Aussie Grit (31 page)

Ann and I then drove to our holiday home in Vence in Provence, so there was another 600 kilometres on the clock that same night! We did some TV and radio interviews in the car and it felt so rewarding to have the first win of the year under the belt. Not only that, but I had kept a personal promise. When I left home I said to the dogs, ‘Hopefully, boys, I will bring home quite a big chunk of points for you,’ and that’s how it worked out. It was another very special day. Another one was waiting at the end of the very next week on the Mediterranean coast between France and Italy.

For eight years I had thought 3 March 2002 in Melbourne, my F1 debut, was my greatest day ever. That changed on 16 May 2010 on the other side of the world. That day I experienced the unique thrill of winning the Monaco Grand Prix. The jewel in the crown, the
crème de la crème
– use any cliché you like, but I knew when I crossed the line that this was the single greatest thrill a Formula 1 driver could ever have.

A look at the winners’ list should help explain why: Fangio wove his way around the chaos caused by a freak wave back in 1950 to win Monaco’s first World Championship Grand Prix … Moss won back-to-back races there in 1960 and 1961 … Stewart won Monaco three times and made a brilliant documentary,
Weekend of a Champion
, about it with Roman Polanski … Prost was a Monaco winner four times, Graham Hill and Schumacher five and Senna an astonishing six. More importantly to the Webber clan, the man who ignited Dad’s passion for racing, Jack Brabham, took his own first Grand Prix victory there in a
Cooper on 10 May 1959 – 51 years before my own day in the Monaco sunlight. That is quite some company for any driver to be keeping.

If they were starting a new World Championship today, would they keep Monaco on the calendar? A racing driver’s every instinct screams, ‘No!’

It’s too narrow, too tight, there is virtually nowhere to go if you start to lose the car. It’s a ridiculously short lap, it inflicts the severest strains imaginable on car and driver – and yet it is the most eagerly anticipated race of every season. It is, too, the only venue on the calendar that Formula 1 needs more than the venue needs Formula 1. For the driver, it’s just you against the track. It doesn’t matter if you make a minor mistake or a major one, the end result is the same – and it’s not good.

But going there less than a week after taking my third career Grand Prix victory in Spain meant I arrived with my confidence high. We didn’t have the best of Thursdays (Monaco starts a day earlier so they can open up the streets for Friday shopping). I got limited running in and I was never quite comfortable in the car. But we made changes on Saturday morning and knew we were in the hunt.

That feeling only grew when I took pole position for the second week running. In fact I could have taken it twice: in Q3 I did just the one four-lap run and my third and fourth times were good enough for top spot on the grid. My final lap of 1:13.892 was the only one under 1:14 all weekend. That day it felt like I found another gear in terms of confidence in the car. When you are concentrating so hard and putting everything on the edge your heart rate soars, and then you have that horrible wait to see if what you’ve done is
good enough. Someone in the post-qualifying press conference reminded me about Jack winning there all those years ago; I said that it was an honour to get pole but it would be the biggest highlight of my career if I could join him on the Monaco winners’ list the next day.

For a little while on Sunday the omens weren’t good. I managed to break the pit-lane speed limit during the pre-race installation laps and collected a €2200 fine for my trouble. More worryingly, I thought I had let all the hard work on Saturday go to waste when I made an average start. I don’t know if it was my fault or my guys hadn’t set the clutch up correctly, but that was my only alarm, and I recovered from it well enough on the short run off the line to be P1 at Ste Dévote, that familiar first corner before the uphill surge towards Casino Square. Once I came out of that first turn in the lead I knew this Grand Prix was mine to lose. But if I thought I’d got the hard part of the job done, I had another think coming.

We had got through just one of the scheduled 78 laps when the safety car made its first appearance. Nico Hülkenberg had crashed his Williams in the tunnel. I got going again nicely when the safety car went in after six laps and was still leading after my pit stop on lap 23, then out came the safety car again on lap 31 when the other Williams came to grief.

