Jenson Button retires permanently in Bahrain

The 2009 F1 champion will compete in the last round of the WEC with the Hertz Team Jota Cadillac and will culminate his professional career.

The 2017 Monaco GP was Jenson Button’s 306th and final race in Formula 1. His participation in the glamorous street race came to replace Fernando Alonso, who had received authorization from McLaren to try to fulfill his dream of Triple Crown in the Indianapolis 500. A collision with Pascal Wehrlein’s Sauber at Portier (the corner made famous by Ayrton Senna in 1988) ended the Englishman’s race on the 57th lap. He would never get into an F1 again, although he would continue racing.

After some races in Japanese Super GT and even passing through Nascar, he finally entered the world of endurance and became a regular WEC driver in the hypercar division with the Jota team, commanding a Porsche in 2024 and a Cadillac in the current year.

Sharing the car with Earl Bamber and Sébastien Bourdais (also with a past in F1), Button had a podium at the 6 Hours of San Pablo as his best result. His time was split between his WEC campaign and his work as an F1 commentator on Sky Sports. The 2025 calendar of the Endurance World Championship has one event left: the 8 Hours of Bahrain, which will be held on the same weekend as the San Pablo GP. The Englishman announced that Sakhir’s career will be his last as a professional and, at 45 years old, he will permanently hang up his helmet.

“I really enjoyed my time with Jota in the WEC, but my life has become too busy and it’s not fair to the team or me to get to 2026 and think I’ll have enough time for it. My kids are four and six, and when I’m away for a week I miss them a lot and that lost time can’t be made up.”Button said in statements to the BBC. “I feel like I missed out on a lot of things in recent years, which I didn’t care about because I knew it was going to happen, but I’m not willing to do it again for another season,” he concluded.

button reached the top of his campaign in 2009, when he was the main protagonist of the epic season of the Brawn GP team, the team founded by Ross Brawn from the ashes of Honda just so as not to lose his work designing and developing the car that would be that of the Japanese giant that season. At the end of 2008, Honda closed its F1 program in the midst of the economic crisis that was shaking the world at that time. The Englishman acquired the team for one euro, plus debts. In an incredible season, with the famous double diffuser as a technical recipe, Button won the drivers’ title and the team took the Constructors’ crown. In mid-2009, Ross sold the structure to Mercedes-Benz for 88 million euros.

Jenson achieved 15 F1 wins, eight pole positions and 50 podiums. With his 306 Grand Prix, the Englishman is the sixth driver with the most races played in the category headed by Fernando Alonso, with 421.