 | | Jenson Button made his first public appearance since his McLaren move was announced at a book signing at London's Selfridges store on Thursday |
| |  | | Weeks after becoming world champion with Brawn, Jenson Button has completed a deal to join McLaren for 2009. He's certainly not the first title winner to immediately head elsewhere, but as our gallery shows, such moves have rarely paid off in the past... |
| |  | | Another McLaren coup saw the team announcing champion Fernando Alonso as one of its 2007 drivers before Christmas 2005! He still gave Renault a second consecutive title in 2006 before making the move. |
|
 | | It was all smiles at first, but the Alonso and Lewis Hamilton partnership proved very fraught - although both came within a point of the title. Meanwhile Renault went into a decline it has yet to arrest, even with Alonso back on board in 2008/09. |
| |  | | While heading for the 1996 championship, Damon Hill was staggered to learn that Williams was going to drop him for Heinz-Harald Frentzen in 1997, for reasons that have never become entirely clear. |
| |  | | Hill stunned F1 by joining Arrows, putting his faith in its new boss: ex-Benetton man Tom Walkinshaw. The champion spent most of his title defence in the midfield, bar a near-win in Hungary, watching Williams win another title with Jacques Villeneuve. |
|
 | | Michael Schumacher and Flavio Briatore's Benetton team grew into champions together. But even before he had clinched his second straight crown in 1995, Schumacher had accepted a big money offer from a Ferrari team that had won just twice in five years. |
| |  | | The first year at Ferrari was largely painful, although he took a few heroic wins. But soon Schumacher had set the Scuderia on the path to domination, while it took a Renault buyout and Alonso's arrival before Benetton became a regular winner again. |
| |  | | Nigel Mansell dominated the 1992 championship but was unhappy with Williams' offers for 1993 and its courting of Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna. A month after clinching the title, an angry Mansell announced he was quitting the team and F1. |
|
 | | Mansell headed for America, where he won the Indycar title at the first attempt before making various attempts to return to F1 with only limited success. Williams simply put Prost in its car and breezed to another championship. |
| |  | | Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna managed two years together at McLaren before their rivalry erupted into full-scale war in the garage. This Suzuka collision made Prost the 1989 champion, so it was lucky he had already decided to take the no.1 to Ferrari. |
| |  | | Ferrari produced its strongest title challenge in many years with Prost on board, but arch-rival Senna eventually denied him the championship by instigating an infamous collision at Suzuka. |
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