Aussie Grit, Page 9

  But even Annie and I didn’t know ourselves where our relationship would play out at that stage. We had no expectations, we had been surprised ourselves how strongly our feelings had developed, but there were people telling us it wasn’t right, it couldn’t work. Admittedly, the pressure got to me and we agreed to put the personal side of our relationship on hold although we continued to share a house together. When I went back to Australia for a break, I started a relationship with a girl I’d known from high school. Mum and Dad were very supportive of this blossoming new romance and in this version of the movie Webber marries the hometown girl, they start a family and everyone lives happily ever after.

  Annie knew that I had only scratched the surface of my racing career but she wasn’t prepared to hang around and watch young love undermine all we’d worked so hard for. No doubt the 1998 Australian Grand Prix only reinforced the way Annie felt, because my new girlfriend and I made a point of announcing our presence in a less than inconspicuous fashion, even to the extent of waltzing into the Yellow Pages suite and laying down some new ground rules, such as the number of autographs I’d sign and meet-and-greets I was willing to do! Of course, this did not go down well with Bob Copp and his colleagues, who were concerned that their vision for me, and their investment, was about to be derailed.

  Annie was bitterly disappointed at my behaviour. Her plan to take me to the highest level of motor sport was starting to go horribly wrong, so she left Australia earlier than planned and headed back to Europe. My family arranged for Alan Docking to collect my belongings from the house we had been sharing and the one and only car Annie and I had at that stage. That left Luke and her stuck in Aylesbury without any form of transport; she later told me that she rented a car whenever she needed to travel for work. Campese Management told her that they had been instructed by the Webber family to terminate her role as my manager and that Campese Management would be taking over all aspects of my career, including the negotiation of my driving contracts.

  Meanwhile, I was off to Germany again, which was bloody tough as it was now going to be my base in Europe. I was in Stuttgart on my own staying in a hotel, although sometimes I’d stay at Bernd’s place, where I learned another little quirk of European life: the continental breakfast! He and I would come back from a 10-kilometre run, I’d be absolutely ravenous – and he would have a little bit of cheese and ham. I ended up virtually scavenging for food, I was so hungry.

  One thing I did enjoy was some of the development work Mercedes asked me to do on the road-going versions of the cars we were racing: it got me onto the autobahn, well north of 320 kilometres per hour, on more than one occasion. There would be an engineer sitting beside me punching the numbers in and saying, ‘Schneller, Schneller!’ – ‘Faster! Faster!’ – when I was already going fast enough for the wipers to peel off the windscreen and bend back along the side of the car like boomerangs. It was by far the quickest I had ever been in a road car.

  By late April, as my first race with Mercedes was fast approaching, I was an emotional wreck. I had the pressure of wanting to do well in my new role; I had my family encouraging me to take a different path in my personal life; and there were plans in place for my girlfriend to come to Europe to attend my first few races.

  I knew that what was going on in my private life was going to affect my driving, and I knew the new regime – a new girlfriend, a new management company – wasn’t going to work. My family and I were dreaming if we thought I could survive and succeed in Germany on my own. I knew the guys at the Mercedes team but I couldn’t exactly sit down and talk to them about my personal life – the last thing they wanted was a bit of Dallas in the middle of their sports car season.

  While I knew Annie provided the support and guidance I needed in my racing career, I was missing her in so many other ways too. We were such a dynamic force in every sense; we could make things happen when we were together. We were teammates, soul mates, call it what you want. Maybe I had been blind to it but we had been on a life journey together and it was going places. I realised I’d screwed things up with her and there was only one way to fix them again: call her. So I did – several times, in fact, but she was quietly getting on with her life in motor racing and at first the calls went unanswered because she was away racing.

  When she eventually answered, the only thing I could say was, ‘I want to come home.’

  So after six months Annie and I resumed our relationship, both personally and professionally. I moved back in with her and Luke in Aylesbury and settled down to the serious job of being a professional racing driver, but now in a stable home environment that I was comfortable with.

  My dad never really had a problem with my relationship with Annie. Mum knows now that there have been more positives than negatives to it. She and Annie were slow to bond but I can honestly say that their relationship has never been stronger than it is now. They’re never going to have the stereotypical mother-in-law/daughter-in-law relationship, which I’m happy about as I’ve seen plenty of major fallouts and disruptions caused by feuding mothers and daughters-in-law! Nowadays they have a good friendship and there’s a lot of mutual respect between them.

  As to Mum’s concern about our age difference, that has never been a factor for us. When we began to be more open about being together, perhaps the top end of the age gap shocked a few people. In those days people were less accepting of a big age difference between partners, especially when it’s our way round. It’s not such a big deal nowadays and it makes us laugh when so-called celebrities reveal they’re dating an older woman or younger man! One of the most amusing things is when we’re checking in to hotels and we get asked if we require separate rooms, or if Dad’s with us, they try checking him and Annie in together! Even now it still causes the odd raised eyebrow!

