Aussie Grit (21 page)

Williams started sniffing around, and just over a year later the approaches became serious. Ann and I thought
this was, at last, the opportunity to launch ourselves. I remember driving the race-winning Williams from Brazil 2004 at the end of that year and thinking, ‘This is going to be awesome.’ The Webber backside was going to be in a car previously graced by names like Jones, Reutemann, Piquet, Mansell, Prost, Senna, Hill, Villeneuve …

The deal first offered in 2003 was confirmed on 28 July 2004, and I called it ‘the most significant milestone in my career to date’. As a result I endured the lowest time in my entire F1 career.

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FW27 was the first car to come from a new group of Williams people headed up by my compatriot Sam Michael. Sam had just been named Technical Director in succession to Patrick Head, the design genius behind Williams’s early title-winning cars, who had been made Director of Engineering. Williams were making sweeping changes; they had also appointed a new aerodynamicist in Loïc Bigois, who came with serious credentials, and the chief designer of the new car was Gavin Fisher. But they seemed to have been caught out by late regulation changes to F1 aerodynamics for 2005.

When I drove the FW27 at Jerez early in January I somehow posted the quickest time, but without telling anyone I privately thought, ‘Bloody hell, we’re gone …’ As early as that first test I rang Ann and told her we’d made the wrong decision. Ironically there is a moment in
Terminator 3
when one of the top brass trying to counter the latest invasion says disbelievingly, ‘This can’t be happening.’ I knew how he felt.

All of us in the F1 paddock broke one long-standing record in 2005: with 19 races between 6 March and 16 October it was the longest season in the sport’s history to that date. Bahrain and China had come on to the calendar in 2004; in 2005 they were joined by another new venue, Turkey, which would be the scene of some drama in my own career a few years later. The tweaks continued: we weren’t allowed tyre changes mid-race, which may have been a contributory factor as Ferrari’s six-year stranglehold over F1 came to an end. They were a Bridgestone team, and the change seemed to suit Michelin better. McLaren were super-strong, as you would expect from a driver line-up of Räikkönen and Montoya, but there was a young Spaniard by the name of Alonso who threw a spanner in their works.

A second test with my new team in Barcelona later in January was followed by a pre-Australian Grand Prix publicity stunt that involved me driving a Williams F1 car over the Sydney Harbour Bridge – quite an eerie experience with no other traffic allowed up there with me.

That year’s was the 10th Australian Grand Prix to be staged in Melbourne, and for me it was a pretty exhausting week of media engagements and behind-the-scenes stuff that left me once again relieved and happy to get into the paddock and shut the gates behind me.

The race itself was low-key, to say the least. I qualified third in the new split format, but that didn’t translate into a top-three finish because I got bottled up behind David Coulthard’s Red Bull Cosworth and came home fifth. Oh yes, and Giancarlo Fisichella, Fernando’s teammate, came out and won the first race of 2005 in a Renault. Talk about rubbing salt in the wound!

After Melbourne we went to Malaysia, which should have brought my first podium. But I touched wheels with Fisi between Turns 15 and 16: as I was passing him, he got on the dirty stuff on the inside of the next corner, his rear tyres were shot, he braked too late, needed to use me to get his car round the corner and ended up on top of mine. I had a taste of what was coming when Patrick Head, who was still very much a driving force at Williams, got stuck into me about that – ‘stupid place to pass’ and other comments along those lines. Two sixth places in Bahrain and Spain were some consolation, even though I believed we were doing far too much of our learning about FW27 in the races themselves rather than having the car sorted out by the time the red lights went out.

Thank goodness for some light relief: Barcelona brought one of those occasional rewarding experiences I have enjoyed so much through my career in the form of a pro-am tennis tournament staged by Barcelona-born tennis star Arantxa Sánchez Vicario and her brother Emilio, no slouch on court himself.

