Aussie Grit (2 page)

With the help of one of your pit crew, the belts are pulled extremely tight, for two reasons: the first, obviously, is to hold you in place in the event of what we call a ‘shunt’; the second, less obviously, is to help eliminate the muscle fatigue that would come from trying to keep yourself properly in the seat without belts. You need to be a fixed component of the machine.

How tight are the belts? Back in 2001, when I won the F3000 race at Imola, I was on painkillers to counter the effects of a broken rib caused by the extreme cornering loads in a recent F1 test in the Benetton-Renault.

With less than 15 minutes to race start, I sometimes hop out again – the reverse of bump-slither-step – and attend to the physical necessities or, putting it another way, go for a pee at the last possible moment; and stretch the lower back and glutes one last time because they are going to be immobilised for the next couple of hours. Hop back in, check the belts and HANS device, the one that looks after the head and neck, get as comfortable as the car allows, connect the drink bottle.

So: you are strapped into a space barely big enough to contain you in the first place. You can scarcely move, except for your feet, arms, hands. The headrest comes in pretty snugly around you; down goes the visor, the radio sits about 3 millimetres off your lips, earplugs in, drink tube coming in beside the radio … and the sensation of enclosure is heightened even more. With that comes stress and elevated heart rate, which goes up because of the pressure on your ribcage; you can’t breathe normally as you would standing or running or riding a bike, you’re in a quite different position.

Don’t focus too far ahead, just concentrate on getting the immediate things right. Talk to your race engineer: how strong is the wind out on the circuit? What’s the track temperature? Have we got our plan right for controlling the first part of the race?

As the countdown intensifies, all the people begin to melt away. Just moments before the start of the warm-up lap may be the first time this weekend I have seen, ‘live’ as
it were, the Ferrari or Mercedes alongside me on our row of the grid.

A practice start at the end of pit lane was part of the pre-race routine; so was a full throttle check, always insisted on by engine-supplier Renault; then a radio check and an electronics check on the clutch. Coming through the grid was like threading the needle, manoeuvring the car through the literally hundreds of people – pit crew, media, race officials, VIPs and countless hangers-on – who manage to find their way out there.

The warm-up lap is broken down into three sectors. Sector 1 is all about getting the engine cooled after sitting, sometimes for an alarmingly long time, waiting for the signal to go. Use high gears, say up to seventh, and sit at around 6000 revs if possible. I’m working the tyres, veering sharply from side to side to get them warm, but not overdoing the zig-zag stuff. ‘Engine temp fine,’ crackles through my earplugs, so it’s time to focus on the brakes. Now I can open the throttle and hit the brake pedal to warm them up without worrying about the effects of any overheating on the engine behind me. In Sector 3 I’m off the leash to do whatever I like on the engine front; now it’s all about making sure brakes and tyres are up around their ideal working temperatures.

F1 fans will be familiar with those sudden bursts of pace – burn-outs – from the drivers midway through their warm-up lap, and that’s another little bit of information to be retained. We used to be given documents telling us where we could start those burn-outs on the circuit in relation to visual cues like sponsor hoardings – all very well if you could remember the right sponsor!

Another factor in the equation: fuel. Is this a circuit where our fuel consumption is critical? Or, just as importantly, someone else’s? In my latter F1 days the Mercedes cars were known to be fuel-sensitive: if the two Red Bulls were on the front row we sometimes debated whether we should do an unusually fast formation lap to help set their nerves on edge, though in practice we never did. Pull up in my grid slot, select neutral … and wait for the moment of truth.

I used to get a call from pit wall when the 17th of the 22 cars had reached its grid slot. That’s when I selected first gear. Then I built the engine revs from the moment when the second of the five red lights on the gantry came on. Waiting for the lights to go out, the drivers feel their heart rate rise. Mine was less dramatic than many: with a resting heart rate in the low 40s when I was at peak fitness, it would climb to around 120 at a Grand Prix start and the maximum I ever recorded was 182. A big part of it is simple adrenaline; I could sound perfectly normal in conversation with my crew but my heart rate would be noticeably higher than before.

