Back in England, Ann and I moved house to Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, on the edge of motor sport’s equivalent of Silicon Valley. We had started out as teammates and friends on a mission but over time our friendship had deepened into something else. I enjoyed spending time with her and we felt entirely comfortable in each other’s company. Moving to England was a huge step for me and I think it was a case of us needing one another and that’s how the relationship was formed. I had a lot of trust in her as she was in my corner from day one. She fought so hard for me and it was amazing to have a great companion who shared my passion for motor sport. From the beginning, Ann was the only one on my level (my dad to a lesser degree) who believed that my dream to race in F1 could happen. When you’re sharing that kind of belief with someone, that person lifts you.
In the beginning, Ann and I decided to keep our relationship quiet because in a professional sense it wasn’t going to help my cause if Ann was seen to be extolling the virtues/talents of her boyfriend to heavy-hitters and decision-makers. We didn’t want to risk not being taken seriously, so we always believed it was better for Ann to be seen negotiating as an independent third party. Over the first few years some people may have had their suspicions but certainly up until my first year in F1, we kept the relationship pretty much under wraps.
Being in a relationship with Ann, there was also her son, Luke, to consider. I had spent a lot of time with Luke back in Australia and by the time we were all living together in England, I was already like a big brother to him. To be honest, he was on the sidelines for me in the early days in the UK. He was too young to take to race weekends and I was so focused on what I was trying to do. That’s why, later on in my career, I liked to involve him in some of the opportunities that came my way. I wasn’t a hero to him, though: of course he liked seeing me do well, but he enjoyed other sports more, especially soccer and cricket, and he had his own heroes up on pedestals.
Living in Aylesbury also put me within shouting distance of Silverstone and Alan Docking Racing, even though I was nowhere near close to finalising a deal with him for 1997.
Once I got my head together I had a strong finish to the 1996 championship: four race wins made me the championship runner-up to Kolby. I was in with a chance of winning the European championship too: I had tasted pole position and victory at what would become one of my favourite circuits, Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium. However, Ralph didn’t let me compete in the last rounds of the championship because he wanted me to focus on the Formula Ford Festival. The European Championship was on the same weekend at Brands so we could have entered but we didn’t want to risk the car – or me – before my second tilt at the festival.
Take it from me, that’s a hard meeting to win, even when you have enjoyed a successful first crack at it, as I had the year before: it’s a lot easier to lose than to come out on top. Michael Schumacher and Kimi Räikkönen rocked up once upon a time and did nothing – that’s the Formula Ford Festival for you.
There were some very fast Formula Ford drivers there and some had been testing on the track for a full week, up to 500 laps in preparation for the racing itself. The track is only a couple of kilometres long, and to get an advantage round there is very, very difficult. It’s Chinese whispers all week about set-ups, tyres, pressures, so you simply try to keep it tight in your own team and figure out what you’re going to use, your gear ratios, your engine. You can’t go there thinking it’s going to be a walk in the park.
Still, I was confident. There were five or six key rivals, the guys to keep an eye on in the heats and semis; I made sure I stayed with them and didn’t give away any grid positions to them. It isn’t a race where you want to be doing too much passing because you only expose yourself to the dreaded DNFs (Did Not Finish), so I wanted to start as far up as possible. There were, as always, a few hotshots from Europe to contend with, but I qualified on pole position for my heat, and I won that. My race was dry – during the other race there was a bit of a sprinkle so their times were slower – and I found myself on pole for the final.
Pretty soon after the start it was back to normal service: Webber makes a terrible start, drops back to second, it’s a wet race … Yet I knew everything was going to turn out well because it was all happening in slow motion. That feeling comes when you are so in control of the car and yourself that there are no surprises. You really are ahead of every scenario: everything is in hand, as if you’ve been here before. You act instinctively; it’s a matter of muscle memory and reflex. I knew I had the other guys covered, all I had to do was make sure I didn’t stuff it up.
I made it safely through the first lap and I was just starting to line up the race leader. I got a good run out of Clearways on to the straight; he went out wide, I covered that move as well, then thought, ‘I’m going to go round you.’ I got to the middle of the corner – and there were yellow flags everywhere. Someone’s gone off. No! Why has the old bloke upstairs done that to me? So I had to let my man back through again. I put my hand up, let him past, slotted back in behind him, passed him again, built up a lead of more than two seconds – and the red flag came out to signal that the race had been stopped. Restart!
We pulled up on the grid again, I lined up on pole, Jacky van der Ende from Holland was second, Vítor Meira from Brazil fourth or thereabouts. This time, surprise, surprise, I didn’t make such a bad start, but Vítor made an awesome one. So Meira was now leading – but not on aggregate over the two starts, so I was cool with that. I was happy just to stay in touch. We were quicker than anyone else and I knew that if I stayed there the win was mine. I wasn’t going to go anywhere near Meira, there was no point. I’d done the hard work and I was leading the race overall. On the second or third lap after the restart, Vítor outbraked himself and crashed. After that I was on a test run, happily driving around in the wet … and not going off! I was wide awake and I wasn’t going to let it go.
