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Jenson Button

British racing driver

Jenson Alexander Lyons Button (born 19 January 1980) is a British former racing driver who competed in Formula One from 2000 to 2017. Button won the Formula One World Drivers' Championship in 2009 with Brawn, and won 15 Grands Prix across 18 seasons. 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 F1 with Williams for the 2000 season. The following year, he switched to Benetton, which, at the start of the 2002 season, became the Renault team, and then moved to BAR for the 2003 season. He finished third in the 2004 World Drivers' Championship before falling to ninth in the 2005 championship. BAR was subsequently renamed and became the Honda team for the 2006 season, during which Button won his first Grand Prix at the Hungarian Grand Prix 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. Button went on to win a record-equalling six of the first seven races of the 2009 season, securing the Drivers' Championship at the Brazilian Grand Prix, having led on points all season; his success also helped Brawn GP to secure that year's Constructors' Championship. At the start of the 2010 season, Button moved to McLaren, partnering fellow British racer Lewis Hamilton. After finishing fifth for the team in 2010, Button ended the 2011 season as runner-up, before falling to fifth in the 2012 championship. Four more seasons with McLaren resulted in no further victories and he retired from Formula One at the end of 2016, making a one-off return at the 2017 Monaco Grand Prix to deputise for Fernando Alonso. From the 306 races that Button started, he won fifteen, qualified on pole position eight times, took fifty podium finishes and scored 1,235 championship points. After his F1 career, Button became champion of the 2018 season of the Super GT Series alongside Naoki Yamamoto, with whom he shared a Honda racing car at Team Kunimitsu. He also competed part-time in the NASCAR Cup Series, driving the No. 15 Ford Mustang for Rick Ware Racing with support from Stewart–Haas Racing and sponsorship from Mobil 1.