Championship leader Jenson Button of the Brawn-Mercedes team drove a 1934 W25 Mercedes at Goodwood's Festival of Speed on Sunday.
Button, who is keen on old cars and owns a Volkswagen microbus, drove the car to mark the 75th anniversary of Mercedes's Silver Arrows grand prix cars.
A full 75 years ago, Manfred von Brauchitsch drove the W25 at the International Eifel race at the full Nuerburgring, as the track had recently been built. While the present Nuerburgring is just five kilometres, the track in the 1930s was 22 kilometres long with over 170 corners.
The W25 has a 3.2 litre engine and a strange configuration as Button discovered.
Jenson Button, F1 Leading Driver, said, "It's so different to anything I am used to. I've driven some old cars in the past, old Formula One cars, but this is unique. This is pre-war 1934 and it's got a lot of history behind it and also the weirdest thing is - the throttle and the brake are the wrong way round so that I think is the most difficult thing to get used to. But yes I am looking forward to it. It is because of the amount of history that's involved with it. This will be some thing I look back on and I say 'Wow I got to drive that car'".
