Life to the Limit: My Autobiography

by Jenson Button

‘All you need to know about racing you can learn from Super Mario Kart.’

I wonder these days if I might have taken advantage of Mum’s good nature when I was younger. Which is another way of admitting that I know full well I did.

The other thing I remember was that the cars seemed able to turn on a dime, which I guess was my introduction to the phenomenon of down-force, that mysterious marriage of air, ground and racing car that will give the car more aerodynamic grip. Seeing it was a revelation; the idea that you could carry more speed through a corner, that you’d have the grip to do it, and that’s what produces G-force. Whoa.

We had most of the early systems: Atari with Pong, followed by a Nintendo, and then a Super Nintendo, and then a SNES, which is where shit got real, thanks mainly to the game Super Mario Kart.

Me, I chose Bowser. A big burly turtle-type creature, Bowser’s selling point was his top speed. The drawback was that he was more difficult to manoeuvre and his acceleration was terrible. What I knew from karting, of course, was that the trick was to maintain his top speed. You’d drift him, make sure he didn’t spin out and keep the minimum speed up as high as possible, keep him consistent around the track. You had to know how to drive Bowser, but once you had the hang of that consistency and you were keeping the minimum speed high, he was unbeatable, and that’s exactly the same principle for all racing.

There Dave took me to one side, sat me down and, in what I now see as an extraordinary display of courage, explained to me how Danny had died, made sure I understood what was going on, and talked me through it. He told me that I wouldn’t get to see Danny again, and although I already understood that, I also knew that these were things Dave needed to say, to help himself through, and they helped him as much as they did me.

I’d joined Paul’s team, GKS, in 1995 when I moved into Formula A. It was a great team, where I found myself temporary teammates with Sophie Kumpen, who was dating Jos Verstappen and two years later had a baby with him. In other words, I raced with Max Verstappen’s mum, which is one of those things, like policemen getting younger, that you try not to think about.

I was introduced to a dozen or so big names in the sport, including Patrick Head, Frank Williams and even Keke Rosberg, who used to be my dad’s favourite driver back in the day. Keke had his son Nico with him, who’s five years younger than me but was acting even younger that day. He was pulling at his dad’s arm as we were talking, trying to pull him away. I remember looking down at him, silently cursing him for messing up my introduction to Keke, thinking, ‘God, just leave us alone.’

Nowadays we have Twitter. People in my position can have their say direct to fans without the filter of the newspapers and magazines adding the wrong emphasis, taking things out of the context and every other trick in the book to make you look bad. Twitter probably came along too late to benefit me personally.

One time we were in the car and a friend put his hand in front of my face to shield me from them. The story was that Jenson’s driving dangerously, larking about with his friend’s hand in front of his face, when of course I wasn’t driving, because there were paparazzi in the way, and the reason my friend’s hand was in front of my face was to stop the paparazzi getting a picture of me.

We rented a house in Saint-Tropez, and in August 2015 we were burgled when intruders pumped anaesthetic gas into our air conditioning, broke in and took stuff as we slept, including her engagement ring. They never caught the guys who did it.