It was an important victory for me. There were 120 guys from different countries having a crack, and only 25–30 made the final, so to win it was a bit of a statement. But it was an early reminder of something I would remember throughout my career, namely that talent is no guarantee of success. There was a lot of quality in that Brands Hatch field but a lot of it was never realised because most of those young racers didn’t have the iron self-belief and determination that makes you keep going.
A win like that is important because it leads nicely into Formula 3. People realise you’ve got the head to win the festival, and the pace; drivers who have done well there must be doing something right. Of course there was still a lot I needed to be tested on, but that win gave me some confidence and, more importantly, it gave people around me some confidence as well. As Ann says, you can do so much off the track but you’ve still got to go and get the results, and if I had crashed and burned in that final, who knows where we might have ended up.
Opportunities certainly opened up after that half-hour race. I was given a free test in a Formula 3 car, and that was to have enormous consequences later on. In fact I drove just about every car known to motor-racing man in the month after my festival win. Formula Opel at Zandvoort in Holland was an enjoyable experience; I did a Redgrave Racing Formula Renault test at Snetterton and one for Hayward Racing at Mallory Park, but our thoughts were already turning quite firmly towards F3.
As a footnote to that Brands Hatch weekend, I remember a juicy little confrontation that took place long after the track action was done and dusted. Fans may remember a Grand Prix driver called Martin Donnelly, whose F1 career was ended by a brutal accident in his Lotus at Jerez in Spain in September 1990. Well, Martin’s dad was at Brands that weekend. The Kentagon’s a famous pub at the circuit; everyone goes there to eat and drink after the race, win, lose or draw. It was pretty special to have the festival trophy presented to me a second time there in the pub, but Donnelly Senior had had a bit too much to drink. My parents had come over to watch me race – in fact Dad spent a fair amount of time with us in England duri
ng 1996 – and this bloke said or did something that left my mum less than impressed. My mechanic was a guy called Micky Galton, and Micky was not a man to be messed with – his hands were the size of shovels. Dad can usually take care of any nonsense, but he was in the background at this point, so Micky went up to Donnelly’s dad, grabbed hold of him so that his little toes were dangling off the floor, and said, ‘If you f#*k up this young boy’s night …’ We had a few lemonades after that and I drove home a happy man!
*
With the festival win under my belt, Team Webber was ready to take on the world. First we were going back to Australia to find lots of money, and that was our first mistake: there wasn’t any to be found. Corporate Australia was convinced that Craig Lowndes was Australia’s next F1 driver, because he had just embarked on a career in F3000 after winning in V8 touring cars at home. This was so frustrating to hear: no disrespect to Craig, he’s a great driver, but there was no way in the world anyone could pitch up in Europe to race F3000 without doing the junior categories first. They’d get eaten alive.
One group of people in Australia who showed faith in me and did their best to keep the Webber name in people’s minds were the guys at Channel 9, who in the early days of my motor-racing career were the F1 broadcasters in Australia. Whenever I came back home, they would ask me into their Sydney studios to offer my own comments on their F1 telecasts alongside Alan Jones and their larger-than-life host, Darrell Eastlake. They also invited me on to their popular weekend program Wide World of Sports, where skilled presenters like Ken Sutcliffe and Tim Sheridan worked very hard to get stories about me on air – Tim even brought a crew to Snetterton as early as 1995 to watch me in a Formula Ford race. But once again – and understandably so – there were just so many people asking me that familiar question: ‘How the f#*k is a boy from Queanbeyan going to get into Formula 1?’
Once again it was Yellow Pages that helped us fan the flames. Bob Copp and his colleagues were particularly keen on seeing progress. They didn’t want to see me in Formula Vauxhall, Formula Renault or any of those other categories that were starting to flourish back then. ‘Formula 3 or nothing’ was their attitude, and they were prepared to support us to get there because it’s a category that people can understand, especially in Europe. Double F1 World Champion Mika Häkkinen had won the title in 1990, and the man who later put together the longest career in F1 history, Rubens Barrichello, succeeded him in 1991.
There weren’t many drivers going from Formula Ford straight to F3 at that time. A few had done that in the past, Ayrton Senna for one, but in the mid-nineties a lot of younger drivers were going to the middle categories to get a bit more experience before they moved into Formula 3. We didn’t have the time or money to do that: we had to skip a year at university, you might say, missing out part of the apprenticeship to catch up.
The overall cost for the UK F3 season was £245,000. Yellow Pages and Dad put a hundred grand in between them – Dad had had 15 months to recover from the shock of 1995 and there was also some inheritance money from my grandfather. We put it all together to buy a Formula 3 car. We were going to do the season with Alan Docking – the man who had given me the F3 test on the back of my Brands Hatch performance. ‘We’ll just go with the flow, mate, and see how we go,’ was Docko’s approach. Typical Australian way …
So we bought a brand-new Dallara race car with a Mugen Honda engine, which was the best engine-chassis combination available. The way it works is that the driver brings a racing budget with him in exchange for the structure, the technical support and the experience of the team that signs him up. After four races we were fourth in the British F3 championship. I started with two sixth places at Donington Park and Silverstone, finished the Thruxton weekend without adding to my total, but then I won the fourth race at Brands Hatch on the full Grand Prix circuit, not the shorter layout used for the Formula Ford Festival, starting from pole position and setting fastest race lap as well. We were taking some big scalps like the works Renault team, or Paul Stewart Racing, the title-winning team set up by Jackie Stewart and his son. We were up against some pretty reasonable outfits and we certainly didn’t get the same Honda engines as PSR! That was the only race I won that year, but I was consistent and quick everywhere else.
