The curious case of Jenson Button

Two months later, and it's my turn to be in control. We're meeting on a lavish rooftop garden overlooking Monaco harbour, which brims with super-yachts and the skeletons of grandstands being dressed for the Monaco Grand Prix. Button arrives in blue jeans, white T-shirt and an odd pair of bright yellow sunglasses. He's taller than the average F1 driver, around 6ft, and super-fit. He greets me with a laddish man-hug and a big smile. For the first time in nearly a decade there are many reasons to smile. He has won four of the first five races of the season (he will win his fifth in Monaco) and is odds-on favourite to win the world championship. This just three months after his career appeared to be on the scrapheap after nosediving inexorably over several seasons: he had won just one race in 155 and was being overshadowed by his fellow Brit, the world champion, Lewis Hamilton.

Against insurmountable odds he's turned it all around; the forgotten man of F1 has become its biggest story.

He is sitting with his legs tucked up to his chest, bathed in sunshine. His half-Japanese, half-Italian model girlfriend, Jessica Michibata, is also here, lounging on a sofa downstairs, sassy and doe-eyed in a short, tight, blue-and-white-striped dress.

It takes confidence to wear those shades, I suggest. "Nah, they're just shades," says Button, still grinning. He looks happy. "Yes, I am. My arms aren't long enough to show how much happier." He's stretching his arms wide, still looking ridiculous in those shades. "It's practically two different people. Although I tried to stay positive when times were tough, I did get down sometimes, massively down, and I said to a few people in my family, 'It's not that I think I'm not good enough, but it's just not happening. I am not able to be with a team that can give me a car that can win.' And now we have it, and now I'm the happiest I've ever been in my entire life."

I first met Button in 2005, at a challenging time for him on and off the track. He was still searching for his first grand prix victory and was newly single, having called off the wedding to his long-time girlfriend, the ex-Fame Academy contestant Louise Griffiths. Some were saying that his mind was not on racing, that he was more interested in the playboy lifestyle. "We didn't have the distractions you have these days with parties and girls," said the former British world champion Jackie Stewart at the time. "It's hard to focus if you're going out a lot. He needs to concentrate. He needs to win a race." There were other criticisms: not ruthless enough, too nice, not aggressive enough. All struck a nerve.

Button is a sensitive man, and he did sometimes party too hard, but he also happened to be one of the hardest-working drivers in F1.

"I never let the comments get to me, even during the lowest periods," he tells me. "It just made me more determined to prove them wrong. Yes, there were moments when I wondered whether it was all worth the hassle, but they were fleeting. Anyone who believed I was going to quit, those people don't know the kind of person I am."

Button is not a complex character. Underneath the smiles and man-hugs is a myopically focused competitor programmed to leave nothing to chance. Interviews are treated with the same preparedness and stealth as a challenging chicane - that control thing again.

Take the subject of Lewis Hamilton, who has been making noises about wanting to leave McLaren after a bad start to the season. What does Button think, given that he managed to keep a positive outlook during his darkest days at BAR-Honda? "I don't know - everyone's got a different situation," he says diplomatically. But was it hard to watch the new guy leap to the front of the grid in his debut season? "I've had a very different career to Lewis. Last year, when he won the world championship, I was driving a car that was not competitive. It didn't make a difference that Lewis was winning." This does not sound convincing. "Look, I think it was good for British sport, Lewis winning the world championship. This year is obviously a different situation. He's in a car that is less competitive. It's the first year it's been difficult for him, and I think he's handled it well, as in he's driving well. What happens off the circuit is none of my business. We've all had very difficult times in our careers, but it's always off the circuit. The driving is what we do best."

The gap between Button's and Hamilton's cars was highlighted at the Spanish Grand Prix last month, when Button lapped him shortly before taking the chequered flag. To understand how far he has come, it's worth remembering where he has been. Despite high hopes at BAR-Honda between 2005 and 2008, the car was nowhere near as competitive as the F1 giants McLaren and Ferrari. There were bright spots, mostly in 2006, when Button won his first race in Budapest at the 113th attempt, with a masterful drive in the wet. However, after finishing a respectable sixth in 2006, he finished 15th in 2007 and 18th in 2008.

