Sports Personality of the Year - why I won't be voting for Jenson Button

You would think, wouldn't you, after all the F1 posts I'd put you through detailing my obsession with Brawn GP during the course of the season, that their World Champion Driver Jenson Button would be my first choice for the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award, due to take place at Sheffield Arena tomorrow night.

Well he's not. I'm quite cross with myself for being so grumpy about it, but I just can't forgive the way he left Brawn. If Ross Brawn and Nick Fry had just laughed it off, then I might feel better, but it's clear that he has seriously annoyed them.

I'm not normally one for holding grudges and it's not the fact that he's gone to McLaren. People change jobs all the time and he had the perfect right to do what he wanted. It's more the way he went about it. Almost from the second he won the championship, stories started to appear in the papers about how underpaid he was at Brawn, and how, bless he'd had to have his own overalls cleaned. I just felt he was behaving like a spoiled brat. Sure he'd won the Championship in a season that had turned out to be a struggle after a flawless start, but he's 30 years old, for goodness sake, and he was acting like a prat.

Then, on Friday 13th November, he went to visit the pretentiously named McLaren "brand centre" in Woking. Not subtly, you understand. The press were made aware of it with McLaren team principal Martin Whitmarsh coyly saying he'd just popped in to say hello.

I guess there was nothing McLaren wanted to do more than stick two fingers up at Brawn. After all, Whitmarsh knew fine that Mercedes was buying the Brackley team and ending its partnership, albeit gradually, with McLaren. I guess it's the sporting equivalent of introducing your husband to someone and then watching as the other two go off together. The desire for revenge is perhaps understandable. For McLaren. What Jenson was doing allowing himself to be used by the McLaren machine to that end is beyond me. As much as Brawn needed him to come up with the goods, there is no doubt in my mind that he would not be world champion if it were not with for the Brawn Team's genius in coming up with a car that was so much ahead of the field at the start of the season.

All I've written before, about how Jenson completely deserves to be World Champion and how well he'd done for the team still stands and how loyal he'd been by staying with the team last year, but I can't forgive the disrespectful and discourteous manner in which he left the team that had helped him to achieve his dreams.