Aussie Grit (18 page)

Alex, my engineer, came on the radio yelling, ‘Salo’s off, Salo’s off!’

I came out of Turn 3, where there’s a little kink, and I checked in the left mirror which is normally where you look for the bloke coming up behind you at that point on the track – and I couldn’t see Salo’s Toyota.

I thought, ‘There’s no way he can be beside me, where the hell’s he gone? This is strange, really strange …’

It only got stranger. I was on the last lap … but then I realised it wasn’t: the crowd’s reaction had confused me. I’d seen on my pit board
2 to go
and then my mind started to play games. Were there still two to go? The leaders had lapped me: when was the chequered flag going to come out?

The crowd was going mental, and it all just happened – the most unbelievable moment of my life. Fifth place and two points on my debut: the World Championship was in its 53rd season, hundreds of drivers had contested hundreds of Grands Prix and I was only the 50th to score points in his first F1 race.

As soon as I crossed the line to clinch that fifth place the tears came. I couldn’t believe it had actually happened. The crowd, the PA, Stoddy … the whole thing was a blur. You could see it in everyone’s eyes: it wasn’t just a sporting event, it had turned into something a bit special for the locals. But I used up a lot of luck on the first one!

After the ‘real’ podium ceremony featuring Michael Schumacher, Juan Pablo Montoya and Kimi Räikkönen, Ron Walker and his media man Geoff Harris came down to the Minardi garage and said they were going to get me up there for the Aussie crowd. It was a highly irregular breach of protocol that might have cost us those two precious points if the authorities hadn’t shown a human touch on the day.

I wasn’t so keen on being shoved up there, mainly because my back was killing me: I didn’t really fit that well in the car and I just wanted to get hold of my physio, fellow Aussie Rod ‘Rocket’ McLean, because it needed unwinding. I was uncomfortable with it in another way, because a podium, especially in F1, is such a difficult thing to achieve. I felt the only men entitled to be up there were the ones who had finished in the top three, not some local bloke who was fifth. But it happened on the spur of the moment. Then Sabine Kehm, Schuey’s press officer, came down to our garage to say Michael had requested the pleasure of our company in the Ferrari garage. He and I had some photos taken because, shrewd operator that he was, he’d won the race and he didn’t want the new local hero to keep him off the next day’s front page!

Emotionally I was fine: well, in the car I was, but when I got out and saw Dad I struggled to keep myself in check. Poor Mum was in the grandstand opposite the Minardi garage with half of Queanbeyan who had travelled down for the race. Understandably she wanted to share in the celebrations and when the crowd was allowed onto the track one of my mates basically hauled her up and over the safety fence so she could join us. I must have been in shock because
after I had a shower, a massage and a bit of a private celebration, the rest of the night was an absolute blur.

I remember Annie being very insistent that before any more celebrating could be done she needed to get her press release out. All I can say is thank God for email: no more of those endless faxes, just a press of the Send button was all it took for the news to go round the world within minutes. Minardi threw an impromptu party that we called in at before going on to enjoy the rest of the night in private. I recall meeting up with friends from Queanbeyan in the Crown Casino but we didn’t know where to go! We tried getting into a night-club but were refused entry. It was only as we were walking away that someone at the club realised who I was and came chasing after us to invite us in. We told them where to poke it!

Days later I spoke to several people and said it was a shame they hadn’t been in Melbourne for the race – and they had been! What we had done only really sank in when I got back to Europe and experienced the response from Italy. It helped me appreciate the enormous following Formula 1 enjoys around the world, and how happy the fans were to see battlers like the little Minardi team enjoy some reward.

The great Murray Walker, ‘the voice of Formula 1’, rang me in tears. That was one of my only regrets, that Murray’s familiar, steely voice, so well known to me from my early days of watching F1 on television, wasn’t calling my first race as he had retired by then. We really did know that those were probably going to be our first and last points of the year, and did we make the most of it! I don’t mean just with the partying that went on, but also in respecting what had happened that day, how good the team had really been.
To cap it all off, Annie had met a bloke called Danny Wallis at the Foster’s pre-race party and he said he would give me $5000 if I finished the race. We rang him on the Monday after Grand Prix weekend, and he did!