Button has always been regarded as one of the most talented drivers in F1. But F1 requires all the elements to be leading the game: the driver, the car, the engine, the strategy and the mechanics. So even the most hardened F1 fan must have felt for Button during last year's Brazilian Grand Prix - while Lewis Hamilton was punching the air after winning the world title, Button was escaping from his broken-down car, which had caught fire. How had Britain's most promising F1 driver become its also-ran?

"Those were very tough years, especially 2007," explains Button, "because we had no direction. I couldn't see a future. Money doesn't mean anything unless you have the right people and the right leader, which we didn't. That's why I pushed hard to get Ross Brawn on board."

Brawn is rated as the sport's towering technical genius. He started out as an apprentice engineer at Britain's Atomic Energy Research Establishment - at the time our nuclear-bomb-making facility - moved to motor racing as a machine operator and worked his way up to the crucial job of aerodynamacist: perhaps the most vital ingredient in the alchemy that produces a winning car. His engineering vision turned Michael Schumacher into a seven-times world champion at Benetton and Ferrari. He took a year off from F1 after Schumacher's retirement, but returned to run the Honda team last year.

At Honda his technical, aerodynamic and engineering skills - perhaps first honed by his ability to work a lump of metal into a precision instrument on a lathe - were focused on producing a winning car for the 2009 season.

Any car built by Brawn was going to be the one to watch, but it was still under wraps when the team seemed to implode in the world banking crisis last autumn. By December, Honda, looking at annual F1 bills of up to £300m, decided to pull out of F1, citing the worsening economic crisis.

Button had been training in Lanzarote, and was waiting for his luggage at Gatwick when he received the call. "I just couldn't take it. I dropped the phone at one point. I thought my career was over." He visited the factory in Bracknell the next day. He wanted to see the team to try to keep their spirits up. "It felt impossible, because I wasn't positive myself. No," he corrects himself, "I was a wreck. The first department I visited was engineering, and I was a bit emotional, and they were all just smiling. I said, 'You know this could be the end of the team,' and they said, 'Why would you think like that? We need to be positive, otherwise nobody is going to want to buy this team.' It's funny: going to the factory helped me more than it helped the mechanics, and I was supposed to be the strong one."

In March, just three weeks before the start of the 2009 season, Ross Brawn announced a last-minute buy-out of Honda F1 under the new name Brawn GP. No doubt Brawn must have known his car was going to be a winner and invested some of his own substantial wealth to prop up the team. They scaled down - 270 of the 700-odd staff at the factory lost their jobs, and Button took a large pay cut - "almost two-thirds of my wage" - which will reportedly cost him around £12m over the next three years. They strapped a Mercedes engine to the plain white Brawn car with no sponsor's logo - nobody was interested in sponsoring a team that might not even get to the grid - and set off for three days of practice in Barcelona.

"The car's speed blew my mind," recalls Button. "I could feel every bump, and I could do so much with it because it did the same thing every time I hit the brakes. It was consistent and reliable, and just incredibly fast."

Nobody has enjoyed Button's comeback more than his father, John, or "Old Boy", as he calls him. Old Boy cried when Button told him he was going to race in F1, aged 19, and has not missed a race since. "He's loved F1 for years. He's obsessive about it, and really it's his life as much as mine."

You can usually see Old Boy on the BBC race-day broadcasts, in various states of unbridled joy. He's a real character, with grey combed-back hair ("the Monaco mane"), a dark leathery tan and the voice of an East End gangster. He lives flamboyantly - there's the house with sea views in Monaco, the convertible Ferrari, and the pink shirts and white capri trousers. "He's definitely living the life," laughs Button.

"He's a bit of… not a porn star, but he's a bit of a legend down here. I'm working nonstop, and he's playing all the time."

Back home in Frome, Somerset, Old Boy was the one who bought eight-year-old Button his first kart to keep his boredom-prone son occupied on weekends - his parents separated when he was a toddler; he lived with his mother and three sisters a couple of streets away on weekdays. Old Boy, a decent rally-cross driver in his time, was the one who supported his son through the junior ranks. "We didn't have much money, and there were times when he'd have to borrow money for petrol to get me to an event. He had complete belief in me. That's what drove me."