  As to Ann’s family’s reaction, we had stayed with her mother when we first moved to the UK in early 1996 and Bettine was always very supportive of my career. She was wise enough to see the relationship developing between us but never felt it was her place to say anything either way. But when it had become blatantly obvious, she embraced it. Sadly Bettine died in March 2015 at 92, but she was sharp as a tack until the end.

  In career terms, perhaps the most crucial lesson I learned in 1998 was about discipline. It’s so easy for young athletes to be dazzled by the trappings of success, whether you measure those in material possessions or in the so-called glamorous lifestyle that people associate with sporting achievement.

  I had gone from being almost down and out to being a paid professional driver. Seeing a few zeros at the end of your bank statement certainly makes a difference, and I can tell you it makes a big difference flying business or first class when you spend so much of your life in aeroplanes getting from one racing venture to another.

  It was easy to think I’d made it. The question is: made what? There were still mountains left to climb and we weren’t exactly rolling in money and there were some not inconsiderable debts to be repaid. With all the emotional distractions it would have been very easy for me to mess things up at Mercedes and be left with absolutely nothing again.

  We were in a dilemma. On the one hand I could go into cruise mode and accept the good things coming my way: I was 21, I was being paid, and had nice little perks like an AMG car at my disposal in the UK and also whenever I was back in Australia.

  On the other hand, we were trying to keep an eye on the real prize: getting to Formula 1. And that was a massive gulf to bridge. It used to annoy Mercedes quite intensely that I was still so focused on F1. It didn’t matter to them that I had been brought up on images of single-seater cars flashing past me in Adelaide, and on videotapes of all the great F1 drivers of the day in action. They would much rather have had me concentrating on sports-car racing, a category for which I was massively undercooked at that time. I had only been in Europe for 18 months, after all. But I wasn’t ready to let go of the F1 dream just yet, even if the route to that eventual goal might have changed in the la
st few months.

  Ann and I thought we might dovetail my GT commitments with a season of F3000 in 1999 if we could find the funds, and we were probably better off being in Australia trying to drive the fund-raising. So we relocated in December 1998, partly because the Mercedes program for the following year was going to be quite short, with the focus firmly on the return to Le Mans and a limited number of American Le Mans series races. Realistically, it was a non-starter as Mercedes wouldn’t have entertained it for one minute but we were still determined to keep my single-seater goal alive.

  When we returned to Australia, we didn’t go back to Queanbeyan but to Melbourne, where we rented an apartment on Queens Road, right opposite the Albert Park track. If I ever needed any motivation about keeping my F1 hopes alive, seeing the track being constructed over January and February and watching the place come alive in March was it.

  5

  Nightmare at Le Mans: 1999

  IN THE EARLY PART OF 1999 I FLEW IN AND OUT OF AUSTRALIA on a regular basis as Mercedes were busy testing in Europe and America. We returned to the UK after the Australian Grand Prix – I remember it being all a bit last-minute and having to recruit one of Annie’s friends to help find us rented accommodation back in Aylesbury. Luke returned to the same school and friends he thought he had said goodbye to three months earlier and we settled down in a rented house on a little estate called Watermead; the picture of domestic bliss was completed by a nice AMG Mercedes in the driveway.

  And another Mercedes would be waiting for me in France.

  I came into 1999 with big plans to go one better than the previous year and win a World Championship with Mercedes, but that hope was quickly dashed. At the end of February the FIA announced that the International Prototype Cup, the category the AMG Mercedes team was scheduled to take part in, had been cancelled. ‘Lack of interest from other manufacturers’ was the reason given, just as we were getting into our testing stride back in California.

  The dumping of the prototype series was cause for concern. It meant 1999 would offer very limited driving opportunities for me. At Mercedes we were left with only one target to aim for, although it was a pretty inviting one: Le Mans. In April AMG Mercedes announced that I would be the lead driver in one of three new CLR machines. Without the distraction of regular racing, there was a clear focus again, a clear goal: it was all about taking three Silver Arrows back to Le Mans – and winning.

  The build-up to the 1999 Le Mans 24-hour race was the best time in my racing life up till that point. It was really rewarding and a lot of fun because Bernd and I did the bulk of the preparatory work. We crossed the Atlantic regularly to do a lot of testing in America because the weather was better over there. There’s no track you can really compare with Le Mans, but thanks to the great American team-owner Roger Penske and his link with Mercedes, we went to Fontana in California to simulate conditions in La Sarthe as best we could. It was a track where you could do a bit on the banking, but on the infield section you could test the engines at full noise, the gearbox, the tyre constructions, everything. A lot of people didn’t know where we were testing as we were getting ready for this one crucial race. And in between times we had so much fun taking in Champ Car races, playing golf, all sorts of stuff – it was a bit like the boys on tour!

