That second trip was for a training camp that took place early in 1998. It started well enough: we were given a day’s grace to get out and do a bit of skiing, then we had a meeting with Tony in the evening to outline what was to come. I knew there was hard work in store, because I had recently done a big test in the car for Bridgestone at Jarama in Madrid. Bridgestone had taken me under their wing as a test driver on their sports-car program. They liked the fact that I spoke English, albeit with an accent! The Jarama schedule included testing about a dozen of the company’s tyre compounds, which meant putting in 15 laps on each set of tyres. I then had to select the best front and rear tyres and carry out a full one-hour run. That was the first time I had ever driven for an hour non-stop, and it came after I had already done well over 150 laps. I lost 4 kilos in the process and I was buggered at the end of the day.
I had already begun to realise I needed to improve my fitness in the F3 race at Macau in late ’97. It’s one of the most demanding street circuits a driver will ever face and the experience really opened my eyes: even though I finished fourth, it was the first time that I had felt so uncomfortable in a race car. I’d been going for my little jogs round Aylesbury and thought I was pretty fit. I was dreaming – and Zürs certainly woke me up.
In F1 there was a changing of the guard in the mid-nineties with Michael Schumacher. It was Schumacher who opened everyone’s eyes to the difference fitness – real fitness – could make. Michael had already been where I found myself now – in the Mercedes sports-car program – and he had become a bit of a beacon for me. I went on that training camp at Zürs with the Mercedes squad, including Bernd and Ricardo Zonta, the Brazilian who had just won the F3000 title – and I got pasted.
We had multiple sessions on each of the six days after a pretty solid pre-breakfast hike: some stretching, some skiing in the middle of the day, a run or some other activity in the afternoon. We used to do this walk on a nearby hill, where we’d put a pair of racquet shoes on and walk to the top. The first day I got there before everyone else, but they never saw me for the rest of the week because I was destroyed. I was so keen to do well on the first day, but I could never repeat that effort.
I couldn’t fix the problem in a week, I just had to hug my teddy and get on with it. But I decided there and then I would never be humiliated in the same way again. When I got back I had changed: fitness was now front and centre on my agenda, and would remain so throughout my career. When I came back again these pricks were going to be in big trouble.
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It’s funny how a couple of words can change the course of a career. Early in 1998, a year after I introduced myself to Norbert Haug, the man in charge of the Mercedes-Benz racing program, I found myself back at the Australian Grand Prix. But this time I was at the wheel of a mighty ‘Silver Arrow’, the name originally given to Mercedes cars in Grand Prix racing before the Second World War. Even though I was ‘only’ doing demonstration runs, it was a wonderful opportunity to showcase sports-car racing to an Australian public with very limited knowledge of the category. For me, it was a taste of things to come in the season that lay ahead. The car I was showing off in Melbourne was the CLK-GTR in which Bernd had taken the inaugural FIA GT title for Mercedes in 1997. I announced in Australia that Mercedes were putting me alongside Bernd in all 10 rounds of the 1998 GT series, whose long races – 500 kilometres, for the most part – demanded that drivers share the burden. In mid-year we would be taking the Mercedes name back to Le Mans, the world-famous endurance race in France, where it’s fair to say the Mercedes marque had a chequered history.
In 1955 a Mercedes was at the centre of the most shocking accident in motor-racing history, when Pierre Levegh’s 300 SLR flew into the crowd opposite the main grandstand, leaving more than 80 spectators dead. That tragedy triggered Mercedes-Benz’s withdrawal from motor sport. Not until 1988 did the three-pointed star return to the circuit in the department of La Sarthe; they won the 1989 event, missed 1990 and were expected to dominate the 1991 race when a young Michael Schumacher was part of the line-up. Instead they were caught out by a minor component failure on two of their cars and left with their tails between their legs.
So the full-scale return of the Silver Arrows to Le Mans would obviously be the centrepiece of our working year. I’ve always been attracted to endurance racing and its twin challenge to man and machine. If you have any feeling for motor racing then Le Mans – Jaguar in the fifties, Ford vs Ferrari in the sixties, Porsche dominance in the seventies and so on – is ingrained in your psyche to start with. I was really looking forward to going there for the first time. First, though, we had to get the championship itself underway.
Between Germany and the UK, where Silverstone was to stage round two, came a spine-tingling moment for me: my first experience of Le Mans. There is a pre-qualifying event there a month or so ahead of the race weekend itself, with two six-hour sessions in which the drivers are required to reach certain qualifying times in order to book their place in the race. We only needed to qualify one car as Bernd’s achievement in winning the previous year’s GT title automatically brought qualification for Le Mans with it. But we were bringing out the CLK-LM, designed specifically for the 24-hour marathon, so all six of the nominated Le Mans drivers, myself included, went down there for our first look at the car and, in my case, the track – all 13.8 kilometres of it. Despite all I had read and heard, it was a stunning experience. As soon as you get out there you understand the mystique that surrounds Le Mans, because it asks every question a racing driver needs to answer: fast corners, low-speed corners – and 330 kilometres flat out on the famous Mulsanne Straight! Bernd did the donkey-work and set third-fastest time overall; I managed six laps, but the length of the circuit meant that I was in the cockpit for 40 minutes while I did them.
