Darren Heath
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.”
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The late Frank Williams, on the other hand, went against the team’s consensus after Button shone in a shootout test against Bruno Junqueira – abetted by Gerhard Berger, then representing engine supplier BMW. “I was excited by him,” Williams explained to Hughes of Button getting the verdict. It prompted an outbreak of interest from young fans, Williams technical chief Patrick Head scoffing: “It’s like the motor racing equivalent of the Spice Girls, and there’s no track record to back it up.”
Hughes regrets that Button has to go ‘on loan’ to Benetton owing to the arrival of Juan Pablo Montoya, before a return to Williams in 2004. Which, as we know, never happened. But that’s another story.
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