But after the fourth or fifth race we were out of cash. The money from Yellow Pages and Dad had stretched only as far as acquiring the car and getting going. We hadn’t paid Docko the money to continue racing for him and his patience was being stretched pretty thin.
Then, not for the first time, Annie had a brainwave.
By that time David Campese, the winger Dad once played with in the same Queanbeyan Rugby XV, had become one of Australia’s greatest-ever players. Peter Windsor, a fellow Aussie and all-round sports fan who was team manager at Williams before becoming a respected motor-sport journalist, had been following my progress and suggested that I try to get in front of Campo somehow. The best chance would be while David was in the UK on his final Wallabies tour before he retired to set up a sports management company back in Sydney. Peter gave Campo a quick snapshot of who I was and what I was doing. He also found out when David was flying back to Australia, so he gave me the heads-up and off I went in my B-reg with a copy of my CV and sponsorship proposal tucked under my arm to stalk David at Heathrow. I handed the documents over to him and said if he was feeling bored on the 24-hour trip back to Australia he might like to read my proposal. When he got back he said he would be interested in managing my commercial affairs in Australia, and that’s how our association started.
But what Ann was proposing in early 1997 went way beyond that. Some months after David agreed to represent me, she picked up the telephone in the middle of the English night, rang Campo and put our future in his hands. I had gone to bed that night destroyed, convinced we had reached the end of our journey. David’s response – as an individual, not as a businessman – was phenomenal: overnight he sent the money we needed to cover what was owing to Docko and enough to get us through the next couple of races. While it was not enough to keep us going for long, it was an extraordinary gesture that let us battle on. It was also a lesson I have never forgotten about hunger, determination – and the need to lend an occasional hand.
*
While Ann and I were going cap in hand to Campo, a quite different avenue was beginning to open up for us. At the Australian Grand Prix in March 1997 I introduced myself to Norbert Haug at the official Grand Prix Ball where Yellow Pages always took a table, not only to entertain their own guests but also as an opportunity for me to network with F1 names. I’m not sure where I summoned up the courage to approach Norbert, but I seem to remember Ann pushing me towards him!
To my surprise he said, ‘Thanks, no problem,’ and Ann was good about making sure we kept him informed of my progress. We weren’t totally ripping up trees but we were getting good results, and she was determined to make people aware of what we were trying to do. In those pre-internet days that meant getting the results out – good, bad or indifferent – by the now antiquated method of faxing them. We sent them to Norbert and anyone who might be half-interested in following a young Aussie’s journey as he tried to come up through the ranks. It was a team effort: Ann and I would come home from a race meeting on Sunday evening shattered, but both of us would still be at the fax machine in the early hours of Monday morning, punching in more than 30 individual numbers! I was always reminding Annie to make sure her release didn’t run on to two pages because it then took twice as long to feed the sheets into the machine.
As things turned out, the fax mill worked.
One morning – 15 May 1997, to be precise, just as I was getting ready for the sixth round of the F3 series at Croft up in North Yorkshire – I’d just jumped out of the shower to answer the phone at the top of the stairs. Luckily I sat down to take the call, otherwise I might have fallen down the bloody stairs.
It was Norbert Haug himself on the other end of the line. It seemed Gerhard Berger, who was then driving for Benetton in what would turn out to be his last season as a Grand Prix driver, was unwell. Regular Mercedes sports-car driver Alex Wurz, an Austrian like Berger, was going to stand in for him.
‘Alex drives with Bernd Schneider for us,’ said Norbert. ‘Do you want to come and do the Nürburgring sports-car race in his place?’
It blew me away, being asked to race at one of the most famous circuits in the world, up there in the Eifel Mountains in Germany, for one of the most famous teams in the world.
That was one of the biggest phone calls I’ve ever had in my career. I told Norbert I was absolutely thrilled to be considered but asked him to let me think about it. I wanted to ask Annie what she thought: it was only six months since I had been driving in Formula Ford, let’s not forget, and here were Mercedes asking me to go to a track I had never seen, to try out a car, the CLK-GTR, that would take me to a whole new level. When Norbert rang back I suggested that it would be a good idea for me to do a preliminary test in the car, and he agreed.
To make it a truly representative test they were going to call in a guy by the name of Roberto Moreno from Brazil. F1 fans will remember that Moreno never really got the breaks he deserved in his career, but he did take part in 42 Grands Prix and he was second in a Benetton one–two finish behind Nelson Piquet at Suzuka in 1990. So here’s Roberto Moreno, whom I used to watch over and over again in those Formula 1 races I used to tape as a kid, and they were going to compare me to him. Bloody hell!