It was as if nobody had noticed there was a credit crunch that had thrown Formula One into its biggest economic crisis. Team owners, drivers and sponsors gathered at the plush Grosvenor House Hotel in London’s Park Lane last night to swill champagne and eat a sumptuous meal at their year-end celebration of achievement in motor racing.

But the celebrations were muted because the ghost at the feast was Honda, the Japanese team that quit the sport last week, while the centre of attention was Jenson Button, the team’s 28-year-old Englishman who many believe can become a world champion. He had booked his seat at the Autosport Awards optimistic that Honda were going to provide him with a competitive car in 2009. Last night, he was drowning his sorrows knowing that he could be out of a job if a buyer for the team cannot be found. Toro Rosso – effectively Red Bull Racing’s second team – have offered Button the chance of a test drive that could lead to a permanent seat. But Button may think that it is jumping from the frying pan into the fire with Toro Rosso also on the market and Dietrich Mateschitz, Red Bull’s owner, thought to be tiring of funding two teams.

Sources close to Button said that the driver might throw himself on the mercy of Bernie Ecclestone, Formula One’s commercial rights-holder. Ecclestone is a fixer and will want to keep Button in the sport, although the economic climate means that Button may be forced to drive for a knockdown price, instead of the £8 million a year that he was due to get at Honda.

Button needs to keep his options open in case Honda are sold to a viable buyer. If he decides to walk away, there is likely to be compensation of up to £24 million on the table to pay the three-year contract he signed a few weeks ago.

Button’s quandary was the talking point last night, but money is always a topic of conversation when the great and the good of the sport meet. The conversation around the tables laden with wine bottles, though, was of the dramatic lack of cash and what it could do to a sport that has created dozens of multi-millionaires.

Formula One’s profligacy has infuriated Max Mosley, president of the FIA, the governing body, who was on a crusade to slash costs before the Honda announcement proved his point that budgets heading beyond £200 million a year to send two cars around a race circuit were ludicrous.

Even the total cost of the line of huge limousines that brought motor racing’s top names to Park Lane would not add up to the budget for a single Formula One car.

Mosley pointed out that a wheel nut purchased by one team cost £800 and was used only once. The unnamed team used 1,000 such nuts a season, all flown into Europe from a specialist manufacturer in California. “It is completely unnecessary and nobody gets any benefit from that at all,” Mosley said.

Regardless of his crusade, the minds of the team executives are being made up for them as sponsors study the bottom line of their investment in the sport. It was at this annual bash in 1995 that Ron Dennis, the McLaren team principal, first met Lewis Hamilton. The 23-year-old from Stevenage in Hertfordshire became McLaren’s Formula One world champion last month at the zenith of a spending blitz that may never be seen again in the sport.

Hamilton’s success represented huge payback for McLaren’s sponsors but even the top team is braced for the worst. Dennis admitted yesterday that he expects the team’s budget to be slashed by about a third – almost £100 million – over the next two years as the credit crunch bites hard.

That dramatic cutback is a signal that there is substantial financial pain to come and that Honda might struggle to find a buyer with pockets deep enough to buy their team.

The asking price is thought to be nominal, possibly a single dollar, but the cost of funding a team with no large sponsors on board will be huge, even with a cost-saving drive under way.