DECEMBER 12, 2000

Button is BBC Newcomer of the Year

THE annual BBC Sports Personality of the Year evening resulted in Jenson Button being named as Britain's Newcomer of the Year for his performances in the BMW Williams F1 team. Button (20) finished eighth in the World Championship but has since moved to Benetton for the next two seasons while Williams switches to the highly-rated Colombian Juan-Pablo Montoya.

Button is hoping that the new Renault V10 engine will be sufficiently competitive to enable him to keep up the momentum in his career. The Benetton technical package should be better this year as Mike Gascoyne is now technical director and working with the ex-Honda Research and Development engineers who joined the team last winter. They had all previously worked together at Tyrrell.