Aussie Grit

  After the previous year’s fiasco, when dehydration had cost me a strong result, Monaco had haunted me. In 2001 I was determined to show the place who was boss. I had changed my hydration strategy, my fitness levels were very high, and I said, ‘Righto, I’m in charge this year, I’m going to rip this race to pieces.’

  Pole position was the first step, though I tried too hard to go even faster and put the car in the barriers; after that I had to pay the guys back for their hard work by winning and I did it despite two safety car periods. Pole, fastest lap, race win: it was one of those days when you wonder, ‘Where’s everyone else?’ That was a taste of things to come as well, but for the time being I was delighted to be Super Nova’s first Monaco winner. It was also my first race as a member of Flavio’s management stable and he was understandably chuffed.

  Front row and second place at the Nürburgring kept the momentum going and when I won again at Magny-Cours I was the first driver to stand on the top step of the podium three times that season. Things were looking pretty promising until a fourth in Britain and three straight DNFs put paid to any chances I had of the title in my second year.

  When we won, we won easily, but when it didn’t happen we were fighting for second, third, fourth, fifth, so that was positive. Overall, though, the workload between F1 testing and F3000 racing proved too much. My shunt at Spa in the penultimate race was massive, and summed things up rather well. Once again frustration kicked in because both qualifying sessions were wet, I was on provisional pole for the whole session, but it dried out in the last five minutes so I came in and put slicks on, went back out and we ended up fourth and fuming. I was determined to crack the famous ultra-fast corner called Eau Rouge and just blast past the other guys up the hill that follows. We lowered the car’s settings on the grid to try to dial out some of the oversteer, but that made it a touch heavy. Through Eau Rouge, whether the car was now so low that it bottomed out or not I can’t say for sure, but it got out of control and I was gone. I ended my day in hospital, where I spent a few hours under observation before being given the all-clear.

  September had started badly. The month would end with another trip to hospital, but this time it was all for the right reasons. The previous year had seen Lance Armstrong publish his book It’s Not About the Bike, and it bowled me over. Armstrong had already won the Tour de France three times. It was an event, and he was a rider, that commanded my respect and admiration, particularly as I had started road cycling myself by then. Here was a man who had come through testicular cancer that spread through his brain, lungs and abdomen. As the book’s title suggested, it was about one man who had to fight for his very life before he was able to pick up his professional cycling career again. His story was very inspirational to me, especially after what I’d seen my grandfather Clive endure.

  September 2001 finished with the F1 race at Indianapolis, which was on my schedule as test and reserve driver for Benetton. Armstrong was treated in Indianapolis at the Indiana University Medical Center, so off my own bat I went to the hospital to see if I could meet some of the people who worked with him. I wanted to see if the book, this amazing story, was real. Just how special was this man?

  In the book he refers to the nurse he was closest to and says, ‘This is what an angel looks like.’ I found her: she was called Latrice Haney and she was certainly real. She also confirmed how hard Armstrong had fought against the disease. Ann and I stayed in touch with Latrice for years afterwards and she gave me a fascinating insight into what a great athlete had been through, and the people who had helped him come out the other side. I can’t help wondering what people like Latrice think of Lance Armstrong now.

  *

  I would really have liked to win the 2001 F3000 championship because that was my last chance to win a title in the junior categories. If I’d stayed on for a second year in British Formula Ford maybe I could have done it; if I’d stayed on for a second year in Formula 3, maybe I could have done it there. But even if I had stayed on for a third year in F3000 I probably wouldn’t have done it, it’s just that sort of category. In the end I finished runner-up to Justin Wilson.

  Flavio put a lot of pressure on me to win that title as well, but in the end he saw what I was doing in the Benetton. There were some days when I would be very close to regular drivers Fisichella and Jenson Button despite my limited opportunities in the car, but it was a tough year because I was the first guy to drive with Renault’s 111-degree engine as they prepared to return to the Grand Prix scene. At the December 2000 Silverstone test the thing was popping and banging for two days as we struggled with no power and no down-force, so throughout the following year we had to work pretty hard on it. What impressed me, looking back, is how motivated the team stayed and how hard they kept pushing. Fisi drove an amazing race in Spa on 2 September, 2001 and ended up on the podium.

