up-and-comers.

“It might seem impudent to run a feature on Jenson Button, a 20-year-old Formula 1 new boy yet to score a podium place,” is the Hughes opening gambit. “But this is different,” he pleads. “This is a story about a phenomenon. If you’re looking for the next Schumacher – or Moss, or Mansell or, perhaps closest of all in terms of what he does behind the wheel, Prost – he’s arrived. Repackaged bright and brash for the new century, but set to be part of that lineage.”

Hughes scorns the “sophisticated, conservative world that is F1” for the anti-Button sentiment that pervaded when, after just two seasons in single-seaters, the second of them in Formula 3, he was given the Williams seat for 2000 alongside Ralf Schumacher. He quotes Stewart, who moved into F1 with BRM in 1965 as a veteran of just one season in single-seaters (in F3): “He’s just a puppy. He’ll mess on the carpet. He should have gone to finishing school first.”