*

While Aussie fans painted Albert Park green and gold as if ‘their’ man had won the race, the Formula 1 world I had stepped into was another colour entirely: red. I became a Grand Prix driver while Ferrari were in the middle of an astonishing run of success that saw them win the Constructors’ Championship six times in a row from 1999. Michael Schumacher had been keen to get in on the photographs in Melbourne because he had become used to lording it over the F1 scene. A broken leg at Silverstone in ’99 had prevented him winning the drivers’ title that year, but his first World Championship as a Ferrari driver came in 2000 – the Scuderia’s first drivers’ crown since Jody Scheckter way back in 1979 – and he retained it the following year. In fact his winning margin of 58 points over McLaren’s David Coulthard in 2001 was the biggest in the 52 years of World Championship history to that date. In 2002 he would go even higher: there were 17 races that year – and Michael Schumacher was on the podium at every one of them! He won 11 races, beating a record set by Nigel Mansell with Williams in 1992, which Michael himself had equalled three times previously. His winning margin in 2002 was 67 points.

When I say Schumacher won 11 races, that’s not quite the whole picture. In 2002 a subject that would come back to play a major part in my own F1 career many years later
raised its ugly head: team orders. In Austria, which was only the sixth round of the 2002 season, Michael’s Ferrari teammate Rubens Barrichello thrashed him in qualifying to take pole, then led the race handsomely before bowing to team orders right at the very end and allowing Schuey to cross the line ahead of him. It turned pretty ugly after that, with Michael taking the winner’s trophy and promptly handing it to Rubens, who ended up very sheepishly on the top step of the podium with the first- and second-place trophies in his arms. Ferrari’s argument was that they needed to guarantee their lead driver maximum points in his title campaign – with 11 races still to go!

There was another red-faced moment in Indianapolis when the Ferrari drivers, who had waltzed away with the race from the start, shuffled places right on the line. Some said Michael was trying to repay Rubens for Austria, as the Brazilian was eventually declared the winner of the American race. Team orders were banned at the end of the season.

My own first F1 season, with all the uncertainty over finances, was tough away from the track and it was a lot more bruising on it. I hardly fitted in the Minardi Asiatech and I was black and blue after every bloody race. But that first result in Australia was a huge financial relief for Stoddy and while there were alarms like Spain, where we had to pull out because of concerns over our cars’ rear wings, we did enjoy some other reasonable afternoons.

One of them was my first time back in Monaco since that memorable day in 2001. I was going very well, up in the top eight, then late in the race a front tyre stripped a tread and we finished eleventh. Monaco was memorable for
another reason: the curious incident of the camp-bed in the night. If anyone thought life was all beer and skittles now that I was in F1, they should have seen where Stoddy had us staying in Monaco. Rumour had it that the ‘hotel’ was a former brothel, and all I can say is that they must have had inventive clients. The rooms weren’t big enough to swing a cat in. And Team Webber was occupying only one of them, which meant Dad was on a camp-bed inches away from his son and, as usual, snoring his head off. He used to feel very bad about it, but that was small consolation if you were the one having to get up and race the next day. I issued the usual warning – he always used to wake up with pillows and shoes strewn around him where someone had thrown them at him the previous night but they made no difference. So in desperation I got up and snapped the camp-bed shut with Dad still in the middle of it. He woke up then and stopped snoring …

*

After only a few rounds of the championship the racing press was full of stories about Stoddy not being able to make it through to the end of the season. Bernie Ecclestone himself was quoted as saying, ‘This is quite a high-powered game so they perhaps shouldn’t have been here.’

To be fair, Stoddy kept me in the loop, helping me understand how much pressure they were under. ‘Mate,’ he said to me in Austria, ‘we are absolutely on the edge here …’ It was hand-to-mouth stuff for him, that season: Minardi was almost like a family-run operation, with all the Italians from the original Minardi days when Giancarlo Minardi himself brought the team into F1 back in 1985. Paul loved all those
guys and kept them on, and I really enjoyed working with all the Italians, but he knew I was pretty important to him as well. I wasn’t going to make or break his team but my presence certainly helped. And he wanted to do the right thing by me. ‘I want to make sure that we give you the best opportunity,’ he said to me, ‘you’ve got to move on from here.’

