Your flights are booked, your hotel reservation is sorted and you’re given a schedule that you don’t really need to consult because you have other people to do that for you. Everything, in short, is sorted so that you can focus on the job at hand, which is to drive a car really, really fast around a circuit. Unless you’re doing a sponsor event, of course, in which case your job is to be picked up, hang around for about half an hour, do some pictures and then more often than not be taken out to dinner to a restaurant of your choosing. And, to cap it all off, on top of that you’ve got…
Older Formula One drivers have it all their own way. They can do shit and get away with it. Like if they’re pictured drinking with their mates in St-Tropez, it’s fine. It’s them letting off steam. Go them!
It’s the youngsters who don’t have it so easy. The ones coming into the game. For them it’s all, ‘Oh, look at that playboy, who does he think he is? It’s all gone to his head.’ Basically, if you want to avoid the wagging fingers and the pointing tongues then you’ve got to be really careful as a youngster coming through the ranks.
Guess who wasn’t careful?
And yes, people ask if it went to my head. Actually they just straight out tell me, ‘it went to your head, JB’, as though they can presume to know what was going on inside my brains. But the people who say that can take a long walk off a short pier, because I don’t think it did go to my head. Not really. What they interpreted as arrogance was in fact the euphoria of someone who was simply happy to be living his dream. How happy? Like a dog with two tails.
I know now that I didn’t focus as much as I should have done. I didn’t study and learn the engineering side of things. I didn’t knuckle down and think, This is just the start, but now I need to be clever and I need to work hard. Like I say, I know that now, with the benefit of these hindsight goggles I’m currently wearing.
But at the time? Come on. I was a Formula One driver, I was racing for Williams. I was 20 years old, which at the time made me the youngest-ever F1 driver, and I thought my talent was all I needed to get by. So what was I going to do? I was going to go out.
So I did. And for a while, I stayed out. I mean, look, I come from Somerset where the local nightclubs were proper sticky-floor pick-up joints. Now suddenly I’m racing in Formula One and London has opened its doors and ushered me inside. I’m no longer at Oscars at Longleat or McGuinness’s in Frome. I’m at China White in the West End, Mahiki in Mayfair, the Atlantic and the Titanic. I hadn’t made new friends when I started in Formula One; I was still hanging out with my old mates from home, and together we were on the same fun, exciting journey, running around London trying to outwit the paparazzi because we needed to keep it all secret from my dad, who would have had a fit if he’d known I was living it up so much.
Having said all that, it wasn’t nearly as debauched as your dirty mind is imagining, and while I might not have been quite as committed as I should have been, I was still a sportsman and very much aware of my responsibilities. Sure, I was out a lot, but I didn’t let it get in the way of races. In terms of cutting things fine, probably the naughtiest thing I did was that I once partied on a Wednesday before a British Grand Prix. Oh yes, and I attended a Scream premier once, went on to the after-party and woke up a bit hung over. That was really the closest I ever got to drinking before a Grand Prix weekend.
After the races. Ah, now that’s a different story. That was when the drinking would happen. Rapunzel had nothing on us when it came to letting our hair down. I remember after a Silverstone I partied for five days non-stop, out every night, and one of those nights consisted of me leaving the property where I was staying, wearing only Ugg boots and running around the block, which was much bigger than expected. The block was much bigger than expected, I should clarify.
Of course, the golden rule is that it’s okay to do all this sort of stuff when things are on the up, but it’s not a good look when results aren’t going your way. Suddenly it’s, ‘Uh oh, so that’s why he’s no longer competitive. It’s because he’s out on the town every night’. That was what happened to me during my time at Benetton in 2001. True, the car wasn’t up to much, but that’s not really the barometer of your success as a driver. For that you need to look at how you perform against your teammate, who’s driving exactly the same car as you, and I was getting soundly beaten by mine, Giancarlo Fisichella. I was in a slump. I was getting flak, not only from the press but also from my own boss, Flavio Briatore, who had called me ‘a lazy playboy’ (not true – I was a highly committed and industrious playboy).
Anyway. Like I say, the team had a word, put me straight. And during the off-season I switched up, got my shit together and focused on the engineering side of things. And after that the results started to come. Funny that.
My change of approach didn’t stop me partying completely, of course. It just gave my work–social life the same thing I look for in my cars: balance. I’d still be up for it on Sunday night, post-race when we’d be like, ‘Where’s the party?’ Me, Daniel Ricciardo, David Coulthard, anyone else we could rope in.