With the help of my compatriot Chris Styring, who also organised tennis hit-outs in Melbourne to help the Mark Webber Challenge Foundation, they always put it together superbly: there were several of the top Spanish stars there (and it was an eye-opener to realise just how huge tennis is in Spain, particularly on clay), but there were also French players and a handful of people from other sports, including me. It was my first snapshot of being on court with professional players and seeing how phenomenally good they were. The mutual respect among elite athletes from different disciplines is obvious, and those tennis players
were just such great people to be with. If memory serves me correctly I actually won the tournament once, but I think the standards had been deliberately lowered to help the amateurs! Interestingly, one of the photographs we have from those days shows a young Andy Murray standing at courtside looking on. He obviously learned from what he was watching!

Then came Monaco. The Monte Carlo race did bring that long-awaited first podium, but it was a disaster. I had absolutely towelled Heidfeld all weekend, every session. In the race we were stuck behind Fernando; the team made a call to bring Nick in and make a pit stop, which I’d had in mind because I was worried about losing more track positions. The way it worked out, I was pissed off that they gave Nick the chance to stop, come back out, enjoy two laps in free air and jump Fernando that way. I lost a position to my teammate, finished third to his second, and my engineer was livid. Heidfeld’s engineer had a lot better relationship with the man in charge of Williams’s strategy than mine did, so it was a bit of internal fun and games, which is why I was disappointed. I knew I was better than my teammate all weekend and he finished up on a higher step to me, that’s what made me look so unhappy.

The Nürburgring was another no-score even though I qualified on the second row again. I was taken out by Montoya’s McLaren while I was trying to defend my position against Trulli and Alonso, but fifth place in Canada in mid-June – my first points in Montreal – poured a little oil on what were clearly troubled waters. And then Indy! That was the year of the absolute shambles over the tyres when only six cars actually raced. Ours weren’t two of them.

Before we got there I was caught up in a little adventure that’s worth recounting. I was asked to do another appearance, and for once I was really looking forward to it. This one involved a group of us – Alex Wurz, for one, and some NASCAR drivers as well – going to Colorado for a three-day cycling camp at which there would be some pretty serious scientific testing to go through. It was being put together by Morris Denton of AMD, then sponsoring Ferrari, and Chris Carmichael. Anyway, off we go to Montreal airport on Sunday evening post-race, check in, see our bags trundle away on the conveyor belt, and shortly after learn that we can’t actually fly to Chicago to pick up our Colorado flight because the city’s O’Hare airport has been closed in by bad weather. Too late for those bags – they’re on their way. Frank’s personal pilot heard about our plight and came up with the perfect solution. They were going to fly down to Indianapolis later in the week, the North American races being back-to-back: why didn’t we borrow the plane, with Frank’s blessing, to get to our interim destination?

Great plan, until we were informed that we couldn’t take off in Canada and land in the US in a private aircraft without a full US visa, and we were travelling on the visa waiver system. No problem: the resourceful pilot suggested they take the plane over, land at Burlington, very close to the border, and meanwhile we cross over in a rental car and pick up the flight from there.

Then we discovered that the same visa issue would stop us: you couldn’t do a one-way trip in a rental car either. Talk about trains, planes and automobiles! By this time it’s early Monday morning; eventually, somehow, we got hold of a van that deposited us on the airfield to pick up the flight to
Colorado – and our bags were waiting for us there! Doubly amazing because we had gone to great lengths to explain, after the Montreal check-in fiasco, that they should be sent to Indianapolis. Bear in mind that this is security-conscious America post-9/11: where those bags had been and how they got to Colorado I will never know.

Once we all, bags and drivers, finally got to the famous Brickyard it was pretty clear early on that trouble was brewing. There were monster shunts: my former sports car teammate Ricardo Zonta, test driver for Toyota, was the first to find himself in trouble, on the infield section on Friday after his left rear tyre failed. Worse was to come. That afternoon Ricardo’s Toyota teammate Ralf Schumacher went into the wall hard on the banked Turn 13 when, he said, he felt something give way on the left-hand side of his car as well. The medical men forbade him from taking any further part in the weekend.