The rest is a familiar enough F1 tale: he raced karts from 8 to 17, became British champion, and then British champion in Formula Ford and Formula Three. He started in F1 by testing for the old Prost team, and was quicker than their race driver, Jean Alesi. Soon after, the team-owner Frank Williams offered him a seat, and in 2000, at 20, he became the youngest-ever British driver to race in F1.

Now 29, he has tasted glory at last. It hit Old Boy when he watched the Chinese Grand Prix in April. "He sent me a text message," remembers Button. "It said,

'I know you might think I'm a bit mad, but you need to realise I've been a fan of F1 since Stirling Moss back in the '50s. This is what I love, it's not just because you're here.' " Why would he say that? "He gets worried, I think, that I think he's a bit crazy. To see his little boy, as I'm sure he still thinks of me, leading the world championship. It's all a big dream to him. I'm sure he wakes up every morning, opens his eyes, and then has the biggest smile on his face. Actually," laughs Button, "I know he does.

"Bahrain was also very emotional for him. He thought that was the best race of my career, and it was. [After a bad start, Button fought back from fifth, passing Hamilton to win the race.] When I saw him afterwards he was crying his eyes out. As I said, this is his life as much as mine, but he's not the sort of guy who gets in the way of his son's dream." You mean he doesn't smother you? "Exactly - he got me into cars, but he never pushed me in them. He's at the races because he loves racing; he's never telling me what to do. He's got a lot of friends in the paddock [the area around the garage], so when I'm out having dinner with Jessica, he can sort himself out."

Button was not always so easy-going about having Old Boy in the paddock. "Being a 20-year- old, I didn't want to be seeing my old man all the time, but I don't care any more. The problem is you do always get annoyed with your parents. Then you think, 'What the hell am I doing?' "

Not many know that he's combustible behind the smiles. His manager, Richard Goddard, knows Button's dark side well. He almost stopped managing him after visiting a practice session in 2005, when Button completely blanked him. "That's true," says Button. "He said, 'I can't believe how rude you were.' I ran him through the reasons why: that when I'm racing I'm so focused, and he understood a lot more after that. Now he doesn't come too close at the racetrack."

More recently, Button's dark side let rip at Sir Richard Branson, after he reportedly took a shine to Jessica during a dinner before the Australian Grand Prix. Button told the new team sponsor in no uncertain terms to back off.

"I have a good relationship with the Virgin brand," he says very deliberately when I ask him to elaborate, though his glaring eyes tell me Branson won't be receiving a Christmas card.

"I do have a short fuse," he admits later.

"I can be difficult company sometimes." He's also restless. "When I'm not working I can't sit still. If I have two days off, I can't lie in. I get bored easily. If I'm watching a film, halfway through it I'm like, I can't be doing this. That's probably my biggest failing. I always need to be doing something." Do you see this as a weakness? "You could say that, but I put it down to racing. I find it difficult to find something that gives me the buzz that racing does. I think I'll still be racing in my fifties and sixties - the fun stuff, like the V8s in Australia."

During the difficult years at BAR-Honda, competing in triathlons became another way of venting his competitive urges. "Triathlons gave me the buzz I needed. It's down to me working my arse off in training. I'm the one in control."

The sun has disappeared, and Button has finally taken off the silly yellow sunglasses. I can't help but take him more seriously now. His girlfriend, Jessica, has also re-emerged, and is helping the photographer on the other side of the terrace. Button gazes over to her.

What effect does Jessica have on him? Is it soothing? "Yes, definitely," he says dreamily.

"I can lie on a beach with her and do absolutely nothing, because I just lie there staring at her the whole time. Life is great when we're together.The great thing about her is that she loves what I do for a living, and that's so important to me. You never know what the future holds, do you? We haven't known each other for long, but it feels like a very long time…"

Button may be head over heels for Jessica, but winning is the only thing on his mind right now. He must retain control. He never mentions the world championship. Nor does Old Boy, despite it being so close - winning the British Grand Prix at Silverstone next weekend would virtually assure it. Hamilton won the title after winning just five races last year; Button is already going for six less than halfway through the season.

Button knows better. He has been hopeful too many times before. He won't be disappointed again. He won't let up until he's reached the finishing line. It's what control freaks do