Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton’s partnership at McLaren was seen as one of the strongest lineups in Formula 1, after the pair joined forces following both their title successes in 2008 and 2009.
Their relationship was great on track, however, off the track they experienced some odd moments and were not as close as British fans thought.
Hamilton was taking a different career trajectory to Button, getting himself more involved with music and figures from Hollywood while the latter was still focused on winning another title after his 2009 success.
The pair collided on track once, although it was never intended, but largely respected each other when it came to wheel-to-wheel battles. Towards the end of their relationship, things quickly took a turn when Hamilton got himself into a feud over posts on former social media website Twitter.
Recalling the episode in his book, Life on the Limit, Button says he nearly had a complete falling out with the seven-time world champion over what he wrote about him on the social media network.
Jenson Button recalls ‘weird’ Twitter feud with Lewis Hamilton
Hamilton had noticed that Button did not follow him on Twitter and decided to call him out on the matter, but there was a flaw to his logic according to the 2009 world champion.
“A few days after Singapore after months of speculation, it was announced that Lewis was leaving to partner Nico Rosberg at Mercedes and that joining me was Sergio Perez. That was a shame for me, I really enjoyed our rivalry. Off the track, he was being a bit weird,” wrote Button.
“After Japan he had another one of his Twitter-fart moments: “Just noticed @JensonButton unfollowed” he wrote, “That’s a shame, the three years we were teammates I thought we respected one another but clearly he didn’t.
“Of course the flaw in his logic is that I never followed him in the first place, so could hardly be accused of unfollowing him. And anyway, I did respect him. Fair play, he did realise his mistake and put it right “My bad, just realised Jenson never followed me. Need to be on Twitter more.” – You need to be on Twitter a bit less if you ask me. But no harm done other than advertising that we weren’t quite as close as our animated ‘Tooned’ counterparts suggested.”
Lewis Hamilton leaks sensitive McLaren telemetry data on Twitter
It was not the first time Button and Hamilton got into a spat about an interaction on Twitter that year.
During the Belgian Grand Prix weekend, Hamilton revealed secrets of McLaren’s car on the social media platform after posting a picture of his and Button’s telemetry data from qualifying.
Hamilton sent a number of posts, one of which read: “Damn, WTF!! Jenson has the new rear wing on, I have the old. We voted to change, didn’t work out. I lose 0.4 tenths just on the straight. Nothing I could do. Now, it’s baout picking up every point I can from here. Jenson should win easy with that speed.”
McLaren team principal Martin Whitmarsh told Hamilton to delete the tweet, which the seven-time world champion did and apologised for afterwards.
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