My Monaco return wasn’t a great day at the office, but there were upsides. Two upsides, in fact: first, I proved to myself that I could still drive bloody fast in an F1 car; second, the very act of going back became a way of checking whether I’d made the right decision to retire in the first place. After a boozy Sunday night I left on Monday morning with a hangover and the sure knowledge that I’d made the right call.
Yes, it had been nice to see the old faces again, but being back in the spotlight had reminded me how insular it was. How you never got off the plane and thought, ‘Wow, this is someplace new’, because the instant you arrived you were absorbed into the city that is Formulaoneville and it was the same city wherever you went in the world. Airport, hotel, circuit, back to the hotel, and that’s it. You don’t see anything else.
Wait. Don’t get me wrong here. I’m talking about being a driver. As a spectator my love for the sport has never diminished, and if Monaco reaffirmed my decision to leave F1, it also reaffirmed my love of racing as a whole, something that’s been in me since I was yea big. I won’t go into the details of how I became a racing driver (there’s another book for that), but mine was a path trodden by the likes of Ayrton Senna and Johnny Herbert; it took me through the ranks of junior karting and into Formula One, and it was a journey started by my father.
I’ll be a dad myself by the time you read this and if my son, Hendrix Jonathan Button, wants to go racing then just you try and stop us. We’ll be off for some important father–son bonding time: karting, probably, but not exclusively, because it’s important to do all kinds of driving, not just the stuff that you like. You need to learn how to drive different vehicles, how they behave in varying conditions, how to brake, how to handle a circuit, how to slide, even going over jumps. It’s all about building up general driving skill.
Me, I got my first go-kart when I was seven, mainly for something to do at the weekends because my parents had split up. My dad was great. He wasn’t one of those tyrants I used to see shouting at their kids. I realise now the benefit of starting young. You’re like a sponge, soaking up knowledge, learning at an age when it all goes in. But what’s just as important is making sure it starts off being fun and stays that way, because if you’re too focused and it becomes all-consuming then the chances are you’ll hate it by the time you’re 12.
I couldn’t improve on the way that my dad it. He’d always say, ‘If you’re not enjoying it, or you want to take a break, tell me, and we’ll stop.’ We never did, of course.
Ask me what is ‘natural skill’ and I’ll look at you as though you’re a bit hard of thinking and say something like, ‘Well, it’s skill, isn’t it? Only skill that you already have,’ and maybe I’ll remember first getting into a kart all those years ago. How I just somehow knew what to do.
And I bet that every single driver on the grid of a Grand Prix had a similar experience, because the fact is that all drivers in Formula One have natural talent, just that some have more of it than others.
Lewis has oodles of it, for example. Put him in anything and he’ll be quick. Then there are other drivers who have a natural gift but whose talent isn’t quite as abundant as his and so have to work at it. Fernando Alonso is a good example, who has worked hard to improve his skills, working on any areas of weakness and to make certain that he can get the maximum out of the car and out of the team. If you ask me, Fernando is a good example of a complete driver because he understands how to supplement his natural ability with hard work.
And of course it’s in your genes, somehow. Take a bow, Max Verstappen, whose father, Jos, was an F1 driver, and whose mother, Sophie Kumpen, was also a racing driver (she was my teammate in karting and she was so quick). Clearly, there’s no doubt Max has inherited his parents’ talent. Just look at the way that he can push a car in wet conditions. A great race for him was Brazil 2016, my second-to-last Grand Prix. It was wet but it was just unreal what Max could do with the car that most of the other drivers couldn’t. I mean, he almost hit the wall and hurt himself badly, but he didn’t. He kept it out there, and he had a great race. That’s natural. That’s not learnt.
For any driver, though, natural talent is not enough. Eventually, and providing that lady luck continues to smile on you with a full-faced idiot grin you’ll be combining your God-given skill with experience, which is when you get to be a really deadly competitor, but you’ll also need to be a grafter. A lot of drivers think they can skip that bit. A lot of drivers, especially when they first join the circus, will think being quick is enough.
