Jenson Button STAYS with McLaren for 2015

McLaren has finally made their mind up and revealed Jenson Button will stay with the team next year alongside Fernando Alonso as Honda team with McLaren.

The ‘will McLaren sign Jenson Button for 2015?’ saga has been running for far too long, making Ron Dennis and McLaren look foolish and placing Button in a vacuum. But now McLaren has finally decided – Jenson Button will drive for McLaren in 2015, and probably further as it’s reported he’s signed a new two-year deal.

What does seem likely is that Jenson’s had to take a big pay cut (someone clearly has to pay for Fernando Alonso’s apparently record-breaking pay deal), but at this stage in his career it’s probably more important to Jenson to be driving in F1 than the size of his pay packet.

What has also probably played a part in McLaren retaining Jenson instead of Kevin Magnussen – who stays with McLaren as reserve and test driver – is the arrival of Honda back in to partnership with McLaren in an attempt to recreate perhaps the greatest F1 partnership in F1, when Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost dominated F1 in Honda-powered McLaren cars.

Thanks to Jenson’s Japanese fiancée, Jessica Michibata, Jenson is hugely popular in Japan – a big plus for Honda. But the huge groundswell of support for Jenson in recent weeks plus his clear superiority over Magnussen during their season together must surely have played a part too.

But whatever the reasons Jenson stays, McLaren go in to 2015 with the most experienced driver pair in F1 – 500 races between them – and the promise of real progress back to the top of the grid if Honda manage to deliver a new engine that matches up to their previous F1 engines.