With 32 Grand Prix wins between them, the adulation of millions and the fact they have one of the best jobs in the world, it would be very easy to be jealous of Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button. But when they tell you, with childlike enthusiasm, that the greatest thing about their lives is ‘taming a 750 horsepower beast’ it’s incredibly difficult to feel envy.

Since taking up Karting as kids and racing around pub car parks, they’ve had to work incredibly hard to get where they are and only the hardest of hearts would begrudge them their success. Of course they enjoy the spoils, from supermodel and pop star girlfriends to hobnobbing with the celebrity elite, but when you spend most weekends taking your life into your hands at 170mph, you’re entitled to do what the hell you like when the helmet comes off.

A dead arm and a cheeky smile is probably far as it would get between these two…

On the track and in life, they’re as different as chalk and cheddar. Hamilton the aggressive driver who loves hardcore rap and lifting weights, Button the smooth operator who prefers the Kings of Leon and training on his bike in the South of France. Yet when you meet them as a pair, they’re good company. There is clearly a rivalry, but where you got the feeling that Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost would have happily beaten the shit out of each other, a dead arm and a cheeky smile is probably far as it would get between these two.

We met up with them at the RAC club not long before it was announced that 2012 would be Lewis’s last for McLaren to talk cars, stars and the perils of having a weak bladder…