  We were working with a real purpose, though: getting those cars bullet-proof. Bernd and I did a lot of training together, and we were totally focused. The sessions would be five or six days long, and we were attempting to complete 30-hour simulations, 25 per cent longer than Le Mans race duration. In our first test at Fontana we had three cars running; two of them failed, but the car I was in actually finished the test – 1000 laps of the Fontana road course. You could say the car won: it wore out the drivers! Gerhard Ungar, AMG’s chief designer, was well aware of the healthy rivalry among the drivers, and he kept hammering it into us that we were all going to be in the race; it wasn’t a competition to see who was doing the quickest lap times, it was all about testing the car. But after three or four hours’ running it was like qualifying out there. We were giving it everything, because after all he did say it was about testing the car and if you want to really test it then you have to do your best to simulate a race scenario.

  I wasn’t going to drive with Bernd in 1999. Mercedes had pretty much given me my own car for Le Mans, which was a thankyou for the year before, so I was with Jean-Marc Gounon and Marcel Tiemann. They had both been in the privately run Persson Mercedes outfit the previous year. In the other cars would be Pedro Lamy, Franck Lagorce and Bernd, then Christophe Bouchut, Nick Heidfeld and Peter Dumbreck in the third entry. The 24-hour classic was due to take place on 12–13 June, with the traditional pre-qualifying on 2 May. Our #4 car had been pre-registered for the race as a reward for AMG’s title win in the ’98 FIA GT series, but I was still keen to get back to La Sarthe, build on the handful of laps I got before the previous year’s race and see what this new car could do – we were expecting top speeds in excess of 350 kilometres per hour.

  What we were not expecting was the mechanical failure that struck our car, with me on board, in that May pre-qualifying session. I was just going into the second chicane on the Mulsanne Straight when the front right suspension collapsed. That was a very unusual failure on the front lower wishbone: it simply pulled out of the tub as soon as I started braking. It was the first time this had ever happened. It sent me spearing across the gravel trap, then I spun and hit the barrier. It was a big moment, but I got it all together and I was able to get out of the car all right. The preparations, as you might expect, were so thorough that we actually had mobile phones in the cars, so the onlookers were taken aback to see the driver putting in an emergency call to the team back in the pits! Team sensitivity also came into play: one of the mechanics grabbed a camera from a nearby photographer and destroyed it on the spot. But the mishap meant our car was pretty much out for the rest of the day’s running because it was in a difficult place for the recovery team to get at.

  What had just happened came as a complete surprise. We had been doing those 30-hour simulations and we’d had to turn the car off because every other part of the team, the drivers and mechanics in particular, was destroyed. As a result we were pretty confident that the cars were going to be reliable for the race. Now, all of a sudden, there was this question mark.

  After pre-qualifying, there was major panic because we could see we just weren’t quick enough. We were off the pace compared with the Toyotas, though there was some talk that they might be running light, show-boating to spook the opposition, and even the Panoz looked pretty quick. There was a hint of desperation creeping in and by that stage there was no time to fix the problem. When the race itself is only four or five weeks away there’s not a great deal you can do to re-invent the wheel in performance terms.

  Any Le Mans victory is sweet, but this year’s looked like being a really prestigious race to win, with official entries from Toyota, Porsche, BMW, Nissan and quick drivers like Martin Brundle, Thierry Boutsen and JJ Lehto, or Le Mans specialists like Tom Kristensen. It was a very, very hotly contested year in terms of the intensity and pace of the race.

  We took ourselves off to Hockenheim and did some testing on the old circuit, the layout without the chicanes, which meant we were able to run at incredibly high pace, taking a bit of down-force off the car to help our top speed. At Le Mans you need the balance between cornering and top speed on the straights, you need to get through the Porsche curves coming back towards the main straight there – we needed to be competitive on every part of the circuit. Within the team our thinking was, ‘Okay, let’s put a bit more performance onto the straights with the aerodynamics and make the car a bit more slippery, and go there in better shape for the race.’ The critical area is the undertray at the front of the car. We had these little ‘flicks’, aerodynamic add-ons which we could put on at each side of the nose to give us more down-force should it rain, and we thought that with Bridgestone tyres, and with the track rubber
ing in and becoming grippier over the race weekend, we still had a chance to win. Armed with what we had learned at Hockenheim, we went back to Le Mans for the famous race itself.

  It would turn into the worst race weekend of my entire career.

  *

  Practice was going along all right until Thursday night, 10 June. I was pretty happy with what we’d done in my car so far, even if we were struggling a bit for outright pace when Marcel was at the wheel. I had only done three timed laps in the car myself and I was out there doing some final reliability checks, getting my eye in. That’s when I came up behind Frank Biela in his open-topped Audi on the section between Mulsanne Corner and Indianapolis at the southern end of the circuit, where you brake for the hairpin and then accelerate up to sixth on the way to the first kink. Biela was cooperating nicely, I was going with the flow – I loved driving in the twilight and it’s nice to punch out the lap times round there. I was pretty close to him just after the apex when the front of my car started to feel light. Nothing unusual there: these are big cars, they punch a big hole in the air and when you get close up behind someone else the car loses a bit of down-force here and there. I wasn’t unduly concerned at first. But I quickly realised, ‘I can’t bring this back … this thing’s going to go up.’