Aussie Grit (10 page)

Sure enough, I hit him and the impact turned me pretty much onto the front of the truck. Now it was pushing me
down the motorway, and when I came off the truck I was totally paranoid about being T-boned because they drive so fast over there. That didn’t happen, but instead I had a head-on with the central reservation, put the three-pointed star up where the windscreen wiper sits and absolutely destroyed the car. I wasn’t hurt at all: I was cool when I got out and then about 30 seconds later the shock hit. It got worse when I realised the truck driver was out of his cab and intent on killing me. That much was clear, even though he didn’t speak any English and my Polish is not that great. Thankfully a lady turned up who spoke multiple languages and managed to calm things down a little and eventually the police arrived as well.

Not knowing what else to do, I rang Bernd.

‘Bernd, mate, I’ve had an absolute monster shunt, driving way too fast, I’m not going to make the function. What do you think I should do?’

He cut right through: ‘Ring Norbert straightaway. Go straight to the top and tell him you’ve f#*ked up, driving like an idiot.’

I rang Norbert, expecting the worst, and said, ‘Norbert, I’ve had a crash, I was driving too quick and the car’s a write-off.’

He asked, ‘How are you, are you okay?’

Once I had reassured him I was unhurt he started making things happen. Mercedes organised for the police to take me to a dealership where I picked up another car. The people bringing my wrecked car were told very clearly not to drive it past the dealership showroom where a new C-Class Mercedes was being launched. I did some work for the dealer in return, signed some photos and did an hour’s
worth of promotional activity for them, which struck me as quite a funny turn of events.

Another stroke of luck was that the accident happened not far from where Bernd’s parents lived. I wasn’t really up for driving by that time so the police took me to the Schneiders’ house and I stayed there overnight.

My tail was between my legs, but the experience taught me another important lesson. It was a big wake-up call about pulling my head in – it’s a good thing I was on my own because the passengers would have been in a much worse state than I was. The driver’s was the only straight door on the car. Bernd’s advice was brilliant: you’ve got to go straight to the top because that way the story is unfiltered. I think Bernd knew that because he’d had plenty of experience of those situations! For me, though, it was a nice little reminder from upstairs to rein it all in a bit.

*

If Bernd Schneider was the teacher when it came to sorting the car out, the man who took control of my personal fitness side was Tony Matthis. Tony was the ski coach of the Austrian World Cup team; Mercedes had been using him to get their driver squad into shape for some years. The place where I found out how far I had to travel in fitness terms was Zürs, in the Austrian Alps. I went there briefly with Bernd just before Christmas 1997; he told me to be sure and enjoy the trip because I sure as hell wouldn’t find the next one much fun!

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.

*

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.

The 10-round series began at Oschersleben, in what was once East Germany. Our three-car force consisted of Schneider/Webber in one car and an interesting pairing
of young and old in the second: three-time Le Mans winner (for Porsche) Klaus Ludwig and Brazilian Ricardo Zonta. Another privately entered Mercedes was to be shared by Jean-Marc Gounon and Marcel Tiemann. All year long comparisons would be drawn, inevitably, between Ricardo and myself – two young chargers in the same Mercedes family with a Formula 1 seat as a very realistic prospect if we did well. Score round one to the other old/new pairing: with our day compromised by damage to a wheel rim, third was the best Bernd and I could do as Klaus and Ricardo drew first blood.

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 was 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!

*

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.