You do a bit of party-hopping, of course. This one’s good, but let’s try this one. Oh, it’s not quite as good, let’s go back to the first one, oh no, we should have stayed at this one all along, but we’d normally find out where the best parties were, and we’d do our best to play catch-up with the rest of our teams, many of whom would have been partying every night of the weekend – especially at Monaco, which is just huge for the teams, the fans, the visiting VIPs – everybody’s on it all weekend, apart from the drivers. (Was I jealous, after my night on the Evian, seeing them all with their hangovers? Not a bit of it, mate. They’d all be going, ‘Oh, we had a great night last night, so much fun,’ and I’d be thinking, Awesome, but I get to drive an F1 car today and that’s pretty damn cool as well.)
Besides, Sunday after Monaco was – probably still is – a blast. If you go to Amber Lounge it’s, like, €600 a ticket just to get in and then you’ve got to pay for your drinks and for a table. You’re talking €6,000 and the night’s hardly even started. If you’re a punter. It’s different for drivers, of course. Everybody wants the drivers there because it attracts money, knowing that the drivers are in the party. And once you’re there you don’t get bothered. You have a VIP drivers’ area, and the security guy follows you to the toilet to make sure everything’s okay (which it would be, except for the fact that you have security guys following you to the toilet).
After winning Monaco in 2009, things got seriously messy. We partied after the race and then the next day, Monday, as the principality began to get back to normal after the weekend’s festivities, we started drinking again, about midday this was. 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 in fact 16 normal bottles of champagne in one (dwarfing my winner’s jeroboam, which is four bottles in one) and then we drank that, and then, just as we were winding down about to leave, they cracked open another one.
In the end, we finished at about one in the morning, and the next day christened our 13 hours of drinking ‘Super Monday’, which went on to became a bit of a Monaco tradition, podium or not.
Meanwhile, things have changed a bit. Back then there was a right crew – Michael Schumacher and David Coulthard to name but two – who all used to party after the race. Now it feels a little different. And while there are still some drivers painting the town various shades of red on a regular basis – don’t worry, I won’t tell your mum, Max – they’re the exception rather than the rule. A lot of them go home. It’s a very different atmosphere. We were like, Do your job, let off steam; they’re like, Do your job, go home. I wonder if it’s social media, your every move photographed, tweeted and tracked, which we didn’t have 20 years ago, thank God.
As for me, I prefer restaurants these days. Parties? Nah. Nightclubs? Definitely not. Give me a good restaurant any day. Besides I can’t deal with the hangovers.
Let’s talk about the wages. According to the 2019 Forbes list, Lewis is F1’s top earner with $55m in earnings and $10m in endorsements on top of that. Sebastian is behind him with $40.3m in earnings and $0.3m in endorsements, although both of them are some way behind the leader, some bloke called Lionel Messi, whose combined earnings is $127m.
(Who, though, is the highest-paid sportsman of all time? Answer at the end of the chapter.)
How Lewis and Sebastian’s cumulative earnings would stack up, I couldn’t say. Lewis is a five-time World Champion, Sebastian is only a four times World Champion. But Sebastian has been earning for longer. He won multiple World Championships at Red Bull and then he went to Ferrari for which he would have been paid a big lump sum.
So that’s what you’ve got at the top end. But it’s not the case right the way through the grid, because at the bottom end there are probably six or more drivers in F1 who don’t get paid and instead have to bring money to the sport in order to compete. They will be paid through the sponsorship money they can generate.
I’m not going to talk about my earnings. Suffice to say that when I arrived in F1, I was paid half-a-million dollars in my first year, and to say I was happy with that as a 20-year old from Somerset is the understatement of the millennium. The fact that it was my starting salary, and that, all being well, things were only going get better from there was exciting. It’s a huge, huge step-up, a real through-the-looking-glass moment, and it’s sobering (metaphorically, not literally); it increases your sense of responsibility, your sense of social guilt, you name it.
Most of all it’s brilliant. Not just because of the amount, but also because you’re being paid so much for something you’d happily do for free. I swear to God that nobody comes into Formula One in the pursuit of fame and fortune. They might get it once they’re there, but that’s not the reason anyone embarks on this as a career. They do it because they love racing. And so when you’re one of the lucky few who reaches the top and you’re racing at the very pinnacle of the sport, and you’re being paid that much money for it – it’s just unreal.
