Formula One news

Brawn and Button to negotiate new contract

World Champions Jenson Button and the Brawn GP team are preparing to begin discussions to renew the contract of the Englishman for 2010. Having taken a pay cut of £5m this season, the Frome man is the lowest paid Champion of recent times although he is believed to be searching for a rise ahead of his season of title defence.

Having been on a salary of £8m before Honda pulled the plug on its Formula One project last December, Button faced the option of lowering of the figure or not driving at all at the newly-owned and cash-strapped Brackley outfit.

Brawn GP had no option but to decrease the sizes of pay cheques following Honda's F1 departure

"We've got to do a bit of negotiation but we want him to stay and I know he wants to stay with the team," Brawn CEO Nick Fry told the BBC. "I wouldn't like to say how far apart we are in money terms but it's a bridge that can be crossed. We've been together a long time, it's six or seven years now. We've been through the hard times together and now we're successful."

Fry admitted that the team's fairytale season came all too close to not starting. "At the beginning of this year we were close to the edge on several occasions and a couple of times we did think that all was lost," he continued. "We had to take it one step at a time because it was easy to get overwhelmed by the situation.

"We just took every race one at a time, did the best we could and have become World Champions."

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