Moves were already afoot. Flavio and Bruno were worried that Minardi wouldn’t last the whole season. In career terms it would have been catastrophic for me to have another six or eight months out, particularly at this level. Flavio started talking to Niki Lauda, the triple World Champion who had been put in charge of the new Jaguar F1 project. Flavio was particularly keen for me to do a test in the middle of the year; Jaguar’s drivers were Eddie Irvine and Pedro de la Rosa and the Spaniard was under fire.

The test drive with Jaguar took place right at the end of June in Barcelona. I was beating Irvine and de la Rosa in the Minardi regularly, so Niki was pretty keen to have a look at me as well. I couldn’t believe what I saw in the Jaguar camp. I’d be there an hour early, making sure I got absolutely ready, being as professional as I could be – and Irvine would be getting a massage! Not quite ready yet, go out to his garage 10–15 minutes late, do the installation lap … I was blown away. This was one of the first big teams in Formula 1 I’d seen at work and I thought, ‘Bloody hell, these drivers are getting away with murder!’ I guess I still had a lot of the Mercedes discipline in my head because I’d been given such a good schooling there. I had it drummed into me that no driver is bigger than his team and vice versa. These guys have worked their arses off all night to get the car ready and you come out 10 minutes late? It’s not on.

Once I got over the initial culture shock the test went well. The Jaguar had phenomenal horsepower compared with my Minardi. It wasn’t the best car in the world by any means but it had a lot of power and felt quite different. In around 50 laps I was within a couple of thousandths of de la Rosa’s times. It was pretty clear that Jaguar were going to replace both their drivers; I didn’t care which, as long as I got one of the seats.

Once I was reasonably sure that Jaguar wanted me, we got on with the rest of our Minardi season, which was made easier when Stoddy won his claim for payment of television monies, easing some of the pressure on him and the rest of us. We had a great weekend at Magny-Cours in France, leap-frogging both Toyotas and coming home in the top eight. Stoddy said afterwards he felt my drive that day was better than the points-scoring debut in Melbourne.

We capped the year off with another top-10 result in Japan and I finished 16th in the World Championship, which earned me F1’s equivalent of an Oscar: the ‘Bernie’ for Rookie of the Year 2002.

Two little episodes may help to paint a picture of how life was beginning to change. At the end of that rookie year I was invited to go to Slovakia, of all places, to do a magazine interview, attend a couple of functions and, as I understood it, help to raise the profile of F1 in that part of the world, possibly because they were toying with the idea of staging a Grand Prix of their own. Maybe the magazine in question had approached all the other F1 drivers and had been turned down!

The journey took us out beyond Bratislava itself, and it became apparent very quickly once we landed that this was
going to be no ordinary trip. First of all, my ‘interpreter’ was a stunner; she could have been some kind of movie star.

‘I’m with you for three days,’ she purred, ‘anything you need, just ask …’

Fortunately, Ann had come with me!

Late in 2002 I also allowed myself a moment of self-indulgent fun: I bought a BMW M5. I think there must have been a bonus clause of some kind in my Minardi deal and I used some of the money to acquire the Bimmer.

Dad was pretty ticked off with me, and he was right: what did I need a BMW M5 for? We had a seemingly endless series of Renaults on hand, but clearly I thought I deserved something a bit more special.

The BMW nearly got me into trouble one evening when I was on my way home from a function. I was honking along when a police car passed me coming the other way. I looked in the mirror, saw the brake lights glow and the flashing lights come on. In a split-second I made the decision to continue: the chase was on! I was in the right car, I knew the roads extremely well, although the question did flash through my mind: ‘Mark, why are you doing this?’

I only had five miles till I was safely home, the adrenaline was off the charts, so I went for it. I didn’t have to pass another car, which was good – and bad, because it meant my pursuers could still see me. There were lots of left-right, left-right flicks as I got closer to home, and they worked in my favour. I parked the car in the garage and waited 15 minutes with it ticking away as it cooled down – would the noise give me away? – and Annie upstairs wondering why the hell I hadn’t come into the house.