Like I say, my earnings increased. They peaked in 2006, 2007, 2008 – the Honda years – and then dipped at Brawn, when the team said, ‘We can’t pay you what your contract says,’ to which I replied, ‘Okay, but I want to go racing, and I think this car could be good, so I’ll take a pay cut.’
So it’s big money, any way you look at it. And that’s before you factor in the bonuses. Some drivers will earn a $1m bonus if they win a race. Just one race. The funny thing, though, is that you don’t normally get a bonus for winning a Driver’s Championship. It’s the Constructor’s Championship that’s worth the big bucks because that’s when the team gets the large payout – €100 million or something – from the FIA, and you can buy a lot of team-branded polo shirts with that.
It’s the same as it is in football, where players are paid more than the people who manage them, the inverse of just about every other situation in life. Someone like Lewis is not only the highest paid person in the team, but also probably the highest paid person in the whole of Daimler AG, Mercedes’ parent company. Even the CEO isn’t going to be on the kind of money Lewis gets paid.
Still, you have to remember that the earning window is much smaller: for the first few years you have to prove yourself, after which you probably have ten years of earning good money and you could maybe push it for a few more years after that. And then? Well, you better find some other way of earning a crust.
In my own case, having left McLaren in 2016, I could have gone to other teams and earned reasonable money, but it wasn’t about that; it was time to move away from the sport. Plus I knew that after F1, I could still earn money doing something. I just hadn’t yet figured out what.
When I watch Formula One, I watch the racing. But you’d need a heart of stone – or be Kimi Räikkönen – not to feel a little excitement at all the glamour and glitz of the whole thing. Of course you love the driving. We’re all there for that. But there’s all the other stuff that goes with it. It’s always in the back of your mind. I probably haven’t really considered it before, but as a kid the glamour of F1 must have attracted me on some level, because otherwise why aim for that, rather than another class of racing? I’ll have to get back to you on that one.
It’s a particularly international sort of glamour, of course. Premiership footballers have the fast cars and the top clobber, but so do we, and what’s more, we have it in Monaco and Melbourne and Austria. When you walk into the paddock in Melbourne for the first race of the season it hits you what a wonderful environment you’re in, simply because it’s such a stunning paddock. Just seeing how much effort they put in to the hospitality and how luxurious it looks, how well everything is presented. It’s like, Whoa. You’ve got the top team at the near end: Mercedes, followed by Ferrari and then Red Bull (the further you have to walk down the paddock, the further down the ranking you are).
I definitely enjoyed that, being a part of that scene. Just the look of it, for starters. Everything from the trailer to the garages is absolutely pristine. And the cars. I mean, you race in other categories and the vehicles are often a bit banged up with scratches, stone chips and such, but there’s not a mark, there’s not a thumb-print or a grease smear on an F1 car. They’re polished and buffed into flawless works of art, and because they’re painted for every race they look that good every single time.
The whole thing about Formula One is that we put so much time and effort into the chase for perfection; everything is about detail, and as a result everything but everything, from the cars themselves to the teacups, looks a-mazing.
I think that’s a huge part of the appeal. It’s that escapism. Life isn’t perfect, but Formula One is just about as close as we’re going to get. And of course we as drivers benefit enormously from that reflected glamour. Unlike footballers, we don’t have 20,000 people screaming rude things about our wives. I’ve got so much respect for football players in dealing with that aggression. I don’t know how they do it, I really don’t. And I hope I’m not tempting fate here, but in F1 we just haven’t seen the kind of financial and sexual scandals that have dogged, say, football and boxing. There are fewer F1 drivers, of course, but even so there does seem to be a general feeling of the drivers behaving themselves – or at least misbehaving a bit more successfully – than footballers.
A lot of this is to do with the media. As a driver you’re in front of the cameras a lot. The first person they speak to after a race is not the team manager, it’s the driver, and you’ve got to be ready for that; you’ve got to understand that you’re not just talking on behalf of yourself but the other 500 other people in the team. As a result I think you grow up very quickly, become more respectful. And if you’re wondering how that fits in with this section’s theme of glamour, well, it just does, because it’s all about the global image of the sport, and upholding that image, and how we all do our bit towards it.
In 1991, Alain Prost was turfed out of Ferrari halfway through a season for trash-talking his own team (he was also fired by Renault for the same reason at the end of the 1983 season). But aside from trash-talking, and getting truly appalling results, the other main reason you’re likely to get your marching orders is if you upset a sponsor.
The thing is, it’s not easy for any team in Formula One to exist; it costs a fortune – $200–$400 million a year – so if it came to a choice between the sponsor and the driver, then the team would get rid of the driver.
