JENSON BUTTON - HOW TO BE AN F1 DRIVER : my guide to life in the fast lane;my guide to life in the fast lane.

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Copyright Jenson Button, 2019

Jenson Button has asserted his moral right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Blink Publishing is an imprint of Bonnier Books UK

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To the new boy, Hendrix.

Im going to buy you a copy of How To Be A Doctor as well to balance things out.

R ight, Mr Burton, says the driving instructor, with the distinctive leathery purr of someone born and bred in Los Angeles.

Its Button, actually, I correct him, settling in behind the wheel of the Honda Accord, ready for my lesson. Jenson Button.

Ginseng Button?

I try again. Jenson Button.

Of course! he explodes. Its your English accent. Jenson Button. Jen-son But-ton. Right. Got it. Okay, Mr But-ton, so youre here today so that we can get you up to speed on your LA driving ahead of your test, is that right?

Yes, I reply.

What Ive discovered since moving in with Brittny is that making my way around LA isnt simply a case of staying on the right-hand side of the road and hoping for the best. There are tons of little things you need to know, like the fact that youre permitted to turn right at a red stop light, or the odd way you have to deal with cycle lanes, and I need to know all this in order to get my Californian driving licence. It doesnt matter where youre from, or what you do for a living, you need a Californian driving licence if you want to use the roads.

In actual fact, it will turn out that I dont really need to learn this stuff for the test when it eventually happens, because the test consists of me very nervously driving around Fontana for a bit, with the examiner saying, Its fifty here, its fifty, you can go faster, out of the side of her mouth, and then passing me on all aspects of the test apart from one braking. Id braked too late, apparently.

I didnt brake too late, I will moan to Brittny afterwards.

You always brake too late, she responds, long-sufferingly.

But thats to come. Right now, I just need to get the hang of the road systems in my adopted home of LA, and the best way of doing that is by having an actual driving lesson. On the one hand, this is uncharacteristically sensible of me. On the other hand, I still have the shame of failing my first UK driving test branded on my heart so I want to get it right. Besides, Britts dad is a Californian Highway Patrol officer so I need to keep my nose clean.

Okay, Mr But-ton, lets try moving off, shall we? says the instructor. We get rolling and as we drive it occurs to me that this is only my fourth-ever driving lesson, and theres been a twenty-year gap between this one and the first three, when my instructor was Roger Brunt, who used to race against my dad in autocross. It wasnt Rogers fault that I went on to fail. I was too cocky, that was my problem.

Youre doing well, the instructor assures me, before asking, What is it that you do for a living, Mr But-ton?

Actually, Im a driver, I tell him.

Hes thinking. Pizza delivery? Uber? UPS?

A racing driver, I add, helpfully.

A racing driver? Wow, he says. He lapses into silence but when I steal a glance over at him I can see that hes googling me.

Wow, he says at last, holding up the phone. Is this you?

Yeah, I say, thats me.

He squints at the phone. Says here that youve retired from Form-ula One. Is that right?

Well I say.

L ike the song goes, I heard it through the grapevine.

Theyre going to call you.

Various people telling me. Theyre going to call you. Any day now. And Id be standing by the side of my pool thinking, Bugger. Really? Maybe I should change my number

The problem was that my last race in Formula One (or what I thought at the time would be my last race in Formula One) had been at Abu Dhabi in 2016 and it had been awesome. It wasnt a great race Id retired with a broken right front suspension but in many ways that didnt matter, and probably even improved the situation, because it meant that Id had my own little farewell before the end, without competing with the podium celebrations (which I would have overshadowed, obviously).

My team was all there, giving it the big goodbye: my friends and family, Brittny, the whole crew. It was a fantastic send-off and no better way to end 17 years in the game, a lifetime spent on planes, in motorhomes and being squeezed into the cockpits of cars. Yes, it was the stuff of boyhood dreams, and no way do I want to give the impression that Im at all ungrateful about any of that because I spent those 17 years pinching myself at my good fortune, but

Theres always a but. My father had died in 2014, and with him went some of me. Not my passion for racing, which as youre about to find out, has never dimmed. But my taste for the life of Formula One. Without him the paddock hadnt been quite the same. Not only that but I was mentally and physically exhausted tired of what is, after all, a repetitious life. And there comes a time when, no matter how great it is, you want a break from that repetition. So Id turned my back on F1 and decided to do something different for a while: take part in triathlons, do a bit of decorating. I wanted to enjoy the freedom from the various pressures of the sport: the teams, the teammates, the sponsors, the media, the whole brilliant but physically and emotionally exhausting merry-go-round of it all. For the first time in my adult life my home was more than a crash pad; I was starting to think of putting down roots, and in Brittny Id met someone with whom I wanted to share that experience, who maybe was the catalyst for it all. Id even earned my Californian driving licence, and I was shortly to be scratching my racing itch by competing in Super GT.

In other words, my ducks were in a row.

And F1 did not feature.

Hey, I thought. Maybe the grapevine is wrong on this occasion. Perhaps the call will never come.

And then the phone went one morning and it was McLaren principal Eric Boullier, who told me that Fernando Alonso wanted to go off and drive the Indianapolis 500, which was taking place on the very same day as the 2017 Monaco Grand Prix, which meant that