Aussie Grit (20 page)

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At Germany’s famous Nürburgring in 2003 Ann and I were able to make a significant announcement, one which had nothing to do with my driving career. We were setting up the inaugural Mark Webber Challenge, a new adventure race in Tasmania, set among some of the most ruggedly beautiful scenery Australia has to offer. The first 10-day Challenge would take place in November after the completion of the Formula 1 season.

The inspiration behind it was a familiar one for most top-flight sportsmen and sportswomen: the desire to give something back. The idea was to force people out of their comfort zone, which just happens to be the title Steve Waugh picked for his autobiography, one of the finest sports books I have ever read. Steve was coming with us to
Tasmania as were James Tomkins, a member of Australia’s ‘Oarsome Foursome’ of Olympic rowers, tennis Grand Slam tournament winner Pat Rafter and the athlete who thrilled the whole country with her magnificent 400-metre sprint victory in the 2000 Sydney Olympics, Cathy Freeman.

Designed to showcase Tasmania as a world-class adventure destination, the inaugural Challenge took in a thousand kilometres and a range of sporting activities that included cross-country running, mountain-biking and kayaking. In addition to its fund-raising aims, the Challenge answered another need. It would really help with the all-round conditioning a modern F1 driver requires to do his day job. You want as many strings in your bow as you can have to prepare you for racing the car on the limit lap after lap and for the bloody big bang that’s also going to come one day – as I had seen in Brazil.

Grand Prix drivers have to condition themselves to make sure they don’t get run down during a hectic schedule of worldwide travel and racing. They are generally fit people, they can take the strains and the pressures of the different countries we race in, and specialist trainers had always encouraged me not to have what they call too tight a pyramid. You want your physical fitness to be built on a good, broad foundation, and that’s what I had been working towards for years: going for a long paddle, going for a long run, sprint sessions, lifting weights, swimming, covering as many bases as I could. The Mark Webber Challenge encapsulated all of that, and it had two other key elements for me: the chance to work within a team, and the competitive urge to see how I might go against some pretty serious athletes.

Being on the Challenge – seven so far – puts me in a completely different world from the one I normally operate in. In F1 you live in a fishbowl, where price means more than value, relationships are built on false foundations and the moral compass is sometimes distorted. The Challenge was the perfect antidote to what Ann often calls ‘that Formula 1 life’, a professional environment that became more and more disenchanting as the years went by. To me it is a happy coincidence that we announced the creation of the Mark Webber Challenge at the place where, six years later, I would rise to the challenge of being a Grand Prix winner.

Although I wanted to test my own limits, the Mark Webber Challenge was not conceived as a competition, more as a personal test for anyone who wanted to join me in one of the most beautiful but also most daunting places on our planet. Since its inception, I believe it has become one of the most respected multi-sports challenges an athlete can face.

The first Mark Webber Challenge was incredibly physical: big, big days, and 10 of them – one of the hardest things I’ve done in my life, by a long way. One of the most pleasing things for me after the first Challenge was the reaction from Bernie Shrosbree, the rugged ex-marine who played such a part early on in my own quest for genuine fitness. It was Bernie who introduced me to the whole idea of multi-sports training; he came on my team for the first Challenge, when there were some demons in me asking, ‘Well Mark, can you get through this thing yourself?’

After those 10 days Bernie said to an interviewer, ‘Mark is walking 10 feet taller than he was 10 days ago.
The Challenge was mentally more difficult than he anticipated; he had some incredible bad moments – a bad fall, a knee problem, but whatever condition he was in, he wanted to stick with it.’ Bernie added that James Tomkins had noticed a change in me as well. Apparently his comment to Bernie was, ‘He’s flipped over to pure leadership.’

It was a relief to me that I had come through it, but the last thing anyone should think is that the event that carries my name is all about me. It’s about encouraging people to step outside their comfort zone and discover what they are capable of. Every participant has his or her story about why they are there in the first place – it gives me goose bumps when I first hear those stories. I’m reminded of Wayne Bennett’s memoir,
The Man in the Mirror
, one of the finest sports books you will ever read. The book and its author have been twin sources of inspiration to me for years. The poem Bennett borrowed his title from sums up everything I believe: if you can look yourself in the eye, you have passed the sternest test of all. I believe many of the men and women who have come with us on the Challenge have passed that test – even if they didn’t think they would.

