2009 F1 Champion Jenson Button has revealed his weakness relative to Sir Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso.
The three drivers have 10 World Championships between them, and Button was a team-mate to both Hamilton and Alonso at McLaren.
Speaking on The High Performance Podcast, Button said initially his biggest weakness was struggling to move on from a bad weekend, but there’s another weakness he was never able to overcome.
“My greatest weakness was I wasn’t willing to move on from a bad weekend,” Button said.
“But I feel I’ve definitely got over that. One thing I haven’t been able to get over is driving a bad car, that’s my weakness.
“Lewis and Fernando Alonso can jump in a bad car and get more out of it than I can – that’s probably my weakness,” he added.
Asked what his strength was relative to his team-mates, Button said his different driving style paid dividends in certain conditions.
“[My] strength is…the way I drive is very different to most,” Button said.
“For example, Lewis, comes into a corner – it’s great because I have all the speed traces from the data when we were team-mates – hammers the brake as hard as he can, there’s no modulation.
“He turns into the corner, goes onto the throttle, the same amount of pressure every time, it’s linear, and he does everything through the steering wheel.
“I was the complete opposite. I would brake and modulate it to stop front-locking, and I would come on the throttle and modulate the throttle so I didn’t have to change my steering angle, so I’d be smooth on the steering.
“They would say ‘oh, he looks so smooth’. It’s just because that’s what I’d use, very differently to someone like Lewis.
“That hurt me in some ways, but it helped me in those mixed conditions, to really feel the conditions underneath me.
“Modulating the brake when you come under braking, you won’t lock up as much. You don’t want steering angle in the wet because it’s very easy to lose the rear and modulating the throttle is key as well because it controls that.
“I feel I felt the car through my bum a lot more than others. A lot of people would see it’s wet and drive to what they see, whereas I would drive to what I felt and that’s where my strength was in those mixed conditions.
“And half of my victories in F1 were in mixed conditions. I’m not saying I like those conditions, nobody likes it, I just did better than others,” he added.