The simple truth of a Grand Prix start is that you must react to the lights as best you can. People probably think you’re trying to get a jump on everyone else by anticipating that moment – but that’s a reasonably good way to get yourself penalised for a jump start. It’s hard to anticipate in any case because there is a random ‘window’ of 3–5 seconds in which the lights will go out. You’ll be doing 100 kilometres an hour in less than three seconds and it’s risky to get ahead of yourself.

Raw acceleration, braking, cornering – everything is on an extreme level. Even people who are used to racing at
a high level in other categories struggle to totally calibrate with what a Formula 1 car can do. The more experience you gain, the slower things get, but the inputs – the movements the driver makes on steering-wheel, throttle and so on – are unbelievably fine.

If the two Red Bulls were on the front row of the grid I would regularly lose 3 or 4 metres to Sebastian in the first couple of seconds of a race. We tried various techniques to help reaction time; I did a warm-up routine before getting into the car but I binned that idea because my reaction times were actually better on a lower heart-rate, not higher. That’s to do with your unique physical make-up. In the days when they were teammates at Ferrari, Eddie Irvine’s reaction times were markedly superior to Michael Schumacher’s, and another Ferrari favourite, Felipe Massa, was always very quick. But bear in mind that we are talking about a range of around only two-hundredths of a second …

Part of my perceived problem with race starts in the later stages of my F1 career was not, as a lot of people probably thought, down to age, but my sensitivity to rubber! At any race start the driver wants to be as sensitive as he can to what happens when he drops the clutch and begins to feel the wheels move under him. It’s essential to eliminate or at least minimise wheel-spin – and after the change of rules on F1 tyre supply I just couldn’t ‘feel’ the Pirellis to the degree I should have done.

So much information to process as the crucial moment approaches. Do we know the tyre temperatures? What’s the grip level from the track like? It can vary dramatically depending on whether a driver’s starting position is on the
left or right side of the track. One will have had more rubber laid down on it during race weekend than the other as the cars follow the correct line, and that rubber will interact with your tyres to help ‘launch’ the car into motion.

What’s the clutch’s ‘bite’ point, the moment at which the car comes alive? Back in my Formula Ford days it was pretty straightforward: 8000 revs, dump the clutch, bang, go! The technical sophistication of a Grand Prix car is light years away from that, but the reactions from the components governed by technology were never entirely predictable – a bit like the driver’s!

And what about the track itself? They can be worlds apart: at Interlagos in Brazil, the start is uphill so the driver has to keep his foot on the brakes to stop rolling backwards; at Suzuka in Japan it’s the exact opposite as the circuit plunges immediately downhill to that thrilling first corner and the car wants to start rolling forward.

Then all hell is let loose on your eardrums, first by the sound of your engine screaming into racing mode. The first few seconds of a race – often so crucial to what happens at the other end – also depend on the track. Take Monaco: the run to the first corner, Ste Dévote, is short, tense and incredibly tight; Monza is the opposite, with that long, long run down to the right–left chicane at the end of the straight. Getting the gear-shift points is vital: lights on the wheel and, if you have asked for it, a ‘beep’ will remind you to shift.

A driver goes through so many emotions during the course of a race – all your sensations are heightened – so if someone goes off the track you can actually smell the cut grass before you go past the scene. It’s just as well, really:
your eyes are not telling you all that much. The driver’s eye-line is at knee level so the sensation of speed is greatly increased from where he is sitting, and the trajectory can be a little hard to pick out.

Our vision – already fairly tightly defined by our helmets – is further reduced by the high sides of the cockpit with the padded insert to protect the driver’s head in case of impact. Believe it or not, but when I’m in the cockpit I can’t see my own front wing. And it only gets worse when it rains.

Your visibility then is virtually nil, so you are making micro-decisions the whole time. I can’t think of any sport, motorcycle racing excepted, where such focus is required, where your visibility is so severely tested at such speed. Every now and again you get a break in the level of spray, you catch a glimpse of a braking board or something else that will give you a context.