But it just doesn’t happen now because everyone in Formula One knows on which side their bread is buttered. In other words, they’re wise to the fact that the sponsors put money into the team, which in very real terms means the team can build a better, faster car, which in turn gives you a better chance of winning. The team can pay for the best drivers – not just the two up front, but better test drivers, too – they can pay for the better staff; they can spend more money on a wind tunnel. It’s no coincidence that the two richest teams in F1, Mercedes and Ferrari, are also the two quickest teams in Formula One.
So in a very real sense you as the driver can use the sponsor – or, rather, the sponsorship situation – to your advantage. You understand that the sponsor wants you there. That you’re integral to their interests in the team, and that if they liked another driver more then they’d probably sponsor that team instead. You being able to understand how the cogs of team, sponsor and driver interlink and that for it all to work you all have to be doing your job properly. Ultimately, the way a driver deals with the sponsor will be a key part of his longevity in the sport.
Am I good at it? Damn straight I am. I realised quite early on that it’s important to be good in every area and schmoozing sponsors is definitely one of them. Plus I really enjoyed it because the people I was meeting were genuinely interested in Formula One. I’d always try not to ask boring questions. I would ask things about driving, put them on the spot a little bit, make them a little bit uncomfortable, and they loved it; I’d start a conversation as a friend would; it wouldn’t be just like, ‘Yeah, it’s great to be here this weekend blah blah blah,’ and all the boring stuff that you have to say. I’d try and make it a bit more personal, hopefully get the crowd laughing, take the piss out of myself or take the piss out of the marketing people I’m with, get a rise out of people. And I think that makes a difference, because they remember you; it’s not just, ‘Oh, some Formula One driver came in and did a little speech.’ It’s different, more personal.
Mind you, as a tactic it backfired a bit. Other drivers would turn up to sponsor events, be a bit distant and disinterested, do the guppy fish impression, and so the sponsor would ask for me next time, and I’d end up doing the lion’s share.
It’s the same with the media. I used to like having a laugh with the press, or at least having a laugh because of the press.
There was this one time, not at band camp – 2014, it was – when we were struggling with the car and my PR man, James Williamson, would get me to say certain words in my answer. It was just to amuse ourselves, really. We loved the Cookie Monster advert, where the Cookie Monster kept saying, ‘How about now?’ as he’s waiting for the cookies to be ready. He keeps saying it. ‘How about now? How about now?’
So there I was in a press conference in Canada, getting really cheesed off with the same old question, and in the end I said, ‘This is really tough, you know, you keep asking me the same question about when is the performance going to get better, you keep saying, how about now? How about now? How about now?’ And I kind of framed it as though I was losing my rag when unbeknown to anyone (apart from James, who I could hear laughing into his hand) it was just me doing a Cookie Monster impression.
Meanwhile, I was always taught when doing an interview to end on a positive, because that’s what they remember. On one occasion in Montreal we were speaking to various McLaren highups, and I was being interviewed on stage by one of the team members. So the first thing I did was to take the piss out of the team member interviewing me. I went on to talk about how shit the day was and then I ended on a high: ‘But tomorrow, I’m sure it’s going to be fantastic with your support,’ and just left them with a bit of positivity.
Did I ever get sick of being a walking sponsorship board? Yes and no. When you’re paid that kind of money you should wear a diarrhoea-coloured frilly tutu if that’s what they want. Yes, you have lots of demands on you and your time, and it’s certainly not what you’d call an easy life. But it’s so well remunerated that all other considerations have to come second. And after all, you always have the option to step aside if it all gets too much.
But on the other hand, maybe I did feel a little… owned. I was often aware that we were being used every second of our lives. Like if the public see you wearing a watch that isn’t a sponsor’s watch, they’ll say, ‘Hang on a sec, why is he wearing that watch and not the sponsor’s watch?’ and the sponsors will be, ‘Shit, this is an issue. He prefers that other watch,’ and before you know it you’ll have people on the phone treating it like a major diplomatic incident when the fact is you just picked up the wrong watch on your way out to fetch a coffee.
Same if I was papped somewhere and I was in a BMW when I drove for Honda. I wouldn’t go back to the car. I’d leave it until I knew that the paps had gone.
Still, whatever I’m advertising, I try my best to do it well, even if I know it’s shit. You couldn’t refuse to be sponsored, as such, but I would say to the team that I’m not doing certain things, and in my contract there are some things that I will and won’t do.