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After the extreme high of the inaugural Mark Webber Challenge in Tasmania in November 2003, the start of the 2004 racing year brought me back to earth with a bump. It would be an understatement to say that we expected more from R5, my second car at Jaguar, than it was willing to give us in 2004, a fact I quickly grasped at the first test session in January in Valencia where we were a full two seconds off the front-running pace. In F1 terms that’s a huge margin,
and while things seemed to have improved by the second test in late February, the season simply underlined our shortcomings.

We always had a good engine but we never seemed able to capitalise on any virtues the car possessed. The year can be summed up pretty easily: four points-scoring races in Bahrain, the Nürburgring, Silverstone and Hockenheim, but instead of the hoped-for podiums the best of those four results was sixth in Germany.

Among the few highlights was my first F1 front-row start in Malaysia, next to Michael’s Ferrari. Being next to Michael’s Ferrari in 2004 wasn’t easy for anyone; his final World Championship-winning season was a stunner, with a new record of 13 race victories – 12 of them in the first 13 rounds. So it was a big lap!

I hadn’t always felt comfortable in Malaysia because there are no reference points, no markers to help a driver on that wide and varied Sepang layout, and it was good to crack that circuit. But all that hard work went out the window when we endured a start-line fiasco with the clutch. It had oil all over it, so when the lights went out the Jaguar was going nowhere.

That led to one of my most aggressive first laps, because of course I did go
somewhere
– back down the field to seventeenth. By the end of the first lap I had clawed my way back up to eighth. I overtook Ralf Schumacher, which he didn’t like, so he came charging up from behind, gave me his front-wing endplate in the left rear and left me with a puncture.

I had to limp all the way back to the pits, damaging the floor and the diffuser in the process, so when I came back
out again the car just wasn’t working. I spun under braking for the final hairpin and retired. Monaco brought two days from hell with fires, hydraulic failures, electronic glitches; it wasn’t until the British Grand Prix at Silverstone in mid-July that I took my first World Championship point at Silverstone. I dedicated my eighth place to ‘John-Boy’ Walton, the team manager at Minardi who had died after a sudden heart attack the previous week.

Most of 2004’s good things came away from racing: an enjoyable visit from George Clooney, Matt Damon and Brad Pitt as they publicised the movie
Ocean’s Twelve
in Monaco; a trip to the Great Wall and the Forbidden City when F1 added China to its annual travel plans; and the opportunity to go bike riding with one of my then sporting heroes, Lance Armstrong, at the end of the season.

Best of all, late in 2004 Ann and I bought a beautiful property in the small town of Aston Clinton in Buckinghamshire. It put us close to the heartland of British motor racing, with Silverstone close at hand; it’s not so far from Heathrow and other airports, which is always a major consideration when you lead the life of an F1 driver; and it is a listed building, meaning it has certain heritage features that make it part of English history. Annie in particular has poured a lot of time and effort into the house; the dogs and I have become familiar with every blade of grass on every track around the place. It must have been a good decision: I’ve been there longer than I was with any of my racing teams and we have no intention of leaving!

D
URING MY TWO YEARS AT
J
AGUAR
R
ACING ITS MARKETING
guru, Nav Sidhu, came up with the idea for the team to generate some publicity by getting on the bandwagon with a couple of blockbuster movies which were just about to be released in the UK. The first one was
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
in 2003. The premiere took place on the Monday evening after the British Grand Prix, where I had raced with a promo for the film on the side of my Jag.

I had the dubious honour of driving the R4 up the red carpet in Leicester Square in the heart of London, wearing my tuxedo, with the whole cast, Arnold Schwarzenegger included, in attendance! Mum, Dad and a friend from Australia were over at the time and they joined Ann and me for the screening. We were separated when we got inside the cinema, but we had already agreed that it probably wasn’t our kind of movie and that they should keep an eye
out for us leaving about 20 minutes into the film and follow us a few minutes later.