  My 2001 season had been split between a fairly basic car with the clutch on the floor and a gear-stick to play with, and a state-of-the-art Grand Prix car with traction control, paddles on the steering-wheel and all sorts of other toys. The F3000 car was 10 to 12 seconds a lap slower and a totally different beast. But the category itself, with its sheer unpredictability, helped me learn to deal with adversity. It was good training for F1 in the sense that it was an unbelievably competitive era in F3000. The first few laps were always very aggressive, and any kind of battle helps to harden you. I didn’t want to be delivering pizzas in Queanbeyan if I got the year all wrong and maybe I tried too hard.

  Just a couple of days after the final race in Monza I was back in the Benetton for three days at Silverstone. This time, I got my first long runs in that year’s car, the B201 – and my time was a bee’s dick slower than Button’s. Every time you drove the car that year there were new things on it: we really were test pilots. We can’t give this to the race driver, he might hurt himself – you have a go and see what happens!

  But that didn’t matter because my single-seater career was back on track. We were back in the hunt to try to get a race seat in Formula 1. At the end of 2001 Jenson kept his seat, Benetton now being wholly owned by Renault and renamed accordingly, and was joined by Italian Jarno Trulli, but Flavio told me: ‘In ’05 I want you and Alonso as my main drivers.’ This is at the end of 2001 and I haven’t even done a Grand Prix yet!

  Fernando Alonso had just finished his debut season in F1, racing with Stoddy’s Minardi team. He may not have scored any World Championship points but he had certainly caught the eye with his trademark combative style and the maturity of his approach. In the years to come I would form a close bond with the Spanish driver and some of my fondest memories of my F1 career are of epic encounters with Fernando on some of the greatest racetracks in the world.

  But Fernando’s name cropped up again during an episode that encapsulates the ups and downs of that year. What was I saying about the single-seater career being back on track? Late 2001 brought one of the great highs of my life to that time. On 21 October, with well-known F1 journalist Tom Clarkson, I launched into a bike ride from John O’Groats to Land’s End, an epic 1627 kilometres to raise money for the never-ending fight against cancer, which had touched my family when Clive succumbed to the disease. Tom and I trained hard at the Renault Sport Human Performance Centre and we often did laps of the European Grand Prix circuits on race weekends on two wheels to get the stamina levels to where they needed to be for our 14-day marathon. It was a rewarding time – except when I heard, midway through the ride, that Alonso was leaving Minardi to take up a new role as Renault’s F1 test and reserve driver. What did that mean for me?

  I finished a hectic year in the cockpit with a final three-day F1 test in Barcelona at the end of the first week in October and wondered where that testing role and my F3000 campaign had all left me. All I knew for certain was that 2001 was the steepest roller-coaster I had ever been on.

  7

  Base Camp at Everest

  RECENT YEARS HAVE SEEN A MARKED INCREASE IN THE number of drivers hav
ing to bring sponsorship money or some form of financial backing with them to F1 teams, even those that are not perennial back-markers. At the start of 2002 Paul Stoddart, who had acquired his own team by buying Minardi a year earlier, signed a driver with a lot of personal backing – but it wasn’t me. Stoddy offered a race seat to Malaysian Alex Yoong, but at least the funds Alex brought with him gave Paul some wiggle room where his second driver was concerned. I still had no deal with him at that stage and our never-ending hunt for support went on.

