Jenson Button

This May, in Miami, the auction house Bonhams will put up for bid Jenson Button’s Brawn GP car from the 2009 season. The car comes with an asterisk: it’s not actually the one Button drove to the F1 world driver’s championship — it’s the one he was given under legal duress.

The details of Brawn GP’s 2009 F1 season amount to one of the great underdog stories in all of sports history: the team, left for dead by its previous owners, won six of the first seven races thanks to a brilliant “double diffuser” downforce breakthrough by engineer-owner Ross Brawn — only to find itself desperately trying to maintain a dwindling late-season points lead in both the drivers championship (for Jenson Button) and the constructor’s championship as the rest of the paddock caught on, and caught up.

As the history books and/or Keanu Reeves will remind us, Brawn GP and Button managed to white-knuckle their way through the rest of the season, fending off Red Bull-Renault and a young Sebastian Vettel to lock up both F1 trophies in the season’s second-to-last race, at Interlagos.

Button and Barrichello coming in 1-2 in the 2009 Australian GP

The fairy tale then turned a bit messy after everyone stepped off the final podium. Per his contract, Jenson was owed a Brawn BGP 001 car from the season. Mercedes, having taken over Brawn heading into the 2010 season, bought out Button’s contract — but never delivered the car. The reigning driver’s champion sued in April of 2010 for what he was owed.

Button rejected Mercedes’ first offer — a replica chassis manufactured in the Brawn factory during the offseason — on the grounds that he wanted the real deal (and his contract stipulated as much). Since Ross Brawn himself kept the championship-winning 001/02 chassis, and Mercedes kept the 03, the court-mandated solution led to Mercedes handing over the 01 chassis. Driven by Button’s teammate Rubens Barrichello through the first 14 races of the 2009 season, the car saw six podiums, including two wins at Valencia and Monza.

Button held onto his hard-won Brawn car up until last year, when he sold it off to a private owner. Now the BGP 001/01 chassis, itself a contentious reminder of that surreal season, will go up for auction via Bonhams on May 3 in Miami during F1’s Miami GP weekend.

Neither an opening price nor an estimated selling range has been shared by Bonhams, but with recent auctions of championship cars driven by Michael Schumacher and Lewis Hamilton gaveling in the range of £5 million or more, Button’s BGP 001/01 will certainly cost more than he paid for it.