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Thirty-four starts, thirty-four wins — and that was just the warm-up.
Perfection in a championship season is supposed to be impossible. In 1991, an eleven-year-old from Frome entered the British Cadet Kart Championship with Wright Karts and won all 34 races. Not most of them. All of them. British karting had found Jenson Button, and it would spend the next six years watching him tick off almost everything the sport had to offer.
It started with a Zip kart under the Christmas tree in 1987 and a first race at Clay Pigeon in May 1988, aged eight. By nine he had won the British Super Prix. Then came the 1991 cadet whitewash, three British Open Championship titles, and a steady climb through the junior ranks — fourth in the 1994 RAC British Junior Championship and a move into Junior Intercontinental A competition.
The international breakthrough was rapid. In 1995, at fifteen, he became the youngest runner-up in the Formula A World Championship. In 1996 he took fifth in the European Formula A Championship and third in the Formula A World Cup. Then 1997: the move to Formula Super A, the summit of the 100cc golden age, where teenagers were fed to factory drivers. Button won the European Super A Championship anyway — the youngest driver ever to do it, and the first Briton. In Japan the same year he finished runner-up in the World Cup and won the Ayrton Senna Memorial Cup, a trophy carrying the name of the most famous karting obsessive of all. As a final karting CV, it is close to flawless.
Smoothness, mostly. Button's reputation in karts was built on a driving style that barely seemed to work the tyres at all — a trait drilled into him by his long-time mechanic Dave Spencer, who paired lessons in aggression with an education in tyre management that stayed with Button for the rest of his career. While rivals scrubbed speed sliding, Button rolled apex speed nobody else could find and made worn rubber last. His father John, a former rallycross racer, ran the programme with a paddock charm that made the Buttons impossible to dislike and hard to beat.
The other marker was composure. Winning Super A races at seventeen against hardened factory professionals requires a driver who does not rattle. Button never rattled. Belgian team boss Paul Lemmens, one of his karting mentors, was convinced enough to connect him with manager Harald Huysman — and with that, cars came calling at eighteen.
Button's karting record remains the template British hopefuls are measured against: total domination at cadet level, sustained success through the junior classes, then a European title at the very top against the best in the world. He is one of the clearest products of the 1990s karting-to-F1 pipeline, graduating in the same late-90s wave that produced Kimi Räikkönen. The rest is well documented: an F1 debut in 2000, the 2009 world championship with Brawn, and a reputation in the wet built on exactly the throttle control he learned on slick kart tracks in Somerset. For karting purists, though, the purest Button statistic will always be the first one: 34 from 34.
Sources: Wikipedia: Jenson Button