  Flavio always complained that the bloody Australians did nothing for me, but that wasn’t true. We had Ron Walker making the Webber case from Australian Grand Prix headquarters, we had Telstra on board, and everyone in Team Webber was pushing like hell to bring money into the fighting fund. Flavio was distinctly unimpressed by what little we did have. ‘Aussie pesos,’ he growled. ‘They’re doing well! Don’t they understand? This is nonsense – they must try harder!’ That’s the whole point, of course: when you come from a big island at the bottom of the world it’s hard for the people down there to realise how the world of F1 works, and how hard you have to work to create your own place in it. Getting people to understand the need for funding – substantial funding – was always an uphill battle, but it made us all the more grateful to the people in Australia who did rally round.

  In desperation I even rang Bernie Ecclestone and reminded him that I had qualified for a super-licence (the piece of paper a driver needs to race in F1) for the past two years running, thanks to my results in F3000. So I said to him we might as well just have Formula Ford and Formula 1: what were all these other categories for? Normally Bernie will lend a sympathetic ear if he thinks a young driver trying to break into F1 has a case; he’s not always the intimidating character that the media portray, as I found out later when I got to know him a little better. But at this crucial stage of my career all he said was, ‘Sometimes life isn’t fair.’

  It wasn’t until the proverbial minute before midnight that I finally did a deal with Paul Stoddart that would get me – at last – to where I wanted to be: in Formula 1, as a race driver. We finalised it at Terminal 4 at Heathrow with Bruno Michel, Flavio Briatore’s right-hand man, and Stoddy. By then all the other F1 drives were gone, things were looking bleak again and at one stage we didn’t even know what was happening with the Minardi team itself.

  I had been determined not to get carried away before I had concrete proof that the Minardi deal, which was being rumoured in the racing media, really was happening at last. I’d had my hopes built up so many times only to be dashed each time, so while I was grateful to Paul for the opportunity I don’t think I believed I really was a Grand Prix driver until I actually arrived in Melbourne. And since Paul owned not only a Formula 1 team but also his own airline, European Aviation, we arrived in Melbourne in some style!

  We flew in Stoddy’s 747, calling in at Kuala Lumpur to say hello to my new teammate’s personal sponsors, then on to Avalon airport outside Melbourne. To fly down there with the cars underneath us in the cargo hold for my first Grand Prix weekend was absolutely surreal. It wasn’t exactly how I would have done it, but I knew where Paul was coming from: an Aussie driver making his F1 debut at the Australian Grand Prix with a team owned by an Australian, and in his home town to boot! He wanted to milk it for all it was worth.

  Ron Walker and Steve Bracks, then Premier of Victoria, met us at Avalon and there was a three-hour media marathon before I could make my way onto a Canberra flight for a touch of normality, a barbecue at my sister’s farm near Queanbeyan with family and friends. Leanne and her own family are a long way removed from the racing scene and it was a short, sweet antidote to the mayhem.

  Next day Webber the likeable larrikin, as one of my teachers had called me, was back at Karabar High talking to the senior students and, in one of life’s little ironies, preaching the need for safe behaviour behind the wheel. In a pattern that became familiar ahead of each year’s Australian Grand Prix, the next few days were a blur as I went from one engagement to the next. Not exactly the ideal preparation for a rookie F1 driver’s first Grand Prix but they were all commitments I felt I had to honour for the people who had done so much to help get me to that Melbourne race in the first place. But I won’t deny the sense of relief I felt when I finally got into the inner sanctum of the F1 paddock.

  There was just one problem: the Minardi team and its car were totally underdone for my World Championship debut. Before heading Down Under, a brief test at Valencia in Spain was all I had managed in the car that was to be mine for my first F1 race. When I visited the Minardi factory in Faenza I could not believe the size of the place: it was like a good F3000 team, it just blew me away that a Formula 1 team could operate from such a small base. Straightaway my admiration for Fernando Alonso, who had raced for Minardi in 2001, went up, because it underlined that big doesn’t always mean better and you can make an impact even with limited resources.