For example, the sponsor can’t use me and just me; they had to have the car in the background and had to have a racing element to the photo they use for advertising. Little details like that. So it wasn’t solely me as an individual sponsoring a brand that I might not want to associate myself with.
For Honda I’m an ambassador, which means I do ‘ambassadorial’ things for them. Again, there’s a line. Like if they wanted me to frolic on a beach with buxom beauties or something equally crass I could refuse. But I also know that they wouldn’t do that because Honda is a brand that is very respectful, so it’s good working with them.
I went to Australia to do a one-day, which was just about the most fun sponsor event ever. They flew me out there, I drove a Civic-type car around Bathurst, which is a beautiful circuit up in the mountains. All I had to do was set the lap record for a front-wheel-drive road car, one that hadn’t been set yet. So I just went out and had fun, had a few beers in the evening and came home, and that was it.
Compare that to 2010, the first year of McLaren – or ‘Vodafone McLaren Mercedes’ as the press kit had me say – when I’d come from Brawn to join Lewis. McLaren had the previous two World Champions racing as teammates, and boy were they going to make the most of it. They used us every day on sponsor events. Race weekends were packed with photo-ops; they were pulling us out of engineering meetings to do sponsor events. We were like, ‘Guys, we understand the need to do marketing and interviews, but our priority is making the car go faster.’
Lewis was lucky, because my manager, Richard, did all the fighting on behalf of us both, and it remains the only time I’ve ever complained about too much work in F1. Marketing listened, of course, and as result scaled the promotional appearances right back.
For about, oh, a fortnight.
Coming into F1, I had no idea what I was doing, especially when it came to money, and my manager at the time, a thoroughly lovely bloke, if a little green, said, ‘It’s fine, you’ve got a long career ahead of you, spend it!’
I’m not blaming him. He was himself a multi-millionaire businessman. He just wanted me to be happy and I was all too willing to take his advice. So I bought a house as well as the expensive apartment I was renting in Monaco, and I also bought…
The trick is to buy a limited car – but don’t sell it right away. You get people who buy and sell them straight away but Ferrari and other manufacturers don’t like it when you do that, so you’re probably not going to get your hands on a limited-edition Ferrari ever again. On the other hand, it’s the people who buy and sell instantly who tend to make the most money on them.
One thing I do know, however, is that the richest man is the one who buys a Ferrari that’s not limited. You buy a Ferrari that’s not limited, you drive it out off the forecourt and it’s dropped $50,000 already and that’s the richest man in the world who does that – who doesn’t care about losing that money. Whereas I will only buy a car if I know it’s a limited car, because I’ll hold on to my money.
Other things I spent a lot of money on: a motorhome. Argh! I remember the conversation with Richard. I said, ‘I don’t know if I can do this any longer,’ and he was, like, ‘Well, why don’t you try making it as easy on yourself as possible? Get rid of some of your peripheral worries so that you can relax and stay focused on the race…’
He would be proved correct. Although I’ve bought a lot of things that have cost me a small fortune, mostly they were all about making my life easier so that I could continue in Formula One for longer.
My motorhome (in the end, motorhomes, plural) was a prime example. It felt like home. I’d get back from the circuit, whether it was a good day or a bad day, walk in and be like, ‘Ah, a restful oasis away from the circus of Formula One.’ I’d open the fridge and gaze upon my Babybels (my beloved Babybels) as well as all the rest of my food. I had my kettle, my bed…
Of course it’s got a bed, you’re thinking. What sort of shonky motorhome doesn’t have a bed? But the point is that it was my bed. When you stay in a hotel, not only do you play a bed version of Russian roulette – because even the best hotels can have shit beds – but it also takes a while to get used to what you’ve got. Even if it’s a great bed it’s still a couple of nights before you’ve adjusted to it and start getting proper restful sleep.
Having a motorhome meant I no longer had the bed problem. In fact, it meant I no longer had hotel issues at all. I could only use it for European races, but that was ideal, because a lot of European hotels were a bit on the average side and were situated a bit too near the circuit, meaning you’d often get fans and media hanging around outside.
My motorhome, on the other hand, with its Babybels and its comfortable, familiar bed, was always parked somewhere secret. They weren’t allowed in the circuit so we had to find somewhere else to park nearby – although I say ‘we’, when, happily, it wasn’t my problem to find out where the motorhome should go. I had a driver. My driver would be driving the motorhome across Europe as I flew. Then at the race he’d get a hotel as I stayed in the motorhome. A great arrangement, but, of course, expensive. You’re paying for your flights, you’re paying for getting the motorhome to the races, you’re paying for staying in the motorhome, because you have to pay for security, you have to pay for where it’s parked, and you’re paying for the driver’s hotel as well.
