Jenson Button admits 2025 “likely my last full year of racing” ahead of Le Mans

Current Cadillac World Endurance Championship driver and 2009 Formula 1 world champion Jenson Button admits this season is “likely my last full year of racing”.

The 45-year-old retired from F1 at the end of the 2016 season but remained active in motorsport, competing full campaigns in Japan’s Super GT series in 2018 and 2019, as well as a part-WEC programme in the 2018-2019 'superseason' in the LMP2 class.

He also made one-off DTM, British GT, Extreme E, NASCAR Cup Series and IMSA SportsCar Championship outings.

After a return to Le Mans in 2023 in the Hendrick Motorsport NASCAR Garage 56 entry, Button contested his first full campaign in racing since 2019 last year in WEC with the Jota team.

Running a customer Porsche 963, Button managed a best result of sixth in the 6 Hours of Fuji and was ninth in the car he shared with Phil Hanson and Oliver Rasmussen at Le Mans.

Remaining with Jota for the 2025 season as it switched to Cadillac machinery, the 38 car driven by Button, Earl Bamber and Sebastien Bourdais comes to Le Mans off the back of a season-best sixth at Spa last month.

But with five rounds left in the WEC, including Le Mans, Button tells crash.net that 2025 will likely be his last as a full-time racer.

“I love endurance racing. I’ve always taken a shine to it through my racing career in F1,” he said on Wednesday at Le Mans ahead of opening practice and qualifying for the 2025 edition of the enduro.

“Then I didn’t really get the opportunity, then COVID hit, I missed quite a few years of racing.

“I said ‘you know what, I’m in my mid-40s and it’s time to see if I’ve still got it, but also go racing at Le Mans’.

“But to do it with a team like Jota, Sam [Hignett, team owner] and DC [David Clark] are friends of mine. It just works.

“This will probably be my last full year of racing. I’ve got so many things going on, and I kind of need to grow up!

“I love racing, always will, but I’ve got so many opportunities in motorsport and outside of it that it’s difficult to balance.

“I’ve got a family. That’s the difficult bit. This year I am away a lot from the family. I don’t want to miss too much of my kids growing up.

“Next year I will still race but it will definitely be [scaled back] and for fun. In my 60s and 70s I will still be racing but it won’t be at Le Mans.”

Button looking to fix Cadillac braking as Le Mans begins on Wednesday

Cadillac sat at the fringes of the top 10 at the end of the official test day at Le Mans last Sunday, but there is reasonable confidence within the camp of a podium challenge in the race.

Button reckons Ferrari and Toyota “have a good advantage” coming into Wednesday’s running, but is confident in Cadillac’s ability to “maximise everything we have” even if he feels work needs to be done to improve braking.

“I think the car is relatively quick,” Button said.

“After practice, the Toyotas and Ferraris have a good advantage. But it’s also a 24-hour race, so we do the best with what we have and you see where you end up.

“It’s about not making mistakes, doing a great job with strategy, and feedback so that every driver gets the most out of the car. If we can do that, who knows where we will end up.

He added: “Braking is a big thing for us. If you can’t get braking right, you position the car poorly at the apex and you can’t get a good exit.

“We know what we need to do. And we’ve done it. We have the data.”