Aussie Grit (12 page)

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 last 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.

I
N THE EARLY PART OF
1999 I
FLEW IN AND OUT OF
A
USTRALIA
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 rubbering 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.’

It happened so fast that it was just like an aeroplane taking off. In fact that’s exactly what was happening: at this point I was probably doing close to 300 kilometres per hour and the car was just taking off. I should point out that at Fontana Bernd and I had been slip-streaming at 330 kilometres per
hour and never had a problem, though of course it’s fine on a billiard-table track like that. At Le Mans it’s bumpy and very narrow on the run down to Indianapolis. I jumped on the brakes, but it was too late. I couldn’t see Frank’s car any more, I was going straight up. I could see the sky and then the ground and then the sky again, I could almost see the headlights clipping the trees – it was dusk, not really dark – and I was a passenger in this 1000-kilo racing car 10 metres in the air doing 300 kilometres per hour. Much of the Le Mans circuit snakes through a forest; I knew how thin the windscreens were on those cars, they’re not designed to be taking trees on, and I thought, ‘That’s probably the only thing that will see me off, I’ll probably cop it if I go into the trees.’ I also knew there was a kink in the circuit so if the thing kept tracking straight I
would
go into the trees. I was thinking clearly, but I was also massively frightened. By this time I’m in mid-flight, a long way up, and everything’s silent – that was the spookiest part, there was just no noise.

And it’s all in slow motion as this thing that weighs a tonne feels as light as a leaf in the wind. Ground, sky, ground: I knew I’d done a flip, but I lost my bearings. Frightened, yes, and yet paradoxically I was calm and completely relaxed.

It’s true what they say: at a moment like that your life does flash before you. The images, the chapters that machine-gunned themselves across my mind as they did when I was in the air were phenomenal. My sister Leanne had had her first baby the year before. I thought of them, and then, ‘I’m too young,’ then, ‘Bloody hell, it’s Thursday night at Le Mans, maybe this is it.’ The whole thing seemed to take five or six minutes but it was probably only three or four seconds.

When I hit the ground I knew I was still within the track fencing – and I was very relieved to know I was still here. In fact I had come down on the right rear of the car; it was on its roof for a short period, apparently, but I don’t really remember a huge amount about that. The air-box was ripped off and there was quite a bit of structural damage to the roof, but somehow it finished on all fours. I had just done several back-flips – some eye-witnesses said the car had gone over three times in mid-air – and landed.

I stopped as close to a marshals’ post as I could get. Obviously I didn’t have any real control, but I did have some brakes left and I managed to pull over to the left-hand side of the track. The marshal was actually gesturing to me to come a little bit closer: he clearly had no idea what I had just been through, he had just looked up to see this damaged car arriving at his post. I was relieved, yes, but now I was also shocked.