“That’s my weakness”– Jenson Button talks about how Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso could extract most out of a bad car, unlike him.
Jenson Button had a decorated career and had teamed with one of the most successful race drivers while also winning a championship title in 2009.
However, his contemporaries- Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton, went onto have more successful careers, and Button told what was his weakness which made him short against the two greats.
“My greatest weakness was that I wasn’t willing to move on from a bad weekend,” Button told the High-Performance podcast. “But I feel I’ve definitely got over that.
“One thing I’ve not been able to get over is driving a bad car. That’s my weakness. Lewis [and] Fernando Alonso can jump in a bad car and get more out of it than I can. That’s probably my weakness.”
This difference with Lewis Hamilton used to hurt
Button further pointed another difference between him and Hamilton, which he claims often hurt him, but it also helped him in some “mixed conditions”. “[My] strength is [that] the way I drive is very different to most,” the 2009 F1 World Champion explained.
“For example, Lewis comes into a corner – it’s great because I have all the speed traces and everything from the data when we were teammates – but hammers the brake as hard as he can, there’s no modulation, turns into the corner, goes on the throttle, the same amount of pressure every time, and he does everything through the steering wheel.
“Whereas I was the complete opposite. I would brake and modulate it, to stop front locking, and I would come on the throttle and modulate it so I didn’t have to change my steering angle.
“So I’d be smooth on the steering. They’d say, ‘Oh, he looks so smooth’. It’s just because that’s what I would use very differently than someone like Lewis. That hurt me in some ways, but it helped me in those mixed conditions [to] really feel the condition underneath me.”