So the cost was just unreal every race. And that’s on top of the price of the motorhome, which for a top-of-the-range Newell, who are one of the best people who make motorhomes, could be $1m, $1.5m.
At Brawn, it was myself and my teammate, Rubens Barrichello, who both had the same type of motorhome, the aforementioned Newell. Sebastian had one. Fernando had one. Nico Rosberg had one. Lewis has (or had) a truck, which was bigger inside, but not as luxurious, very contemporary. I didn’t like it – it didn’t feel like home. Cool, but not to my taste. So that was probably six or seven of us who had motorhomes, and so we all clubbed together to pay for a ‘motorhome guy’ who would make sure our motorhomes were clean and that they were stocked with Babybels and that the bed was set up at night so you didn’t have to do it yourself. I ask you. Talk about pampered.
During testing, the circuit relaxed its rules on having motorhomes so you could have it in the paddock, which meant you could cross from the garage, across the paddock and go straight into your motorhome. So cool.
The first one I had used to belong to Mika Salo, and Jacques Villeneuve before him. It had a leopard-skin print theme running through the interior and looked a bit like a gin palace, which was no doubt what had enchanted both Mika and Jacques. Apart from a weird sink-next-to-the-bed bit of negative feng shui it was great, but even so, the time came to trade up.
My next one used to belong to the NASCAR driver Jimmy Johnson and was 45 feet long, just about as big as you can get. In fact, it was so big that it was illegal to register it in the UK, so I had to register it in Ireland. It had a lounge area, kitchen in the middle, bedrooms at the back.
There’s so much that can go wrong with them. Even more than with a boat, which is surprising. A lot of them have hydraulic pull-outs to make the rooms bigger, only they go wrong and then water comes in and you get mould. The shower will pack up. You’ll fix that and something else will break. You’re throwing money away like a man with three arms.
I sold it after I finished in F1. I bought it for $400,000 and sold it for $130,000. Lovely thing to have, but I must say I breathed a sigh of relief when it was gone.
I bought a boat I couldn’t afford. I earned half a million dollars a year and it cost £800,000, so I was immediately in debt.
Yachts, you probably don’t need me to tell you, are expensive to buy and they’re expensive to run. Mine was moored at Monaco harbour, which isn’t cheap, plus you need to employ a captain to live on it, keep everything – yes – shipshape, and tell you when you need a new engine, which I did at one point. Again: not cheap. This guy would never see me. Three weeks a year I was on that boat, at most, and I ended up chartering it out because I just couldn’t afford to run it, what with paying for him, the repairs, harbour fees and, oh, God, fuel – fuel is unbelievably expensive. I remember when I picked up my first boat, Little Missy, in 2001, I invited my mates from Frome over for a holiday and one day they said, ‘Right, JB, today we’re going to pay for the fuel for the boat.’
I was, like, ‘No, it’s okay, it’s fine, it’s fine.’
‘No, no we’re going to sort it out.’
I was, like, ‘Guys, seriously, you don’t have to…’
They said, ‘Come on, come on. How much is it going to be?’
I said, ‘Two and a half grand to fill it up.’
‘Okay,’ they said, ‘How about we, sort of, pay a bit towards it? Like, a hundred pounds...’
In all, the yacht was costing me hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
And I ended up buying two.
Little Missy was 20 metres. I got rid of that one and bought a new one, Ichiban, in 2014. That one cost £5,000–£6,000 to fill up with fuel and was 28 metres long, which isn’t all that big when you consider that back in the day Eddie Irvine had a 100-foot boat; Jacques Villeneuve’s was 145-foot.
Someone will always have a bigger boat, that’s what they say. It doesn’t matter how much money you’ve got and how much money you spend on a yacht, someone will always have a bigger one. They also say that the best boat is your mate’s boat, and that’s just as true.
Still, it was really stunning, that second boat: Ichiban. It had four bedrooms, slept eight people. We took it to Sardinia, Corsica, the Italian coast, the French Riviera, sailed it down the coast to St-Tropez.