  I felt a huge amount of pressure: it was going to be very, very bad if the car broke down in the first five or six laps, because people’s expectations were impossibly high after all the media hype and we had to spend so much time damping those unrealistic expectations down. It was, of course, really special to drive my first Grand Prix in my home country. Not many drivers get that opportunity. But in terms of putting on a good show, I wondered if later in the championship would have been more suitable.

  Still, I was staying as positive as I could. I was there, that was the main thing, and to my mind in those early stages it was all about trying to ruffle some feathers, being somewhere I shouldn’t be, or at least where so many people had told me I never would be. ‘How the f#*k are you going to make it to Formula 1, coming from Queanbeyan?’ Here was the answer to the oft-repeated question: M. Webber (Australia) on the grid in Melbourne in Minardi Asiatech PS02 #23. Even if I was nervous about the outcome of my first race there was a considerable degree of satisfaction in simply being there in the first place after so many years of trying.

  In Melbourne race distance is 58 laps. It wasn’t going to be the longest time I’d spent in a car, but I was on the track, a street circuit, with the guys perceived as the best in the world, and the plain fact was that I was going to be one of the slowest on that circuit because of the car I was driving, and there wasn’t a lot I could do about that. I was going to do my absolute best with what I had, but I knew the car was very unreliable.

  The story of the race weekend itself is pretty straightforward – but almost unbelievable. For a start we out-qualified the Jaguars, which a Minardi was not supposed to do. As for the race, things played into our hands quite beautifully. Ralf Schumacher’s Williams took Rubens Barrichello’s Ferrari out off the start-line and the ensuing carnage meant there would be fewer cars in the hunt for a good result. When the crash happened I thought the red flag was going to be put out for sure.

  We’re out there – eighth or ninth or whatever – and it didn’t matter what I did, with the equipment I had there was no way I was going to be overtaking anyone. There was only one car behind me and that was my teammate! From lap 3 we were already behind the safety car, and the differential and traction control were starting to play up. All weekend we were also having a nightmare in the pits: whenever we grabbed first gear and tried to pull away, the anti-stall would kick in because there was a bug in the software relating to the pit-lane speed limiter. Whenever you came into the pits you would hit the pit limiter once to go to the mandatory pit-lane speed on the way to your garage. But when you were ready to leave, boom, it kept putting on the anti-stall and you were going nowhere. What the team wanted Alex and me to do in the race was hit the cruise control, do the regulation 80 kilometres per hour as we came in, then just before braking into the pit box, hit the button again so the cruise control went off.

  But what happens when you do that? The fuel flap goes down.

  When I pulled up the pit crew just went ballistic, screwdrivers flying everywhere, until team manager John Walt
on came on the radio and calmly said, ‘Mark, hit the pit button.’

  I did as John-Boy asked: the flap went up, the guys were able to insert the hose on the refuelling rig where it was supposed to go, and I was able to take fuel on board and rejoin the fray.

  At that stage in the race I wasn’t thinking about my position too much. There was a more pressing question in my mind: how was I going to get to the finish? This car and I had never done anything like this sort of distance together before and it was sending me all sorts of distress signals to say it was definitely going to let me down, the only question was when. For the last 25 laps or so – almost half the race distance – I was short-shifting, moving up through the gears quickly to avoid stressing any of the components unnecessarily and doing everything I could to nurse the car home.

  Then I saw Mika Salo coming in the Toyota. He was much quicker and I thought, ‘Once he starts getting within 10 seconds I’ll start to stretch my car a bit more.’

  I surprised myself by staying so cool: I knew there wasn’t long to go, we were in the points, which was pretty massive in itself, and I could see the crowd coming closer to me with every lap that went by.

  When Salo cruised up on the back of me I was pretty much driving flat out; that was all the car could give me. I was drawing on all my experience to keep him behind me. On the grid Stoddy had said to me, ‘Just bring it home, mate.’ But when I was in position to score two World Championship points for fifth on debut in a team that needed those points so desperately and Salo was catching me, Stoddy came on the radio and said, ‘Under no circumstances let him past.’