Fry: We didn’t lose Button over money

What, then, is the reason for Jenson Button’s switch to McLaren?

In an interview with Autosport, Nick Fry claims that money was not the issue and — like many of us — he says “we don’t understand the logic of the decision and I think Jenson is going to have to up his game if he’s going to beat Lewis on home territory.”

Not only was money not an issue, Fry adds, but he thinks the new Mercedes GP team offered Button a bigger contract than McLaren did.

Since that seemed to be the only logical reason for Jenson’s switch — to strike gold while he could — I think we can begin whatever conspiracy theories we want when it comes to Button’s depature.

Was he simply upset that Brawn GP (before its purchase by Mercedes) did not make resigning him more of a priority?

Fry has an answer to that:

Despite losing Button to McLaren, Fry insists he does not regret delaying contract negotiations until the end of the season in the belief that it would have distracted both team and driver from their main aim of winning the drivers’ and constructors’ championships.

“Unfortunately we were between a rock and a hard place on this,” Fry told AUTOSPORT. “Ideally the discussions should have been completed before the end of the season, but because of the way that the championship was going in the latter part of the season, the last thing we wanted was to distract the driver with contract negotiations.

“That was the right decision because there was enough going on on the racing side to fully occupy us and him without having the burden of contract discussions on top of that.”

Is there something going on at McLaren, which we are not privy to, that makes Jenson think he will have a better car there than at Mercedes?

Are there unknown issues at Mercedes?

We may never know.

What we can, apparently, set aside as a reason is money.

“I don’t think that it was a financial issue,” Fry told AUTOSPORT. “We understand that our offer to Jenson may well have been in excess of what he might be getting with McLaren.

“We are disappointed that Jenson has decided to leave because we did make 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 over the past week or so.”

A final interesting piece to Fry’s story. He says there has been little contact between Mercedes and Button’s management in the past days.

Fry added that the team was still keen to proceed with further contract negotiations over the past week, but that Button’s management seemed uninterested in talks when approached in recent days.

“It was clear to us that things were going seriously astray as of Sunday night or Monday morning,” said Fry.

“Unfortunately, over the last week there has been very little dialogue with Jenson’s management team despite the fact that we have made overtures to have further discussions. But they didn’t seem particularly keen, presumably because they were set on the McLaren route.”

If I had to make a wild guess, I’d say that the reason Button will be at McLaren next year has something to do with the Mercedes deal. By that I mean one of two things: either Brawn got so preoccupied with the Merc negotiations that it accidentally sent the message to Button he wasn’t wanted or Button wasn’t told about the Merc deal and felt betrayed and free to jump ship.

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