The living area had a sheer glass wall giving you a beautiful view of the ocean, and as for stocking it, we filled it full of alcohol, lots of rosé. That was our drink of choice. Rosé and beer were the must-haves on the boat. I had a chef, who was amazing. She’d be on the boat six months of the year, along with the captain and a first mate. I’m not sure what they were all doing – cleaning, I suppose, and taking out the jet ski and paddle board to make sure they were in working order. Enjoying the luxury of yacht life in Monaco, knowing that I was paying them to do it. Oh God.
At least I could be certain they weren’t having wild parties on my dollar. My captain kept a tight ship. Nobody was allowed to get near the boat if they were smoking a cigarette. Even my friends, if they had a cigarette, he’d be cross with them. He was in his forties, while the rest of the crew were in their twenties and he ruled over them with the proverbial rod of iron.
Mainly, I loved it and had some great times on it. The trouble is that however much fun you’re having, you’re super-aware of the sheer amount of money you’re throwing away. They say it’s like having a bag of cash and the whole time you’re on the boat, chucking $100 bills into the ocean, and it’s true. But I enjoyed it and I loved being on the water. Yes, I probably should have just chartered a boat when I fancied it. But hindsight is a wonderful thing.
Confession: this bit’s a cheat, because I didn’t actually buy a plane. Thank God. Back in the day, people were spending a fortune on them. It was the proper glitzy, glamorous lifestyle of an F1 playboy: planes, cars and boats. Rubens Barrichello had one, Michael Schumacher, Eddie Irvine. Lewis had one for years but sold it. Why? Surprise, surprise, it turns out that you’re throwing money away when you own a plane. Worse even than boats.
Just for starters, if you’re going to buy a new one and you want it capable of making transatlantic flights – which of course you would if you’re a Formula One driver – it’s going to cost you $20 million plus, and it’ll be no comfier than flying first class. Then you need a crew. Then you have airport fees, and of course the dreaded aviation fuel. Plus, if you own a plane you’re going to have to service it, and when you’re servicing it for those three or four weeks, you’re going to have to rent another plane.
All of which means that if you have to fly private then it’s better to rent, and what a lot of drivers ended up doing was clubbing together to rent a private jet so it cost us less.
We’d fly to Russia on a 14-seater jet and share the cost, which would be about £4,000 each. It’s a pretty good way to travel, because you’re not queuing up, and if you take a nap you haven’t got people gawping at you while you’re asleep, which has always struck me as a bit unsettling when I’m flying. Like, what if I start drooling, or do one of those weird sleep-spasms when I’m drifting off?
Saying that, the interior of a private jet – or a PJ as we call them, being simply too spoiled to say the words out in full – isn’t actually that grand. Not unless you get a really big one. A lot of people will climb aboard a private jet and go, ‘God, it’s so small in here,’ possibly because they hadn’t been paying attention when they took a look from the outside, or were maybe expecting a TARDIS-like interior. Get a load of racing drivers onboard, all of whom are in an over-caffeinated state, either because they’re excited about the race ahead or excited about a week away from the circus, and things can even start to feel a little bit cramped, not to mention a bit farty. Like a lot of things, it’s often better in theory than it is in reality.
Travelling is glamorous. Even though it isn’t, because it’s long and tiring and boring, it sort of is anyway. Just is. And as drivers we don’t take it for granted, because we know we’re doing cool stuff that most people will never get to experience. Going to Australia once a year is awesome, for example. And then you go to Japan, wicked. And then Brazil. A lot of these countries I never would have thought about going to it, if I wasn’t racing in F1.
These days. I do plenty of flying to Japan plus to the Grand Prix for my work with Sky. In all I do close to 16 long-haul flights a year. I fly business, not first class, and although I fly with all sorts of airlines, I’ve definitely got it down to the best ones now, and weirdly enough, considering that they’re usually on the end of a bad-PR story and it’s difficult to find someone with a good word to say about them, Delta is the best airline if you’re flying to Japan.
For a start, it’s a brand-new plane, the Airbus 350. Now, all planes fly the same ‘actual’ altitude, around 31,000 feet, but internally they don’t, of course; they’re pressurised to a lower altitude. And while most normal planes are internally pressurised to 6,000 feet, an A350 flies at about 4,500 feet internally, which means the passengers get less tired. As a result, I really do feel less fatigued when I get off an Airbus 350.
And Delta’s the only company that fly them and they’re brand new inside. Plus in business class, you get a door, so it’s proper fun. It’s like a little suite.
I never take anything, except hand luggage, so I save up to an hour checking in luggage at one end and then collecting it at the other end. Bo-ho-nus.
And you can check in online, so you can arrive less than an hour before the flight leaves and still be on time. All that stuff about making sure you’re at the airport three hours before your flight? Pah.