Me, for example. Coming into Formula One in 2000 I believed my raw talent was enough. I was 20 years old, racing with Williams, a multiple World Championship winning team. That season I qualified third at Spa, which is one of the most difficult tracks in the world. I thought I was the mutt’s nuts.
And then in 2001 the results stopped coming. Racing with Benetton, I was uncompetitive and outraced by my teammate, Giancarlo Fisichella, added to which I was maybe enjoying the trappings of wealth a bit too much.
I’ll touch on this again later, but it was the team who brought me out of that dark place. They told me, ‘You’re quick, but you think it’s easy. You think your driving skill is enough, but it’s not.’ They made me work harder, and after that I never stopped putting in the time and effort. I spent more time with the engineers than I did with my mates; more time in the garage than I did on yachts – and it paid off.
In brief: No matter how much talent you (think you) have, you need to supplement it with hard graft. Which brings me on to...
Coming from karting to F1 was a big shock, because karting is the opposite of racing an F1 car. There’s no power in a kart. Lots of grip, but no power. So it’s just about being as smooth as possible. Some of that smoothness you carry across to Formula One – not being aggressive on the steering wheel, for example – but other things, like braking, you don’t, because even though you’ve acquired race-craft and driving skills in karting, it’s just a fraction of the learning needed to be at the top of your game in an F1 car – and if you can’t adapt it could be the end of your career. If you come in and you’re not quick enough or you make too many mistakes, you’re out immediately. Remember Yuji Ide? Exactly.
Kevin Magnussen was my teammate in 2014. He’d won everything before he got to F1, and he thought he’d come into the sport, destroy his teammate (me) and be winning races. And he wasn’t, of course, because he made the classic mistake that we all make of thinking that he was the finished article.
I remember him in the third race of the year saying to me, ‘JB, I didn’t realise how tough this was. How much I’d have to work.’
‘Aha, Kevin,’ I said, ‘and that’s because you’re racing against the very best in the world, the crème de la crème – chaps who have so much experience, not just of racing, but also of setting up of a Formula One car. You should be learning as a racing driver, Kevin, especially when you get to a sport that’s as complex as Formula One.’
I mean, maybe that’s not an exact quote. But it was something just as articulate and wise as that.
In brief: It’s important to have confidence in your ability, but also have the understanding that you need to learn, you should always be learning, you’re never as good as you should be, you’re never the greatest. In other words, never think you’re the best – but strive to be.
Sweeping statement alert: 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 shouldering my bag and leaving to catch a flight. And while in the bad old days I might well have told her she was plain wrong, these days I’m old and ugly enough to realise that she was in fact totally 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 to a fault. And by the way, your hair really suits you like that.
Take Nico Rosberg, who won the World Championship in 2016 and then quit the sport. There were those who said that he’d bailed because he’d won the World Championship, that he was lucky and he knew Lewis would beat him next year.
I know there were those who said that, because I was one of them.
However, I’ve since heard him say something that resonated with me. He said, ‘Sure, I could have gone on, trying to defend the title. But why? It’s easy to want more, more, more, but you also have to be careful and not lose yourself as a person.’
I respect that and understand how he felt. Plus it was interesting to hear him say that, because not only had I never heard a driver say that before but because I’ve always felt like that myself: you have to forget about everything else in life and become a person that you might not like. You have to be very selfish.
There is, of course, a positive aspect to being selfish (having spent years at it I had to find something good) and it’s the fact that you’re focused on what you’re doing, being in the right frame of mind, being as fit as possible, being ready for the start of the year. You also have to make sure that you get on well with the team and the sponsors, and though that sounds like the opposite of being selfish – quite nice of you, in fact – it’s actually all about improving your standing and getting the best out of those around you so they’ll work harder for you, and thus your competitiveness will improve. So, yeah, it’s still pretty selfish.
In brief: In F1, everything is a selfish act until you stop being a driver, and then it’s not.
Am I competitive? Much more competitive than you, I bet.
And this is a terrible thing to admit, but I don’t tend to compete at things that I can’t win, which is one of the reasons I don’t play any other sports. Here in LA I’ve taken up boxing and lifting weights, both things I’d never done and didn’t want to do until Brittny badgered me into it. I love them both now, but only since I got good.
