Jenson Button looks set to make up for the cash he gave up to keep Brawn GP going at the start of the 2009 season, as mutterings from the team indicate that the championship leader is set for a big money contact to remain with the team.
Button agreed to take a pay cut (which, depending on which excitable news source you trust was anywhere between £12 and £15 million pounds) at the start of this season, rewriting his original £8 million a year contract that he had agreed with Honda in order to help the fledgling Brawn team balance the books in it's first year on the grid.
But now, despite Brawn still seeming to lack sponsor money, the team are set to offer him a massive improvement on his current deal in order to ensure he stays with the team until 2011 at the earliest.
Button is believed to have a number of clauses in his current contract which would allow him to leave before 2011 should the right offer fall into his lap, and back in 2005 he was famously involved in a pathetic scrap that involved buying himself out of a freshly-signed Williams contract in order to remain at Honda.
Smug Brawn CEO Nick Fry has admitted that although contract discussions have not yet started, they will likely renegotiate Button's current deal later in the season, to "reward" his championship-leading status.
"He took voluntary a major reduction but he does have a contract for several years to come and we will discussing at some stage later this year what we do to make sure he is rewarded fairly," Fry smugged to Autosport, "But it is not something we are discussing at the moment.
"These contracts are quite complicated but it is not something that is vexing us at the moment. He has done a great job and later in the year he will win more races and have a discussion."
When asked whether Brawn GP could afford any significant wage increase, given the fact that the team is still without a title sponsor on it's largely plain car, Fry maintained that the team had the money to shower Jenson with gifts and still keep the BGP001 competitive, with the bulk of their funding coming from the £70 million payout Honda threw at the team as they ran away from the paddock, in order to ensure the team stayed afloat in 2009.
"There is no issue whatsoever with funding through this year," he grinned inanely, "Even if we didn't get another penny in sponsorship we are able to do what we need to do. We are using our money wisely, and that means spending money on the performance of the car and, for example, the whole team including Ross and I flying Easyjet."
The news that Button is about to start earning a significant lottery win-worth of money every 12 months will doubtless fill those Easyjet-bound engineers with all sorts of joy.
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