In
Weekend of a Champion
JYS talks about the centimetres (or inches in the old money) he had to keep up his sleeve to avoid the Monaco manhole covers. Well, in 2010 he should have reminded his former driver Rubens Barrichello: it was a loose drain cover that came up and destroyed the Brazilian’s right rear wheel. Just 10 laps later
another menacing drain cover was spotted and the safety car came out until that was fixed; and with just four laps to go it was out for the fourth and final time when Jarno Trulli’s Lotus climbed all over Karun Chandhok’s HRT on the way into La Rascasse. This was the only really worrying one, because I was right behind them.

As I saw Jarno lunge for the inside, interlock wheels with the HRT and go up in the air I was praying there would be enough room left for me to go through on the inside, and sure enough, there was. It was a help to me that Seb struggled on the restarts: it meant I was able to impose myself on the race again each time and start the hard work all over again with a bit of a cushion. Actually I had expected Robert Kubica to be the main opposition. His Renault had been very quick throughout the build-up to the race, so it was something of a relief to see Sebastian get ahead of it at the original start.

On days like those – and there aren’t many of them – you understand what it means to be lost for words. As a Formula One driver all you want to do is win races; if you could choose, then the Blue Riband event on our calendar is very, very special for any driver. My name was up there alongside Jack’s now. All the basic questions a Grand Prix driver can be asked were flung at us that day and we had an answer for every one of them. All things considered, jumping into the swimming pool on the Red Bull Energy Station was a pretty conservative reaction!

My journey really was different now: not only had I got to F1 from Queanbeyan, I had got to the top step of the podium in Monaco to receive the winner’s trophy from a prince. Although the special thing about that podium was
having Sir Jackie and Lady Stewart up there as well – I wasn’t really worried about the other guy! The end of my race brought a slight hiccup just as the start had done: I jumped up in my exuberance, hit the trophy on one of the steel beams overhead and put a dent in the lid!

Not only had I damaged the trophy, I had also failed to pack a suit. Jackie had told us that he always used to travel with a dinner suit in his luggage just in case it was ever needed. To me, that sounded a bit like tempting fate, so mine stayed firmly at home. That was inconvenient, because at Monaco there is a gala ball on Sunday evening at which the winning driver, among others, has to make a speech.

As luck would have it, Grand Prix racing’s best-dressed man – JYS – was on our table and he gave me hell. He was still on about it on the telephone the next day! I duly apologised in my speech but really I was too busy enjoying the fireworks (I’m a bit of a pyromaniac), enjoying the company (there were members of Grace Kelly’s family on our table), and basking in the glory of that day to care about what I was wearing.

Red Bull put together a nice bash at one of Monaco’s night-clubs. Everyone was there, and there were people on the dance floor, the Monaco Grand Prix winner included, who shouldn’t have been! I don’t think I will ever erase the image of Red Bull Racing’s Rob Marshall, who could not be described as a small man, doing belly-flops on the floor …

Next morning I discovered that Rob had popped a note under my hotel room door that said,
Lost the Ashes again – but won Monaco Grand Prix! Fair dinkum.

It was nine years since my last Monaco success, in the F3000 race in 2001. How far we had travelled in those
intervening seasons, and how much higher we were about to go!

*

Monaco 2010 – perhaps the greatest day of my F1 career – is a perfect example of the two faces of Red Bull Racing that I was having to come to terms with. Something happened in Monaco, which couldn’t take the gloss off my win there but, looking back, said a lot about what was going on at the heart of the team. Somewhere in the post-race mix there was talk that Sebastian wanted my chassis. In the end Christian Horner took me aside and told me that he had given Marko the opportunity to tell Sebastian that he had a cracked chassis – which he didn’t – to help him rationalise the fact that he had just been well and truly beaten, for the second race in a row, by the old Aussie in the other car. It seems it had been affecting his confidence, and to Seb that’s everything. As with Turkey 2009, it seemed beyond his comprehension that I could beat him fair and square: for him there had to be another reason why.