But I’m the same with anything. Like, if I do my shoelaces up and it takes longer than I think it should, that annoys me. Or, I don’t know, measuring coffee beans for grinding and it’s not 15 grams – or it is 15 grams, but I didn’t do it as quickly as I did it the day before. Stuff like that. Stupid stuff.
And here’s another sad thing to admit: if I hadn’t been any good at racing I wouldn’t have continued with it. I couldn’t have stood people thinking, You’re not good enough, and, worse, knowing it in my own heart. I’d have had to do something else – something else that channelled my competitive spirit.
In brief: If you’re not super-competitive you’re probably not cut out for sports. I mean: duh.
Despite Formula One’s reputation for breeding prima donnas, there is in fact no room for them because F1 is a team sport, pure and simple.
Not that it was always the case, mind you, and it’s taken teams and drivers a while to wake up to the fact that the most successful teams are the ones who work well together, which means that these days, drivers are spending more time at the factory. They’ve realised that they have to hang out with the engineers to understand the cars, because people who came before them have done it and achieved great things – drivers like myself and Fernando and Sebastian Vettel – drivers who put the time and effort in.
So now when a new driver comes in, the team says to them, ‘You need to spend time with the engineer; you need to understand the car,’ as well as spending a lot of time in simulators, which I never had when I was a kid. It was Gran Turismo, that was it. Or Mario Kart.
All this means that they’re spending much more time understanding what the car can and can’t do, they’re a lot more prepared than they – by which I mean ‘we’ – used to be, and as a result they get into F1 cars and can be pretty quick straight away.
But there’s a drawback. Kids who have spent a lot of time in simulators and not enough time on the track are in danger of suffering a huge setback when they crash. It knocks the stuffing out of them. A computer game helps you in many ways, but it doesn’t help you understand how an impact feels, and we all have to crash one time in our lives to understand what G-force feels like – proper G-force, I’m talking 35G. It puts you in your place a little bit and you respect the car and the circuits a little bit more as a result.
We’ll talk more about the simulator in a bit. The point being that young drivers are absorbed into a team-player culture quicker these days than ever before, and they understand that they’re not driving for themselves, they’re doing it for the team.
So when, for example, you crash the car, you’re devastated. Not for yourself, you don’t give a shit about yourself, but for the mechanics, all those guys who have worked flat out to build the car, who’ve now got to stay up all night – because they do, you know – and do it all again.
They’re the guys for whom you reserve your sympathy and your apologies; they’re the first people you see when you come in after you’ve stacked the car up against the wall. Not the team boss. You’ll speak to him or her last. You walk around every single mechanic and you say sorry. Most of the time the mechanics will pat you on the back and say, ‘Shit happens, mate, it’s great that you were pushing,’ And then and only then will you speak to the team boss. But that bit doesn’t matter so much; you don’t mind about that, that’s just a ‘sorry for crashing your car’, which he should be all right about, because for him it’s just a case of finding money in the budget, which – this being Formula One – he should be able to do with comparative ease.
After that you might even spend time in the garage with the mechanics when they’re rebuilding. If you see drivers rolling their sleeves up and getting busy with a wrench then it’s probably just for TV: the moment the cameras leave the mechanics are snatching the tools out of the driver’s hand and shooing them off to a safe distance before they can do any damage. Even so, the mechanics like drivers to be there. They want you to see and appreciate the amount of work that’s going into this extraordinary piece of kit.
Even when they’re not working on the car, it’s worth spending a bit of time with them. You’ll never be a fully paid-up member of their gang – mechanics are a breed unto themselves, the garage a closed society – but you can learn from them and they can learn from you. Day to day they’ll hear you shouting at your engineer but they rarely hear first-hand what you have to say about the car or what you think about the team, and I think they deserve to hear it.
I’d often go out for a booze-up with my engineers and mechanics post-race. They’d have a few beers, say what they really thought, and sometimes it wasn’t especially flattering. ‘I thought you were a bit of a dick at such-and-such a time.’ And more often than not they’d be right about that.