Silverstone is another of our sport’s most hallowed grounds, and soon after the buzz of seeing Le Mans came another high: the biggest win of my career to that point when Bernd and I turned the tables on the Ludwig/Zonta car at the British track in the second round of the championship. AMG’s Hans-Werner Aufrecht asked me to take the lead role in our car for the weekend, so that was a feather in the Webber cap. Schneider/Webber in the championship lead, albeit by a single point!
Before racing at Silverstone even started I had another ‘moment’ that left a Mercedes with significant damage and its driver in need of assistance. One of the great advantages of racing at Silverstone is that I could commute each day from home. About halfway to Silverstone there is a village called Whitchurch. It has one of those funny little English mini-roundabouts, and that was my undoing.
Ann and I were in an E-Class Mercedes and as we approached the roundabout we came up behind a bloke who looked as if he was going to take the first exit and go left. In fact he was only veering left to swing round hard and do a 180-degree turn back round the mini-roundabout. He came back on me and turned into the left rear quarter of my car. If I’d been going faster he would have missed me, but the long and the short of it was that my E-Class now had a severely damaged rear bumper and light hanging off the back. I had no option but to press on to Silverstone with the car in that state. As luck would have it, as I turned off the road into the circuit entry, who should be in the car ahead but Norbert Haug. I went straight to Alan Docking to see if there wa
s any kind of minor miracle he could work – I knew I was in a bit of strife as the left rear of the car was basically smashed in. I took it to the car park, reversed it into a corner, and from the front it looked beautiful!
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On-track the news kept getting better: less than three weeks later Bernd planted the #35 car he would be sharing with Klaus and me on pole for Le Mans. Qualifying for the race proper is staged over four sessions on the Wednesday and Thursday of race week.
I put in another 12 laps of the Le Mans track during qualifying, focusing on setting the car up for the race. Bernd did a phenomenal job: we went there not believing we could find the one-lap pace to grab pole, but Wednesday gave us a glimmer of hope and he pushed like hell to get there on Thursday. The only man in the field to break the 3-minute 36-second record, Bernd was a full second quicker than the leading Toyota, which in turn was only just faster than our #36 car driven by Christophe Bouchut. It was just reward for the team’s hard work, which included major test sessions over at Homestead in Florida, at the Paul Ricard circuit up on the plateau to the east of Marseille just before our Silverstone victory, and a final shakedown at Hockenheim in southern Germany. I had played my own role in that testing, too: every single Bridgestone tyre we had used in our GT racing and every tyre we planned to use at Le Mans had been tested by me and me alone.
I was thrilled to be at Le Mans, especially in a year that was a bit of a landmark even for that famous place. Nissan had been plotting their Le Mans campaign for some time, Toyota would be there, so would Porsche – and so would we, for the first time in almost a decade. Everyone was expecting record speeds in such a competitive environment. During those Paul Ricard tests I had a word with a former Le Mans winner, Martin Brundle, and he said, ‘You’ve picked the right year to do it, mate, because it’s just so competitive this time.’
There was a different animal to get used to. The CLK-LM was a Le Mans-specific car: in contrast to the GTR’s 12 cylinders it had a V8 engine and was 100 kilos lighter. At Le Mans we were also allowed to use so-called driver aids such as traction control and an anti-lock braking system. It was even closer to a single-seater, in my view, than the car we had been sharing in the GT series proper. Bernd was used to those tools, thanks to his experience in the International Touring Car championship, and he was working hard to bring me up to speed not only with those systems but also with tyre management and fuel consumption. Formula Ford and F3 don’t teach a young driver much in that regard because all you do there is go flat out! We had also figured out another crucial part of the weekend, namely who would be A-B-C in our car; that is, which of us would be allowed to sleep when – an important consideration when you have a 24-hour marathon at high speed ahead of you. I was B, the man in the middle, which meant I would be catching some shut-eye roughly between two and five in the morning of Sunday, and that suited me just fine.
I felt some trepidation about racing at night, not least of all because of the speed differential between the various classes of cars that race at Le Mans. It’s a sobering thought that when you come to the end of a straight in your car you will still be pedal to the metal up around 300-plus when you reach the braking-board 200 metres from a first-gear chicane – by which time the GT2 guys have been on the brakes for about 150 metres already, so there is a difference of about 150 kilometres per hour between you.
Still, I was trying not to set too much store by this first appearance at Le Mans. For a start, I understood that however much testing and preparation you had done, in the pressure-cooker of that race a 50-cent washer could bring you undone. More than that, though, whether we won by 10 laps or blew up on the first one, I felt it didn’t carry that much weight where my future was concerned. Just as well: I never got to turn a wheel in anger! Our lead man Bernd started the race but had to call it quits after just 75 minutes of the 24 hours when a steering-pump problem led to engine failure. Neither Klaus nor I got into the car. Becoming a Le Mans driver would have to wait another year.