You’re looking for hoardings or signs as markers to where exactly you might be on a 5-kilometre circuit. Your default vision has been pulled back so much closer to where you are sitting and believe me, pulling information from the side of the car rather than the front, working out to within 20 metres where you actually are, is mentally very draining. The racing lines change in the wet, too. More than ever, in these conditions, composure is what’s called for.

Mental strength is certainly what you need when it comes to racing at a place like Monaco. But then there is no place remotely like Monaco. When I was leading there it was constant resetting, lap by lap: copy and paste what you did last time round, nudge your confidence level up over a two-to-three lap stretch; don’t try to grab too much round there. At Mirabeau, for example, the downhill
run followed by the right-hander that takes you towards the hairpin, you have to fight against the feeling that you’re on the brakes too early. Jenson Button once asked me if I felt, as he said he did, that as the race went on the Monaco barriers actually closed in on you even more. My answer was a firm ‘No’: those barriers don’t move; it’s always about you, your car and the track you are on.

Our job is to keep the car on the absolute limit and get it through the corners as quickly as possible. Every F1 corner is a tightrope, with the driver working as hard as he can to balance the car and get a bit more out of it – yet this animal underneath us is trying to pull our arms out of our sockets and our head off our shoulders.

Corner entry is the crucial thing: hit the brakes at the right moment, hit them hard and ignore the deceleration forces – up to five times your own body weight – going through you.

Next: turn into the corner itself. Some turn in early, others ‘go deeper’, then turn in later and more violently. Keep the car in line: don’t put too much lock on, don’t slide – stay on that tightrope. Get to the apex, the real change of direction, and start thinking about getting out of the corner. Keep the beast in line before you release it … use all of the road and then some on exit … then get on the throttle. Focus, feeling and concentration, corner after corner, lap after lap.

In fact you can get into that trance-like state that sporting people call ‘the zone’. For a racing driver it’s about flow and rhythm, your inputs allowing the car to weave its way around a circuit smoothly and consistently – something you can gauge by your lap times. When I was ‘in the zone’
I found myself thinking like a chess-player, several moves ahead; when the car was going through Casino Square I was already mentally at Mirabeau. There was that feeling of easy repeatability: every lap would be timed to within a tenth of a second of the one before or after. Rhythm … repetition.

It’s so hard to shut down after a Grand Prix. Your ears feel as if you’ve just got out of an aeroplane but then these things are fighter jets that stay on the ground, so in a sense you have. You’ve been fixed for so long at the centre of a storm of sound and vibration, your concentration levels have been phenomenally high as you process information coming at you and changing virtually with every metre of ground you have been covering. All you want to do is get out of there.

What’s it like to be in the cockpit of an F1 car?

It’s like running a marathon in shoes two sizes too small.

I
WAS AN ADDICT BEFORE
I
WAS
10.

I simply couldn’t get enough: I’d have my fix on a Sunday night, or Monday morning, and I’d keep coming back for another hit, and another one after that. It started in 1984, when I was just seven years old. That was the year Nigel Mansell should have won the Monaco Grand Prix for Lotus but crashed in the wet on the hill going up towards Casino Square. His accident left a young bloke called Ayrton Senna in with a great shout of winning his first Grand Prix in a Toleman Hart, of all things, but the race was stopped because of the rain and Alain Prost was declared the winner for McLaren on count-back instead. I remember it like yesterday. My drug, of course, was Formula 1.

I was born on 27 August, 1976, midway through the memorable year when Britain’s James Hunt and Austrian Niki Lauda went head-to-head for the world title. Their
season-long duel, including Lauda’s near-fatal crash in Germany, was the subject of the highly successful 2013 movie
Rush
. When I came on the scene the Webber clan was living in Queanbeyan (from the Aboriginal ‘Quinbean’, meaning ‘clear waters’) in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales, hard up against the border with the Australian Capital Territory. It’s best known for producing people who excelled in sport, like cricketer Brad Haddin, squash star Heather McKay and Rugby Union great David Campese.