As soon as you arrive on the plane, you should already be thinking of yourself as being at your destination. So if you get on a plane in LA and it’s 1pm, you should already think that you’re on Japanese time, which is 16 hours in front, thus it’s five in the morning there, and you should sleep and eat accordingly.
So, if I get on the plane at 1pm, I try to sleep immediately and then after about six hours, wake up, because then it will be 11am in Japan. Literally, I get on the plane and that’s it. Everyone’s eating and I’m earplugs in, eye mask on, getting some shut-eye.
There are certain flights out of LA that work and some flights that don’t. Some flights take off at midnight, others at 10 in the morning, but the midnight flights are better because I arrive in Japan at 5am and I’ve slept for a whole night.
Japan is 16 hours ahead of me in Los Angeles, so to work it out I move the current time forward one day and then move it back eight hours. Coming back is weird, because I take a midnight flight after the race on Sunday and arrive home at 5pm on Sunday. Marty McFly has nothing on me.
The thing is, my body now knows LA as ‘home’ and lets me get straight back on my home time zone quickly. So coming this way is not too bad.
Going the other way – out to Japan – however, is really tough, and I’ve found the best if not only policy is just not to think about the fact that if I want to go to Japan I lose two days of my life. Just gone, just like that.
Don’t look so alarmed. Melatonin is what you produce when you’re tired. So it’s all natural and all you’re doing by taking a supplement is adding to it a little bit. Just giving it a wee boost. I normally take 5mg. I always take it when I travel. And I take it as soon as I get on board. It takes 15 minutes to work, and it’s a nice sleep, because you don’t wake up groggy. Just helps you drift off.
They say you shouldn’t drink at all, but I find it’s nice to have that little glass of red. I’ll probably have it in the lounge before I get on board, though. Don’t tell anyone.
If, like me, you’re on your own from when you leave home until you arrive at your destination, you’ll want something to do en route: a film to watch, a book or a couple of magazines to read. Whatever you do, make it an activity that’s absorbing but not too demanding. Something you know will keep you occupied for long hours on end. Personally, I’m a big one for watching a box set on my laptop.
Once you’ve found the right bed, hold onto it tight. Don’t let it go. I’ve spent a lot of time in the Grand Hyatt in Tokyo and I love their beds and pillows, so every time I land in Japan, I stay there for the night before we go off to the race.
Late last year, I had some flowers and a letter from them that said, ‘Congratulations, Mr Button, you’ve stayed with us 50 times,’ which was nice. I’ve probably stayed with them about 80 times now, which has got me wondering what’ll happen when I get to 100.
Generally speaking, drivers go their own way during the offseason. You never hang out with a racing driver in the winter. Daniel Ricciardo would go home to Australia, Lewis would go to LA; me, I used to go to Hawaii on holiday, because it was the only break I really had throughout the year.
During the mid-season break I’d go to either Ibiza or St-Tropez for two weeks, and I remember that being weird, because I’d feel fine and then at the end of the break, like literally the last day of the holiday I’d be all blocked up, get a cold and be poorly for another week leading up to the next race. That probably happened for about two years on the trot, before I was like, ‘Hey, guys, maybe we’ll go to St-Tropez for one week, not two.’
Hawaii, then, in the off-season. Apart from relaxing I’d do a lot of fitness training. Every year you’d get a little bit fitter and do a little bit more, and for me, the perfect place to do that was Hawaii. I’d train in the morning and most afternoons, spend the rest of the day lazing around, have a few drinks and then get back to training the next day.
Being in Hawaii meant that I missed Christmas with the family, but I think they understood that I needed time to relax and get away from the world of motor racing. Well, they said they understood. I don’t know if they really did. I haven’t asked them since. I know my mum missed me not being there, but I’ve made up for it, because in the last few years, since I’ve been with Brit, we go home every year to see everyone and it’s really, really nice to have a big family affair. Just brilliant to see my three sisters, and all of their kids. It’s a massive get-together.
After off-season, I would always struggle to get back in the car. After a winter of living a different kind of life – a more relaxing, me-time sort of life, it took time. But as soon as I got back in the groove I could think about nothing else. I was a man obsessed. I couldn’t switch off. Again, it was another reason I ended up pulling the plug for good.
The highest-paid sportsmen of all time, by the way, is Gaius Appuleius Diocles, a Roman chariot racer who earned 35,863,120 sesterces, which when adjusted for inflation amounts to well over $15 billion.