Jenson Button Speaks Out In Favor Of Closed Cockpits

While the general consensus is that closed cockpits won’t be utilized in Formula 1 just yet, there are still those who go out and race cars for a living who seem to think they’re needed ASAP.

Take McLaren-Honda’s Jenson Button for example – a rather unlikely candidate for the “pro closed cockpit camp”. I say unlikely because Jenson has been around F1 for the past 12 years, winning 1 championship and scoring 1,204 career points.

By all accounts, you’d think he’d take an “old-school” approach to this issue. But no, it seems that Jenson is quite in favor of making Formula One racing safer by getting “a canopy on the car of some sort, because we can’t have this happening as much as it has over the last few years.”

“It [fatalities] just shouldn’t happen at this time in motorsport. It’s not the seventies, we should know better. Canopies probably are the way to go, but obviously that takes time”, added the British driver.

Of course, we should all be in favor of making racing safer for the drivers, whereas the aerodynamic and aesthetic factors can probably be taken care of as well eventually. If you think that an aerodynamic design can’t work if you add a canopy to machine meant to go really fast just look at how certain speedboats are designed.

Besides, we saw this rendering of a closed-cockpit McLaren a few months ago and we were all pretty impressed by it – despite the fact that the car design probably doesn’t need to change as much in real life in order to add the canopy.

Jenson’s former teammate at McLaren (now at Mercedes), Lewis Hamilton, said that he’s torn on this issue, while adding that he sees a closed cockpit “as potentially the future, but growing up watching the sport, it’s always been open cockpit. So it’s difficult to change, but sometimes change is the way forward.”

Lewis went on to say that there are several mechanisms that might work and that the cockpit doesn’t have to be closed all the way in order to better protect the driver.

He might really be onto something there.

Story references: Autosport, Rendering via Andries van Overbeeke