Formula 1 world champion Jenson Button will compete full-time in the World Endurance Championship next year.
JOTA Sport has confirmed he will join their three-driver squad in the number 38 Porsche 963. The 2009 F1 champion will share his car with Oliver Rasmussen and Phil Hanson.The team ran a single Hypercar this year and another entry in the LMP2 class. Next year it will run a pair of Hypercars, with Will Stevens, Norman Nato and Callum Ilott sharing another Porsche.
JOTA scored their best result of the season in the finale at Bahrain International Circuit, where Stevens, Antonio Felix da Costa and Yifei Ye took fourth place. Porsche, which also has a factory team, finished third in the constructors championship for Hypercar manufacturers, behind Toyota and Ferrari.
Button already has experience of the Porsche 963 having driven one for JDC Miller at Petit Le Mans in October. He finished fifth with team mates Mike Rockenfeller and Tijmen van der Helm.
Among the eight rounds which form next year’s WEC season is the Le Mans 24 Hours, which Button will contest for the third time. He shared a one-off entry in the Garage 56 class in a Chevrolet Camaro built to largely confirm with NASCAR regulations. In 2018 he shared an SMP Racing-run BR Engineering BR1-AER with Vitaly Petrov and Mikhail Aleshin, but did not finish.
Button’s first appearance for the team will be in the season-opening round at the Losail International Circuit Qatar on March 2nd.
Since retiring from F1 at the end of 2016, and making a one-off return as a substitute for Fernando Alonso the following year, Button has raced in a diverse range of different series. He won the Japanese Super GT championship with Naoki Yamamoto in 2018, appeared in Extreme E and British GT racing, and made three starts in NASCAR Cup races this year.
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Nick T.
16th December 2023, 16:08
Many think of Button as a lucky WDC, which I would have agreed with if he retired after Honda, but if one goes back and watches his performances at McLaren during the three seasons when they had a car capable of contending for a championship (2010, 2011 and 2012), he was fantastic. It’s pretty easy to see he just lost motivation when not competing for podiums, which is why he sometimes looker too close to teammates like Barrichello when Honda produced absolute stinkers.
dot_com (@dot_com)
16th December 2023, 18:43
Also his time at BAR was really impressive! I’ve always believed that Button was a much better driver than he is given credit for. Let’s not forget that he beat Alonso and Hamilton in the same equipment :-)
Nick T.
17th December 2023, 0:02
Yes, he did very well when the car was competitive, but unlike say an Alonso, when his car’s natural pace meant finishing 13th or 14th, he had no interest in giving it 100% to get into the top ten, especially with points only going to down 6th and then 8th while he was Honda. I think that hurt his image. It made it look like he and Rubens weren’t far apart.