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“Nobody can take away what I have achieved,” he says, as if still coming to terms with the enormity of it all. “When you consider that the team was almost out of business at the beginning of the season when Honda walked away, it is remarkable that we have managed to win the drivers’ championship and the constructors’ title. Much of the credit has to go to Ross.”

That’s Ross Brawn, the race engineer who risked his own money to keep the team afloat when Honda pulled the plug on its F1 operation. For a while last December it really looked as if the entire outfit would fold and that Button would be without a drive, perhaps spelling the end of his F1 career. But some last-minute fundraising, together with cost-cutting that led to the loss of 270 jobs at the team base in Brackley in March, kept the operation intact and Button and Rubens Barrichello, his Brazilian team-mate, in work.

Even the drivers made sacrifices, Button taking a salary cut (from £8 million to £3 million) and paying his own expenses for the early part of the season. “I took quite a few flights on easyJet, but it wasn’t a big deal. We all have to give up certain things when times are tough,” he says. But what nobody could have predicted as the team fought for its very survival was that Brawn GP would make such a dazzling start to the season. Button won six of his first seven races – a feat only equalled by Michael Schumacher and Jim Clark – in what insiders describe as one of the most improbable renaissances in motorsport history.

Although Button was pegged back over the second half of the season as rival teams modified their car designs, his stunning drive in Brazil was enough to take him to the championship. When he flew back to London from São Paulo, he no longer required a ticket from easyJet: he borrowed Barrichello’s private jet instead. “It was nice of Rubens to let me use his plane so I could spend some time with the team,” Button says.

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“Do you feel emotionally liberated by the victory,” I ask, “particularly given how often motor-racing journalists have written you off and questioned your championship-winning credentials over the years?”

“Absolutely, yes,” he says, flashing another smile. “I always knew I had it in me to win, which makes it very tough to read so often about my supposed defects and flaws. The key this season was to stay strong and focused, particularly when things started to go a bit wrong after my flying start. Now, I am the champion.

“Nobody can take it away from me,” he repeats.

From playboy to contender

Button was brought up in Frome, Somerset, with three older sisters, and started in motorsport when he was given a kart by his father John, a former Rallycross driver, for his eighth birthday. He rapidly progressed up the ladder with some stunning performances on the track in Formula Ford and Formula Three and, at the age of 19, was handed the biggest opportunity of all with a drive in the Williams F1 team. He finished eighth in the 2000 drivers’ championship.

Suddenly awash with money, Button bought a luxury, 72ft yacht called Little Missy and moved into tax exile in Monaco. But, while he was being photographed with beautiful women and envied by all red-blooded males, his racing career was rather more humdrum as he moved from team to team in vain pursuit of a drive that might take him to the title. “I was a bit unlucky with the choices I made,” Button says. “Formula One is often about being in the right place at the right time, but that just didn’t seem to happen for me. If you are not in a competitive car, there is very little you can do about it.”

By the start of this season, Button had won just a solitary grand prix in 152 starts and was widely considered to be the nearly man of F1; a driver with plenty of natural talent, but without the gumption to translate his gifts into concrete results. Lewis Hamilton, in contrast, who had waltzed to the title in only his second year in the paddock, was the man with all the kudos, publicity and sponsors.

How different things seem today. “It is an amazing turn-around,” Button agrees. “I never really minded the way that Lewis grabbed all the spotlight over the last two seasons, I really didn’t. Actually, it may have helped a bit because it took attention away from me and helped me to get on with what I was doing… But it’s funny looking back that people thought I was washed up and that I might never drive again. This season has to be one of the most unexpected stories in F1.”