But then you crash the car one morning at practice, you need it ready for qualifying and it’s touch and go if they can get it ready in time. Maybe if you’re the guy who’s been out boozing with them, accepted the piss-take and admitted you were a dick then they’ll go that extra mile to get it done for qualifying. But if you’re not that person, and you’re not showing them love and letting them know how important they are to the team, then maybe they won’t have that extra 10 per cent in caring whether the car’s built for qualifying or not; maybe they’d be, like, ‘Oh, sorry, mate, it wasn’t quite ready.’
So there’s that. There’s also the fact that as the driver you’re a kind of link between the garage, the engineers, management and the sponsors, and by the simple expedient of stopping off in the garage to wish everyone a good night you can help with that all-important sense of belonging and communal effort otherwise known as team spirit.
And there’s the fact that ultimately everything you do is for the selfish reason that you want to be quicker come the race, and the more people you have on your side the more likely that is to happen (ahem, see number three).
In brief: Go out for beers with your mechanic and engineers, get your round in and they’ll soon open up; they’ll tell you if and when you’re behaving like a dick and you’ll thank them for it later.
It’s Silverstone, Grand Prix weekend, and I’m stepping into a helicopter, interrupting what should be a weekend of laser-sharp racing focus in order to fly to a sponsor meeting. I’ve got my best ingratiating smile in my top pocket and I’m ready to go.
Crucially, the McLaren marketing department haven’t told me what the meeting is about, and I haven’t asked because it isn’t that important to me what the meeting is about. The key thing is that I know what is required, which is to represent McLaren.
I was a bit of sponsor-meeting monster when I was at McLaren. A sponsor-friendly driver has a lot to do with whether a sponsor stays at a team or goes and, thankfully, I was one of the most sponsor-friendly drivers in the paddock. It was one of the reasons they kept me on as a representative after my retirement. I remember it being an absolute wake-up call. Wait. So I’m in control of whether the sponsors stay or go? Mwah-ha-ha..
Truth is, though, I enjoyed that part of the job and I knew that more often than not, I nailed it. I see kids coming into the sport now and they haven’t got a Scooby what to do in front of the sponsors. These are companies putting £50 million into a team. It’s a massive deal. And drivers just stand there staring out from under the peaks of their snapbacks and gawping like guppy fish.
So anyway. Silverstone. They fly me from Silverstone for this meeting, we walk in and it’s Deutsche Bank.
I say to marketing, ‘Er, can I have a word?’
We go outside. I say, ‘You do know that I’m an ambassador for Santander and I have been for five years. I know you know this because you sorted the deal.’
‘Yes,’ says the marketing bod, ‘but this is fine. This is for the future.’
I say, ‘I’m still contracted, I’ve got another year.’
He’s, like, ‘Oh, it’ll be fine.’
At this point, I have to do what the team say. So I’m sitting in a meeting about a bank sponsor for the team when I’m sponsored by a rival bank, which is awkward to say the least.
But of course I wear my ingratiating smile and play my part, which is to convey that whether we win or lose, we at McLaren work hard, and that we’re a great family that you, the sponsor, absolutely want to be a part of.
And that’s my job because as I say, I’m like a hub in the team. The bosses know many things about the future of the team, but in terms of where the car is – its performance and future direction – that’s something that only the engineers, mechanics and the driver know, and like it or not, the sponsors don’t want to talk to the engineers and mechanics. They want to talk to the driver.
The drivers are the personalities who represent the team and therefore they become the public faces of any brand that aligns itself to the team. So if the sponsor doesn’t like the driver, it’s an uphill battle for the team to make a deal.
So it’s a strange situation, but I actually quite enjoyed it, knowing that what I said and did actually made a difference to whether we succeeded or not.
More on sponsors later, but for the time being…
In brief: If you think you’re just a racing driver and not a salesman as well, think again.
More on fitness to come. For the time being I just want to leave this here.
You know how people say you make your own luck? That’s bollocks. If a car spins off the circuit in front of you and you beat it, that’s not you ‘making your own luck’, that’s just luck. He spun off the circuit and you benefited because he’s been unfortunate or made a mistake.