Meanwhile there was a GT championship to be won. Bernd and I set about doing that in the best way possible: we won the third round at Hockenheim in Germany on the last weekend of June 1998. It was the maiden victory for the CLK-LM, albeit one race later than we had all hoped, and Bernd’s signature was all over it: pole position, a double stint in the cockpit at the start, a 40-second lead when he handed over to me and an eventual 72-second margin of victory over the Ludwig/Zonta Mercedes.
The next race couldn’t have been more of a contrast. We went to Dijon, in north-eastern France, and once again we were comfortably in control until traffic forced me offline and I picked up a piece of debris between the rear wishbone and the inside of my wheel rim. The friction split the rim and the tyre deflated, which pitched me into a spin and I had to crawl back to pit lane for repairs. With no points for us and with Klaus winning the race in the other Mercedes, our title hopes had taken a knock.
But you have to roll with the punches and come out fighting again, which is exactly what we did in round five at the Hungaroring just outside Budapest only a week later. Bernd and I led from start to finish from the car’s fourth successive pole; we were a point behind our teammates as the GT championship prepared to head east.
A few days in Oz catching up with family and friends (my sister Leanne was about to give birth to her first child) did me the world of good. Immediately after that Bernd and I caught up with Klaus and Ricardo and regained the lead in the GT series. Not only that, but for me it was the most remarkable victory I had tasted so far. It came at one of my favourite circuits, Suzuka in Japan, and it was doubly satisfying because it was a 1000-kilometre test of endurance in high temperatures and even higher humidity – one of the worst combinations a driver can face. Sure enough, I started dehydrating, but I got over it quickly enough to take over the car for the final hour and bring it home again.
When we racked up victory number five in the next race back in the UK things were looking rosy for the #1 Mercedes. We were seven points in the clear with three rounds to go, and another 1–2 result meant Mercedes had retained the manufacturers’ title. Round eight in the third week of September took me back to the scene of the crime: the A1-Ring in Austria where just over a year earlier I went through that first spine-tingling test for Mercedes. This time I had a shorter day’s work ahead of me – a three-hour race – but there was plenty at stake again. Despite Bernd’s best efforts in his final stint we were beaten by over half a minute. Our lead was down to three points; maybe it was just as well we had a month’s break in the schedule before heading across the pond for the final two rounds in the USA.
Unfortunately I kept my least impressive performance of the year for the first of those two American races, at Homestead in Florida on 18 October. Once again there was lingering evidence of my inexperience: while we had all the technical back-up we could hope for, race-day specifics like wellness and hydration were left to the drivers’ own devices and I wasn’t getting my physical preparation quite right. I was also caught out by Klaus Ludwig’s craftiness as I chased him late in the race – he forced me into a mistake and I went off. Now we were four points adrift, with one race left on the other side of the country at Laguna Seca. When we got to the business end of the race Zonta had 18 seconds on me. I tried very hard to catch him, but I went off on a large patch of oil someone had kindly deposited – and Ricardo had the same problem next time round. I fired in a string of fastest laps but just ran out of time and had to back off and keep an eye on the fuel gauge.
So the end result was second place in the FIA GT Championship by a margin of eight points. My disappointment was tempered by happiness for Klaus, since that was his last year in racing, but I also felt it had been a little unfair on Bernd. His partner came from Formula Ford and F3, whereas Ricardo arrived as the new F3000 champion to partner Klaus and was already getting test drives in Formula 1. I could go toe-to-toe with them most times but sometimes I struggled, partly because it was Bernd’s car, basically, and he h
ad it set up as he wanted it, and partly through sheer lack of experience.
I didn’t realise until a few years later how lucky I had been to see how Mercedes went about their racing: the discipline in every area was exemplary. In terms of car preparation it was a super team. On the back of that success Zonta headed off to F1 with the BAR (British American Racing) team; meanwhile I was gearing up for a second season of sports-car racing.
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The Mercedes arrangement had changed things dramatically on the professional front, and it almost changed my personal life at the same time. If I really wanted to go somewhere as a racing driver, 1998 also taught me that you have to be emotionally sound as well as physically together. There was a period in the middle of that year when I was an emotional mess.
My parents came over to the UK in the English summer of 1997. While they were thrilled about how things were developing for me in racing, they’d been less thrilled by the romantic relationship that was developing between Annie and me. I had suspected that Dad had sensed our growing feelings as he had been spending quite a bit of time with us in the UK but he hadn’t raised any warning flags with me. I think it’s fair to say that both he and I buried our heads in the sand as we didn’t want to upset Mum by telling her the truth about my relationship with Ann. It was only when Mum came over in 1997 that it had to be confronted.
I felt totally torn between the new life I was carving out for myself in the UK and wanting to keep my parents happy and, more importantly, respect their feelings. Annie could sense the pressure I was under and didn’t want to add to it: she was understanding to a point but she was disappointed that she was being made to feel uncomfortable in her own home, all because the Webbers hadn’t communicated with each other very well. The irony was that by wanting to protect Mum in the first place and not telling her, Dad and I had ultimately made things worse. Disey is quite a traditional mum and she was terribly distraught and upset, mainly because of the age difference between me and Annie, and she was concerned that this would mean I wouldn’t have a family of my own.