page_title: Jenson Button
section_title: Driving style
hierarchical_section_title: Jenson Button / Driving style
caption_attribution_description: English: Jenson drives down John Dalton Street in Manchester City Centre, August 2011.
context_page_description: Jenson Alexander Lyons Button MBE is a British racing driver and former Formula One racer who won the 2009 Formula One World Championship driving for Brawn GP. After his Formula One career, he became a champion of the Super GT Series in 2018, driving a Honda car for Team Kunimitsu.
  Button began karting at the age of eight and achieved early success, before progressing to car racing in the British Formula Ford Championship and the British Formula 3 Championship. He first drove in Formula One with Williams for 2000. The following year he switched to Benetton, which in 2002 became Renault, and then for 2003 he moved to BAR. In 2004 he finished third in the World Drivers' Championship, falling to ninth in 2005. BAR was subsequently renamed Honda for 2006, during which Button won his first Grand Prix in Hungary, after 113 races.
  Following the withdrawal of Honda from the sport in December 2008, Button was left without a team for the 2009 season. In February 2009, Ross Brawn led a management buyout of Honda, creating Brawn GP and recruiting Button as a driver.
context_section_description: Button has a smooth driving style; journalist Mark Hughes wrote in 2009, "Button has a fantastic feel for how much momentum can be taken into a corner and this allows him to be minimal in his inputs—his steering and throttle movements in particular tend to be graceful and beautifully co-ordinated." This allows him to perform well in wet-weather where the front of the car tends to slide more than the rear, and many believe using his smooth style he can conserve his tyres better during race conditions than other drivers. He adapted his style in go-karts and transferred it to more powerful machinery. Since 2000, Button has braked with his left foot, by dragging the brake pedal and stopping the car in less time to control and modulate power. He likes to turn into a corner early under braking and balance the car on pedal application and steering. This creates more strain in the tyre loads for a longer physical lap but allows for a higher minimum speed entering a corner and allowing Button to adapt to a changeable or slippery track. 
  He is comfortable driving a car with understeer, prefers its rear to be stable into corners and on which he is able to lean on leaving them, and rarely locks the inside of his front tyres. His smooth driving also means he cannot generate the required amount of temperature into his tyres on a cool track or it was undemanding on him. Button occasionally cannot get his tyres to operate efficiently over a single lap in qualifying because his gentle steering produces less energy into the wheel. His driving gave him additional thought time and be less prone to making an error for improved consistency in races and notices events without the team necessarily instructing him on what to do. Button accurately exploits grip on a damp corner to adapt to his limits earlier than other drivers. During 2001 and 2007, when traction control was legal in Formula One, he was able to control the throttle pedal to prevent wheelspin, allowing him to be as fast due to his feel for grip exiting a turn.
caption: Button driving a McLaren MP4-23 car through the streets of Manchester in August 2011.
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