Racing at Suzuka in May, 2019, I was in sixth place at the weekend and the Mugen NSX in front of me got a puncture, pulled out and I went up to fifth. That was good luck. Later on, I got a puncture myself. That was bad luck.
In brief: Luck is swings and roundabouts. Sometimes we get it, sometimes we don’t. Be sure to make the best of it when you do. That’s all I have to say about that.
What’s the difference between arrogance and self-belief?’ I think self-belief is believing in yourself. Arrogance, on the other hand, that’s when you’re shouting it from the rooftops. Ask someone with self-belief if they’re the best in the world and they’ll give you a little wink or the smile that says, “What do you think I think?” Ask an arrogant bleeder if he’s the best in the world and he’ll be shouting it from the rooftops. So that’s the big difference. They know they are, but they don’t shout it out.
In brief: Acquiring self-belief is a whole other thing, of course. For that you need…
When you start your career, you think that everyone you meet is looking out for you. You believe that everyone is a well-wisher, every pat on the back a purely selfless act.
It’s a common tale in sports and entertainment: somebody makes various promises, and because you’re young (for which read naïve) and you’re walking around with a big Snoopy grin on your face because you can’t believe your luck, and because the money’s coming in, you don’t really do much questioning.
Then one day the penny drops that you haven’t got quite as much as you should and your gaze turns to the guy in the corner puffing on a big cigar and sitting on a big pile of money.
After that, you go the opposite way. You suddenly become ultra-suspicious, you only trust those in your inner circle, which means you go through a period of suspecting people’s motives. You think, Why does this person want to be my mate? Is it because they like me as a person? Or do they want something?
That’s the situation I was in for, oh, about 13 of the 17 years I was in the sport. It was only latterly that I really started to open up. If I got into a relationship and discovered they weren’t really interested in me as a person I could deal with it, whereas when I was younger I couldn’t.
Living in LA you have to be careful. People there are always looking for an angle, but I’m willing to let them in and see where it takes us as friends. I’m a lot more open to that; I’m much stronger and I can handle it if it all goes tits up.
As for that inner circle, mine has been incredible. First off, there was my dad. There was never any doubt that he had my best interests at heart. When it came to racing, everything he said and did was for me. He never had a hidden agenda.
Having said that, I didn’t take on board everything he told me. I used him to bounce ideas off, but if I didn’t like his response I would often snap at him. If his answer or his reasoning wasn’t what I wanted to hear, I let him know about it. For example, he’d be saying, ‘I think you need to spend more time with the mechanics, make them feel part of the team, you know,’ something like that.
I’d be like, ‘Dad, come on, I’m doing enough.’
But then I’d think about it and realise he was right. Years later, I’d even be including it as a piece of essential advice in this very book. And the reason he was right was that he saw things from another angle; he stood back in the garage, saw the guys at work, noted how I interacted with them and thought there was room for improvement. It’s one of the few things I regret in life, snapping at Papa Smurf.
But at least I can say that I came round. And I can say when it happened, too, because it was in 2009, my Championship-winning year. The season began spectacularly well for me – I won six of the first seven races – after which things were, shall we say, a little more trying. And that’s when it really hit home to me that I couldn’t do this on my own. Before that year I’d always felt that I was getting the best out of the car. No one ever thought we had a race-winning car, so there wasn’t that pressure; I could just go out and enjoy my racing. It was a little bit frustrating that we weren’t winning races, but we were fighting for podiums and it was great, it was fun, every success was a bonus that exceeded all of the expectations placed upon me.
Then suddenly we had a chance to fight for the Championship and wouldn’t you just know it but the pressure from the team and the outside world increased exponentially.
History tells us that I was doing phenomenally well at the beginning of the season – until suddenly I wasn’t. My teammate, Rubens Barrichello, was doing a better job in certain races and I felt the Championship was maybe slipping from my grasp.