It was really the remarkable four-race sequence in the middle of 2010, from Istanbul through Montreal, Valencia and Silverstone, that signalled the beginning of the end of my positive feelings for Red Bull Racing. F1 fans will remember Turkey that year and the infamous coming-together between Seb and me as we tussled for the race lead. The day before that happened I got wind that matters might be conspiring against me.

At this stage of the season I was the championship leader by virtue of my two wins to Vettel’s one. I had led every lap of the previous two races from pole position, so I may
have reasonably expected that to be enough to give me the edge in the pecking order when it came to new components for our cars. But on Saturday morning in Istanbul it was Sebastian who was given a new rear wing; mine arrived only minutes before the qualifying session got underway that afternoon. It was touch and go whether it would even get on to the car because we had so-called F-duct rear wings that year, with a device that allowed the driver to alter the airflow and increase speed, and setting one of those up was no five-minute job. But it was done, just in the nick of time. On Sunday the two Red Bulls clashed on-track and Sebastian’s retired on the spot. In the lead-up to that unfortunate moment Ciaron had come on the horn to tell me I needed to turn the engine down to manage the fuel load. I did, but I made a point of asking about Sebastian’s status on fuel. He was fine: I had been leading for so long that the guys in my slip-stream were able to save their fuel slightly and buy back some kpl (kilos per lap). It was one of the few F1 races I can remember where there was Formula Ford-style slip-streaming going on. I was the guy who led, and who suffered; that’s what Seb had in his top pocket and he planned to use it when he could get a run at me.

When he did, I held my line and kept him on the inside for as long as possible. As the corner approached he flicked his car over to the right where I was and high-speed contact was made. Seb retired on the spot and spent some time making weird gestures meant to indicate it was all my fault. I managed to limp back for repairs, rejoin the race and claim third place. Immediately after parking my car I had to go into the mandatory FIA press conference before I had any contact with the team; I dealt with the questions as
straightforwardly and professionally as I could, went back to the paddock – and found that I was being blamed for what had happened.

Annie had been watching the whole situation unfold. In the blue corner, Horner seemed to be managing things well enough and like the vast majority of people who had witnessed the incident he appeared to know where the blame lay even if he was being diplomatic. But in the red corner Marko was surrounded by the German/Austrian media and blaming me. Since Sebastian had moved up to Red Bull Racing from Toro Rosso, it was evident Marko was taking more and more of an interest. Now, here in Turkey at a highly controversial moment, he had apparently become a spokesperson for the team as well!

On hearing what Marko had said, Christian seemed to perform a 180-degree turn and ended up siding with Marko. As sections of the British media reported, Horner was ‘initially equivocal but later moved towards Marko’s view’. I couldn’t believe what I was walking into when I returned from the press conference. Later, when I saw on TV the hugs Sebastian got on the pit wall from the team, I began having serious doubts as to who was really pulling the strings at Red Bull Racing.

The team was sheepish to say the least. We had a 60-strong workforce at the race, one of our cars was in the fence and the other had gone from the lead to third place, and no one really knew how to handle a scenario that had been played out in front of a global TV audience.

The post-race debrief was interesting: we were minus one driver as Seb had been excused from attending! I was quite happy he wasn’t there as it gave me the higher moral
ground. I was the one with the team. To this day I still don’t know why he missed the debrief, which is the essential conclusion to a race weekend. It’s a time for everyone to face the music from the various departments and that includes driver performance. I don’t think team management was particularly happy with either of us. After all, we had committed the ultimate sin in motor sport – colliding with your teammate.

Next morning, when I switched on my phone, I was inundated with SMSs and voicemail messages; by the time we got home my inbox was swamped with emails, not only from fans but also from well-known figures in the motor-racing world who were outraged by what had happened. One well-respected captain of industry took time out to call me and strongly recommended that I should put my thoughts down in writing for Dietrich Mateschitz. That struck me as a pretty good idea, and this is what I wrote:

1 June 2010

Dear Dietrich

I know we have already discussed the events of the Turkish Grand Prix and will continue to do so over the next few days. However, now that I’ve had time to consider my position and view what happened on Sunday as objectively as possible, I believe it is also important to express my thoughts in writing.