Brawn brassed off with Jenson Button as he signs for rivals McLaren

Bye bye Fry: Jenson Button celebrates winning the world championship with Brawn’s Nick Fry before deciding to switch teams for next season
David Smith13 April 2012

Jenson Button has been condemned for turning his back on the Brawn GP team which helped him realise his dream of becoming Formula One world champion.

Nick Fry, chief executive of Brawn GP, hit out following Button's move to rivals McLaren where next season he will partner Lewis Hamilton in an all-British dream team.

Fry said he failed to understand why Button had made his decision to quit Brawn, relaunched this week as Mercedes Grand Prix following a takeover by the German car company.

Rejecting reports that McLaren had lured his man away with the offer a bigger retainer, believed to be worth around £18million over three years, Fry claimed Button will actually receive less than if he had stayed at Brawn.

Fry said: "Clearly, loyalty would be nice but in this day and age you don't expect too much of that. I'm always happy when any employee leaves our company if I think that they've made the right decision and they are going to a better job. They always go with our blessing if that is the situation.

"In this situation, we don't understand the logic of the decision. I think Jenson is going to have to up his game if he's going to beat Lewis."

Fry believes Button would have had a better chance of becoming the first of Britain's 10 world champions to successfully defend their title if he had driven on for Mercedes.

He said: "We feel that we gave Jenson a car that enabled him to win the world championship, and we hoped he'd have stuck with us for that reason as we are very confident we can provide a race-winning car for next season."

According to Fry, Button would also have been better paid as a Mercedes driver with Nico Rosberg as his teammate.

He said: "We believe that our offer was in excess of what Jenson has accepted from McLaren. Jenson has indicated to me personally that may well be the case.

"We made what we thought was a very generous offer for a new contract which was significantly in excess of the frankly spurious figures that were put out to the press."

Fry rejected criticism that he and team principal Ross Brawn should have tied Button to a lucrative new deal before both the drivers' and constructors' titles were finally put beyond the grasp of the pursuing Red Bull cars in the season's penultimate Brazilian Grand Prix.

He said: "Unfortunately, we were between a rock and a hard place on this. Ideally, the discussions should have been completed before the end of the season. But because of the way that the championship was going, the last thing we wanted was to distract the driver with contract negotiations.

"We didn't really start serious discussions until the end of the season. That was the right decision, because there was enough going on on the racing side to fully occupy us and Jenson without having the burden of contract discussions on top of that."

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