So alarm bells were ringing early on about the casing on the Michelin tyres, and we were experiencing a lot of loading on that side of the cars on the Indianapolis banking. Ironically it was Jarno Trulli in the other Toyota who grabbed pole position on Saturday, but that turned out to be a furphy as they had put a thimbleful of fuel in the TF105 to rescue some good publicity, and possibly because they already knew their man would not be in the field the following day. I qualified ninth, with a disgruntled teammate back in 15th between the two Red Bulls.

Ours was not a happy camp for other reasons, namely the widening rift between Williams and our engine partner BMW, but there were more immediate problems to contend with. We had our normal team meeting that night, and it
never crossed our minds that we wouldn’t be racing next day. We just thought there would be some magical solution. Different tyre pressures, a change of camber on the wheels, and it would be all right on the night. The show would go on.

But in the background Michelin were in a state of near-panic. At Williams we drivers were kept a little bit in the dark. There was a further meeting that night down in the pits with all the Michelin teams’ technical directors trying to work out what to do. The French company had brought in some different casings by then, a stiffer sidewall meant originally for the Barcelona race; in fact they threw everything at the problem overnight. On Saturday morning one of the Williams cars had a bulge on the sidewall of a tyre, which is the first indication that the tyre in question is about to fail. We limited ourselves to short runs, said we’d do qualifying, take it from there and have a look at our options for the race. Everyone got through the qualifying session and the tyres were fine.

But Michelin were adamant that the specification of tyre available to us was not guaranteed safe for racing speeds unless those speeds could somehow be reduced through the banked section of the famous oval. Don’t forget Michelin were supplying two-thirds of the field, but they’d got their calculations wrong and we couldn’t use these tyres on this track. So then it was down to the FIA and Michelin to work things out. There were a lot of voices from within the Bridgestone and Ferrari camps, saying the show must go on, which is understandable when you are at one of the temples of motor sport and people have come from all over America to see what’s supposed to be the absolute pinnacle of motor racing taking place in their own backyard.

By now it was all about these fans and what we could do to give them something for their money and their support. In the end we couldn’t find a way to do anything. Whenever some compromise was put forward the response was just ‘No, no, no’, there was no real flexibility. We were not going to take part in the United States Grand Prix. Early in the season, assessing the new Williams, I had said to myself, ‘This can’t be happening.’ On the Indianapolis grid I came across Bernie Ecclestone and he was saying, ‘This shouldn’t be happening …’

But it was happening. It was bizarre, really, getting ready and knowing you weren’t going to do the race – in front of 130,000 paying customers who had come expecting to see a Grand Prix. We did the formation lap, then all of the Michelin-shod runners peeled off, the Ferraris blissfully raced off into the distance and that was the Grand Prix of America that year! It was the one race Michael managed to win all season. By the way, it was also the last time a team known as Minardi ever scored points in Formula 1: Christijan Albers and Patrick Friesacher were two of the other four drivers on Bridgestones! We were booed as we were leaving the track, and no wonder. I really felt for Michelin because they are a brilliant company, with top people. They just got it wrong.

The Indianapolis fiasco came about largely because of the disunity among the people at the highest levels of the sport. The same applied to us as a group of drivers. As the movie
Rush
showed so well, it’s nothing new for drivers to have wildly varying opinions, especially when it comes to the biggest issue of all: safety. One of the most absorbing aspects of today’s F1 racing, as it was back then, is the
activities of the GPDA, the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association, in which I was a pretty active participant for much of my F1 career. Interestingly, it was Michael Schumacher who first approached me to play an active role just a couple of years into my own F1 career.

The Indianapolis affair was one of the most challenging periods for the GPDA during my close involvement. As the situation developed we had Michael clearly taking a position with Max Mosley, the FIA President, who was insisting that the race go ahead; the rest of us in the GPDA were worried about safety, because if you had Michelin tyres clearly it was a problem. David Coulthard took a phone call from Max, a pretty stern one, saying ‘Pull your head in,’ which we weren’t happy about as a group. Michael didn’t really support us much, so David, Jarno, Ralf Schumacher and I got together and compiled a petition saying we weren’t happy with the way the issue had been handled and we’d like to do something better in the future. Even the Bridgestone drivers signed. All except Michael.