I duly slipped out after 20 minutes. Annie followed me a few minutes later and we waited … and waited. I couldn’t work out why Mum and Dad hadn’t appeared, so I went back inside on the pretext that I had forgotten something. Our seats had been next to Jenson Button, who still had a close contractual relationship with Williams at that time, and he gave me a very odd look when I came back, started rummaging around and then disappeared back outside again. Still no sign of Mum and Dad! This went on for a while; Annie went back in and did the same as I had just done, so by this stage JB must really have been wondering what the hell was going on! Annie then went and fetched an usher with a flashlight and the two of them went looking.

This time Mum and Dad must have spotted her. We certainly couldn’t have made it more obvious if we’d tried. Still no sign. By now I was fuming as I wanted to get home but we had all come in the same car. So Annie and I headed off round the corner for a bite to eat.

The story is important because it was the unlikely start of my relationship with one of the greatest names in F1. When my phone rang a few minutes later, it was not my parents, but Sir Frank Williams. He said that much as he would like me to join his team for the 2004 season, his existing drivers were still under contract.

But he would be happy to have me in 2005.

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Sport’s a lot like life. In the end, it’s the people in it who matter – not the numbers, not the statistics, not the petty
politics but the people like Sir Frank Williams, founder of Williams Grand Prix Engineering, who live through their sport and are driven by the desire to excel, whatever the circumstances they find themselves in.

In March 1986 Frank found himself in circumstances he could never have imagined. A racer through and through, Frank by his own admission was driving his rented Ford Sierra too fast for the road to Nice airport after an F1 testing session at the Paul Ricard circuit in the south of France. When the almost inevitable accident happened, Frank suffered severe spinal injuries that left him a quadriplegic, paralysed from the shoulders down. But almost 30 years later Frank is still at the helm of the World Championship-winning F1 team that carries his name.

Over the years Williams had attracted drivers of the stature of Nelson Piquet, Nigel Mansell and my boyhood hero, Alain Prost. In 1994 he had finally got his man when Ayrton Senna left McLaren to join Williams. Within weeks the great Brazilian driver was dead, killed in one of Frank’s cars at Imola in northern Italy. It was a blow almost as devastating as the one Frank suffered on that road in France eight years earlier. If you looked closely at a Williams F1 car in 2014 you would see the familiar double-S logo and the words ‘Ayrton Senna Sempre’ – ‘Ayrton Senna Always’ – to mark the 20th anniversary of his death.

Sport’s a lot like life in another important way. Sometimes the heart rules the head, because sport is emotion or it is nothing at all, and sometimes our passions run away with us. When a man like Frank Williams called me and asked if I would like to drive for him, how could I say ‘No’?

Flavio wanted me to go to Renault after my spell at Jaguar. His master plan had been to have a Webber–Alonso pairing by 2005 and we were on the brink of it. But I looked at Williams – the man and the team – and I saw pretty well everything that I liked in Formula 1. My compatriot Alan Jones had helped Williams win their first titles at the start of the 1980s. Drivers as different as the stylish Piquet and the bulldog Mansell had won countless races in their cars. The name and the man behind it had been enough to lure Senna away from the team that took him to his three world titles. More importantly, the Williams team had emerged from its recent doldrums to win the last race of the 2004 season in Brazil.

Their current drivers Juan Pablo Montoya and Ralf Schumacher were both moving on at the end of 2004; Williams wouldn’t name my teammate until months later but obviously they were pretty keen to get the deal with me done and dusted and I took that as a feather in the Webber cap. In fact my new teammate was to be a German by the name of Nick Heidfeld. ‘Quick Nick’ had won the 1999 F3000 title; since then he had been to the short-lived Prost team for his F1 debut in 2000, moved on to Sauber for three seasons and spent 2004 at Jordan.

For me, the decision was easy. I followed my heart. The interest in me from Williams had begun as early as my sixth race with Jaguar. At the A1-Ring in Austria in May 2003 I set the third-fastest lap of the race, bettered only by the two Ferrari drivers, Michael Schumacher and Rubens Barrichello, and even then I was only five hundredths of a second behind the Brazilian.