Jenson Button reveals his former playboy lifestyle including wild five-day party where he ‘ran round naked in Ugg boots’
FORMULA ONE ace Jenson Button has lifted the lid on the wild, champagne-fuelled parties and childish pranks of motor racing.
The 2009 World Champion says the levels of debauchery hit turbo-drive after races.
Other party animals included German serial Grand Prix winner Michael Schumacher and hard-racing Scotsman David Coulthard, according to Somerset-born Jenson.
The 39-year-old ace, who has a fascinating new book out, exclusively reveals in The Sun on Sunday: “I was a highly committed and industrious playboy. After races, that was when the drinking began.
“Rapunzel had nothing on us when it came to letting our hair down. I remember after a Silverstone Grand Prix I partied for five days non-stop, out every night.
“One of those nights consisted of me leaving the property where I was staying wearing only Ugg boots and running around the block.
“Back then there was a right crew — Michael Schumacher and David Coulthard to name but two — who all used to party after the race.”
At the time of his debut aged 20 in Melbourne, Australia in 2000, Jenson was one of the youngest-ever F1 drivers.
In 2016 he retired after 306 races and currently drives in the Japanese Super GT series.
Jenson reveals in How To Be An F1 Driver how he swapped the “sticky floors” of rural Somerset nightclubs for glitzy Monaco.
Formula One crews would party hard in haunts such as the Amber Lounge, renowned for its heady mix of royalty, celebrities and F1 legends including Schumacher — who was later to suffer a traumatic brain injury in a skiing accident in 2013.
‘MY YACHT COST £6,000 TO FILL WITH FUEL’
Jenson says: “After winning Monaco in 2009, things got seriously messy.
“We partied after the race. Then the next day, Monday, as the principality began to get back to normal after the weekend’s festivities, we started drinking again, from about midday.
“Sitting at a bar on the beach, we were downing bottles of rosé, texting people to join us until there was a whole crew, and between the lot of us we caned ten magnums of rosé.
“Next, the call went up for a club, which opened especially for us, and there they opened a huge bottle of champagne, a Balthazar — that is 16 normal bottles of champagne in one — dwarfing my winner’s Jeroboam which is four bottles in one.
“We drank that and then, as we were winding down and about to leave, they cracked open another.
“We finished at about 1am and the next day christened our 13 hours of drinking Super Monday, which went on to become a bit of a Monaco tradition, podium finish or not.
“The Sunday after Monaco was, and probably still is, a blast. If you go to Amber Lounge it’s like €600 (£520) a ticket just to get in, and then you’ve got to pay for drinks and a table.”
While drivers love winning, there is also the agony of poor results — as Jenson found in 2001 as he kept getting beaten by his then Benetton teammate Giancarlo Fisichella.
He said: “I was in a slump. I was getting flak, not only from the Press but also my boss, Flavio Briatore, who called me ‘a lazy playboy’. Not true. I was a highly committed and industrious playboy.”
But that was also the catalyst to Jenson finding a lifestyle which ultimately put him on the path to becoming world champ in 2009.
I was in a slump. I was getting flak, not only from the Press but also my boss, Flavio Briatore, who called me ‘a lazy playboy’.
Jenson Button
He says: “My change of approach didn’t stop me partying completely. It just gave my work–social life the same thing I look for in cars — balance.
“I’d still be up for it on a Sunday night, post-race, when we’d be like, ‘Where’s the party?’ Me, David Coulthard, anyone else we could rope in. You do a bit of party-hopping.”
By now, Jenson was swapping champagne for water but adds: “Was I jealous, after my night on the Evian, seeing them all with hangovers? Not a bit, mate.
“They’d be going, ‘Oh, we had a great night, so much fun’, and I’d be thinking, ‘Awesome, but I get to drive an F1 car today and that’s damn cool as well’.”
On the Grand Prix circuit, day-to-day life was wildly extravagant.
At races, drivers would often stay in £300,000 motor homes, which were taken from circuit to circuit and set up ready for the stars when they flew in.
Jenson’s had “a leopardskin theme through the interior and looked a bit like a gin palace” and the fridge was stocked, bizarrely, with Babybel cheese.
He owned two yachts, moored in Monaco. He bought the first for £800,000 when a young driver on £500,000 a year, the second in 2014.
“That cost £5,000 to £6,000 to fill up with fuel and was 28 metres (92ft),” he says, “which isn’t that big if you consider Eddie Irvine had a 100ft boat and Jacques Villeneuve’s was 145ft.”
He says owning a yacht was like “having a bag of cash and, the whole time you’re on the boat, chucking $100 bills into the ocean.”
But away from the glamour, toilet humour was commonplace in the pits and garages.
Jenson says: “Farting’s great because it stays in the cockpit. I’d call my mechanic over, ‘Mate, can I ask you something?’ He’d put his head in the cockpit and know. ‘Aw, you dirty bastard!’ Then I’d hold his arms so he couldn’t get away.
“Sometimes you get in the car a bit early, feel like you’re dozing off and get an erection.
“Look, it happens, OK. Why do you think they call it a cockpit? This is what passes for sophisticated humour in a Formula One garage.”
But in 2014, the death of his beloved dad John made Jenson take stock of his life.
The race ace said of his glory days: “It was the stuff of boyhood dreams, and no way do I want to give the impression I’m at all ungrateful because I spent those years pinching myself at my good fortune, but . . . there’s always a ‘but’.
“My father had died, and with him went some of me. Without him, the paddock hadn’t been quite the same.”
Jenson has also had love troubles. He was engaged to English actress-singer Louise Griffiths before ending their five-year relationship in 2005.
‘I TRY TO BE KIND AND GENEROUS’
In 2009, he began dating model Jessica Michibata and in December 2014 they wed. But that lasted a year.
He has now found love again, though. He is engaged to US model Brittny Ward, 28, and in July this year she gave birth to son Hendrix.
Jenson now feels his life has been transformed since the wild days. He says: “It’s almost impossible to hold down a relationship and be a Formula One driver.
“It was Brittny, in the early days of our relationship, who pointed this out to me, probably as I was leaving to catch a flight.
“While in the bad old days I might have told her she was plain wrong, these days I’m old and ugly enough to realise she was on the money. I was very selfish and, having bailed from F1, I’m a very different person now.
“I try to be kind and generous. In fact, I think I’ve improved more as a human being in the last two years than in the rest of my life.
“That’s down to changing priorities, finding love with Brittny, being a dog owner, becoming a father.”
As for Hendrix maybe one day becoming an F1 driver, Jenson says: “Just you try and stop us. I couldn’t improve on the way my dad did it.
“He’d say, ‘If you’re not enjoying it, or want to take a break, tell me and we’ll stop.’ We never did, of course.”
I think I’ve improved more as a human being in the last two years than in the rest of my life.
Jenson Button
Today, a prized possession is the car he drove to win the F1 title, and one day he will show it to Hendrix, though he won’t be letting him take it for a spin any time soon.
He says: “You don’t just turn the ignition key on a F1 car. No, it would cost £50,000 to start it up — I’d need the assistance of three or four people, all the computers and electronics.”
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Now happy with a gentler pace of life, Jenson says: “I prefer restaurants these days. Nightclubs Definitely not. — I can’t deal with the hangovers.”
Even F1 is not what it was, he says: “It feels a little different. While there are still some drivers painting the town red, they’re the exception. We were like, ‘Do your job, let off steam’. They’re like, ‘Do your job, go home’.
“I wonder if it’s down to social media, with your every move tweeted and tracked.”
- How To Be An F1 Driver, by Jenson Button (Blink Publishing) is out now.
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