More pressure. In an interview somebody asked me, ‘Do you not want to win this Championship?’ and I responded sarcastically. It was a dumb, unprofessional thing to do (despite the fact that it was a stupid question, and I saw other journalists shaking their heads at just how stupid it was), but it became a bit of a watershed moment nonetheless, the point at which I thought, Hang on, no, I can’t do this on my own, I need support.
And, sure, when you’re down, and the pressure’s on, that’s when you cast about looking for other opinions.
It shouldn’t have taken being down for me to do that, but it did, and I’m glad it happened because at least I finally opened myself up to the advice of others. Not for the purpose of blowing smoke up my arse and telling me how good I was, but to remind me of what I’d achieved at the start of that season, making me feel comfortable with having a bad race, because we all have bad races, and it’s all about learning from them and coming back stronger.
I remember my dad saying to me that year, ‘Is it okay for me to say how I feel?’ and I was, like, ‘Yes, I promise you I won’t be snappy, I want to hear what you’ve got to say,’ and that was a real turning point in my career. I began listening to the people around me and using their support, understanding that they were being helpful in my time of need. I realised how much they meant to me.
The fact is that whether you take it with a pinch of salt or take it seriously, you’ve got to listen to others’ opinions, because they see things that you don’t. I wish it hadn’t taken adversity to make me realise that, because I know now that you can always be better as a person and as a driver through listening – because that’s how you learn.
Mikey was a really calming influence, because the only time I got to relax was when I was getting a massage over a race weekend, when he’d talk me through the race. ‘What do you want from this weekend? What would you be happy with? Where do you think you need to improve?’
I don’t even know if he was listening to my answers – probably not – but it was great to have that sounding board. As Brits, we’re not very good at talking about our feelings, most of us anyway, so you need people around you who can draw that out of you. Having read a bunch of books by the life coach Tony Robbins I’ve begun to wish I’d had someone like that in F1, someone to whom you can talk who doesn’t have a vested interest in you.
On the other hand, I would have never wanted my teammate or a rival from another team knowing I was seeing a therapist. However you’re feeling on the inside you’ve got to look strong and confident. There’s no room for doubt in motorsport, because in motorsport if you doubt yourself, other people will doubt you as well. Big shout out, then, to those I’ve already mentioned – Richard, Mikey, Chrissy, James – as well as my PA, Jules Gough – all of whom were there for the bad times as well as the good, and are still with me.
In brief: It’s not just a case of remembering that you need support, it’s about listening to that support and letting that support know that their contribution is welcome and valued.
In LA I go karting with a bunch of kids who beat me every time. Does it bother me? No.
Well, okay, it does bother me a bit. Quite a lot, actually. But it’s not as though I have a problem with it. It’s not like I’m throwing my crash helmet at the fence and decking stewards in my anger. That’s because, firstly, I’m not in the habit of chucking helmets and decking stewards at the best of times; and secondly, I’m not afraid to lose.
It’s true. Despite everything I’ve already said about having a competitive nature, I really don’t mind losing. I care. Oh yes. And I plan to get better the next time I’m sitting behind the wheel. But it doesn’t scare me, and that’s the crucial difference.
Plus – and here’s the important bit – I know I can improve. I mean, I’ll always get quicker. Even at 39, I reckon I could spend two weeks in a kart and be good enough to race. Probably wouldn’t win, but I would race competitively.
It’s the same for me and GT racing. I’ve had to put the time and effort in and not get frustrated when it wasn’t plain sailing. An F1 car is open-wheeled. It’s single-seater. It’s all about the aerodynamics. A GT car is none of the above. Pretty much all they have in common is four wheels. Even the steering wheel’s a different shape.
So there’s still so much left to learn before I hang up my cap for good. My ultimate aim is to be that ‘complete driver’ I’m talking about, and maybe even go one better than the likes of Fernando. After all, the categories he’s chosen have high down-force. He’s not racing anything like Super GT or rallying, and that’s when it gets more difficult, which is when you really learn. So that’s what I’m looking forward to over the next few years. I’m looking forward to doing more learning.
I remember speaking to Alain Prost – one of my childhood heroes – because I was interested in getting a team together for rallycross, which is rally but around a circuit, banging wheels and everything. It’s great fun. ‘Would you be interested in being my teammate, Alain?’ I asked him.
