Button admits he would have been “a horrible person to live with” after his Honda team pulled out of the sport in December - leaving him without a job.
But he also insists his new girlfriend - Japanese beauty Jessica Michibata - stopped him sinking into depression. And it’s not hard to see why.
Button admits: “I would have been a horrible person to live with over the winter. Luckily enough, I started dating Jessica and she looked after me. I spent a few weeks with her, which was great. We just got away from it all in Hawaii. It was really good.”
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Monaco-based Button visited Jessica several times in Japan when he flew over for crucial meetings with his then Honda bosses.
He has taken a £15million pay-cut to continue competing in the sport he loves. Incredibly, his testing times have propelled him into an unexpected title contender - just weeks after his team was saved from the scrapheap.
He declared: “I had just landed after flying back from a week’s training in Lanzarote and I was thinking: ‘S***, I’m fit!’ Just then I got the call from my manager Richard Goddard and thought: ‘S***!’
“The phone just dropped out of my hand. Everyone was staring at me thinking: ‘What’s the matter with him?’
“But, in a way, the announcement made me train harder. I couldn’t do anything about Honda’s decision. I just had to train as I would coming into a new season, thinking that I was racing.
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“For sure, I wasn’t as smiley as I usually would be over a winter. The family noticed that at Christmas. But my friends were very supportive.”
Button admitted he has been the butt of dole-queue humour since his Japanese paymasters took their shock decision.
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