Website: Jenson Button
Currently: 2009 FIA Formula One World Championship. Racing for McLaren in 2010.
Career highlights: 1991 British Cadet Kart champion; 1997 European Super A Kart champion; 1998 British Formula Ford champion and winner of Formula Ford Festival; 2000-08 FIA Formula One World Championship with Williams, Renault, BAR, Honda, Brawn and McLaren. 2006 maiden Grand Prix win in Hungary; 2009 FIA Formula One World Champion.
In Jenson Button's debut season with Williams F1 in 2000 he impressed everyone with his maturity and speed. After spending his formative years in the premier league armed with relatively uncompetitive machinery at Williams, Renault and the then BAR Honda team, Jenson broke his grand prix duck when winning the Hungarian GP for the Honda Racing F1 Team in 2006. Following Honda F1's withdrawl from grand prix racing at the end of 2008, Jenson stayed loyal to the team then reborn as Brawn GP. It turned out to be a very wise decision, too, as Brawn GP was the one to beat in 2009. Jenson won six of the opening seven GPs and fulfilled his boyhood dream by clinching the Drivers' title in Brazil with a race to spare.
Button was born in Frome in Somerset and is the son of former Rallycross driver John Button, runner-up in the MSA British Rallycross championship in 1976. He began karting at age eight after his father bought him his first kart, and he made an extraordinarily successful start winning all 34 races in the 1991 British Cadet Kart Championship, along with the title. Further titles followed and in 1997 he became the youngest driver ever to win the European Super A Championship.
Aged 18, he graduated to the British Formula Ford Championship and won the title and also triumphed in the coveted end-of-season Formula Ford Festival at Brands Hatch. Button entered Formula Three in 1999 and finished the campaign third overall and as the top rookie driver. Then, at the end of that season, Jenson broke into the F1 big time after winning a shoot-out set up by the Williams team to find a new driver for 2000. He has now contested more than 150 Grands Prix and become one of this country's top sportsmen as well as a Go Motorsport ambassador.