That would be so cool. Alain Prost as my teammate.
‘Only do it if I could test every day.’
Cue the sound of fizzling fireworks.
‘What?’ I said.
With typical Gallic insouciance he said, ‘I would never get in a car and race if I’m not up there with the best of them.’
He wanted to test for weeks before we went racing and most teams don’t have the budget for that. Now, as it happens, the team didn’t get off the ground anyway, but the fact is most teams don’t have the budget for that kind of testing, so Alain was counting himself out.
At the time I was disappointed, but I totally got where he was coming from. He knew what we all know, that it takes time. You can’t just jump in anything and be the quickest; there will always be drivers in every category who are experts at what they do, who will be very, very difficult to beat.
Put simply, if you have too much ego you’ll never succeed in other forms of motorsport, because you’ll arrive, you won’t be much cop, and you’ll reach the conclusion that the equipment is at fault, when the blame lies with you.
Equally, you will never be a good driver if you don’t eat, sleep and breathe F1. There’s no such thing as a brilliant driver with a passing interest in the sport. When I was racing in F1, I didn’t think about anything else apart from racing in F1. So on a Sunday night after the race, whether it was good or bad, I’d want to get straight back in the car. Pretty much, the whole time I was not racing, I wanted to be in the car.
As you might imagine, I struggled to relax. Whether I was driving the car or not, it was all Formula One: how can I be better as a driver? How can I put right the mistakes I made the weekend before, or, if I had won the race, how could I do an even better job? As a result, I was so drained at the end of the season, I’d get ill. You never fall ill during the season, always at the end.
Is it a strength or a weakness, that inability to switch off? You might argue that the ability to focus is a good one, but on balance I’m marking it down in the minus column. If I’d had a negative race, that negativity would stay with me and I was very bad at being able to put it behind me, at which point it started to have a slightly poisoning effect.
I think that’s why racing took such a toll on me over 17 years, and why it was so tough for me, mentally and physically. Why I retired. I couldn’t deal with it any more.
In brief: Don’t be afraid to lose and try – if you can (and if you can then you’re a stronger person than I am) – not to let it take over your life.
Crashing is inevitable. The trick is to come out the other side. Some of the reason why you can carry on after a big shunt is because you’ve survived and you look at yourself, and you think, I hit that wall at 140 miles an hour and I’m still here. How is that possible? Because in a road car, you’d be dead; you’d be a millimetre thick, whereas in an F1 car you’re surrounded by goodness: you’ve the carbon-fibre tub, the spongey headrest; you’re wearing a carbon-fibre helmet and you’ve got the HANS device, which stops your head from going too far forward and breaking your neck.
Then you’ve got the circuits, which are built for safety. It’s not like it used to be with a bunch of tyres stacked on top of each other. Now they’re proper safety barriers.
So you’re in a car that’s safe, on a circuit that’s safe, surrounded by state-of-the-art apparatus whose sole function is to keep you safe. But even so, you don’t want to crash, and not just because it’s expensive and embarrassing and messes up your team’s weekend. Firstly because, well, you know, there’s always the possibility that something bad will happen, that something will go wrong and that those safety features will fail you or be insufficient. Because crashing is scary shit.
Secondly, because fearlessness can make you a poor driver. You’re never going to finish a race if you’re a fearless – for which read ‘reckless’ – driver. ‘Mad’ Max Verstappen, for example, has gone through his period of being fearless, crashed a lot, learnt to exercise caution and come out the other side a better driver because of it. Think about Niki Lauda, who in 1976 showed unbelievable courage to return to racing just three races after the fiery accident that almost claimed his life. Reaching the last race of the season in Japan it was raining, horrific weather, and Lauda withdrew, refusing to race and in doing so handing the World Championship to James Hunt. Even someone as fearless as him understood the danger, and knew when to step back and say, ‘I’m not a superhero.’
In brief: There’s a difference between being brave and being foolhardy, and a lot of it comes down to age and experience.
•Love your racing
•Love to learn
•Keep yourself in physical and mental shape
•Don’t be a dick.