Aussie Grit (39 page)

Another emotional moment was taking off my helmet on the Interlagos slowing-down lap: it was something I wanted to do for the passionate Brazilian fans, to let them see the
man beneath the mask. It was a different touch on a day when there had been a few of them, not least of all finding the Aussie flag draped across my cockpit on the grid, or seeing my crew wearing Aussie bush hats and sending me big ‘Thank You’ messages for the TV cameras to pick up.

Taking the crash hat off might have got me into trouble on any other day, but not when I was actually saying my goodbyes to the sport and all its fans. Mind you, if the stewards had objected it would just have rounded off a season where I was up before the beaks on a few occasions. In fact, my fellow Red Bull athlete and skydiver Felix Baumgartner, who made world news in 2013 when he jumped to earth from a helium balloon in the stratosphere, sent me a text saying that he would personally pay my fine if I got hauled up in front of the stewards again!

I had already been ‘pinged’ three grid places for my alleged part in a Shanghai tussle with JEV, Jean-Éric Vergne; they reprimanded me again in Bahrain after Nico Rosberg and I came together; and they were on my case again most famously in Singapore. My race was over just before the scheduled finish because of an engine failure; I hitched a lift back to pit lane with Fernando, and officialdom took a dim view of that – they slapped a 10-place grid penalty on me for Korea.

You’d think an old-fashioned racer like Derek Warwick, who was the driver representative among the officials that Singapore weekend, might have taken a more lenient view. They claimed it was dangerous for Fernando to have stopped as Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes came past on the slowdown lap but Lewis was going slower at that point than the pit-lane speed limit! I was delighted, after that run-in with
officialdom, to receive an email from Ferrari chairman Luca di Montezemolo. It was short and to the point:

Dear Mark,

I have seen the ridiculous penalty the FIA has inflicted you, exactly the contrary to what it should do to support a positive image of F1, as the public has shown to appreciate you hitching a ride on Fernando’s car.

Good luck for this end of F1 season and for the conclusion of your career in Formula 1, at the closing of which I would be very pleased to have you my guest in Maranello.

Best regards,

Luca di Montezemolo

Chairman

Ferrari

Tell it like it is! Unfortunately I never did get the opportunity to be a guest of Luca’s at Maranello as he left Ferrari in the summer of 2014.

*

As the Brazilian curtain fell Ann was emotional too, but she was also relieved. After that final race she told me that the next day was the first day of the rest of my life. For almost 20 years we had been chasing and fulfilling a dream, under constant pressure to perform and deliver, but it was now time for me to start living my life.

Although I was about to embark on a fresh challenge with Porsche, the intensity and relentless scrutiny of everything
you do and say, which goes hand-in-hand with F1, had been lifted. She told me that competing at the highest level for 12 years is an impressive stint by anyone’s standards. Of my time in F1, Ann says, ‘Of course I was disappointed he didn’t win the championship in 2010 but ultimately I derived far greater satisfaction than any title could bring from the way Mark conducted himself as a true professional, rising above all the bullshit and being able to hold his head high.’

I began my story by confessing that I was an addict before I had reached the age of 10. I was reminded of that fact when I sat in the cockpit of RB9 on the grid at Interlagos at the end of 2013. People had been asking me all week long what I was going to miss most about being a Formula 1 driver. I hadn’t been able to give a very convincing answer, I confess, probably because there was simply so much going through my mind: memories, moments, people met and places seen, chances missed and opportunities taken.

But suddenly I knew the answer.

I’m in the car on the starting grid and the guys all walk away; it’s all down to me now; another race is about to unfold. That’s a feeling I could never get anywhere else. It’s the best legal drug you can get.

I
T
’
S A CLOSED WORLD
.

But now the feeling of being shut in is totally different from what I knew in a Formula 1 car. There are two main reasons for that. The first is that I have a roof over my head. The second is that it’s pitch dark outside.

For the first time since 1999 I am back in a sports car. No ordinary sports car, either: this is the Porsche 919 Hybrid, a radical sports prototype for the 21st century – but still a sports car with an enclosed cockpit.

Right now it’s night-time in Portugal, in the European mid-winter. At the Portimão track in the Algarve, on the first of two days’ testing, I am experiencing my first few laps in the Porsche 919.

I’m a little uneasy at first: have I made the right decision in quitting F1 and coming back to sports cars?

But I feel fantastic as well: I love driving at night in these cars. The headlights knife through the darkness; in the
cockpit the atmosphere is unbelievable, with the glow from the instruments, the sense of being cocooned at the centre of things. It is very different from anything you could experience anywhere else.

You never experience the night-time in F1, not even in the Grands Prix like Singapore and Abu Dhabi, because the trackside lighting is so good that it’s just like driving in daylight.

A few more laps in the car next day are all it takes to convince me. ‘Pow!’ The car feels taut and responsive, I love being back on Michelin tyres which I can ‘feel’ so well, the car is very high-tech – and it’s quick. I know absolutely that the decision I announced at the 2013 British Grand Prix was right; I know I am going to enjoy the next chapter of my career.

Alex Wurz, often there or thereabouts at key moments in my racing life, hit the nail on the head when he described life as a sports-car racer: ‘You are there simply to drive fast,’ he said. ‘That’s all that matters. It’s just 5 per cent politics versus 95 per cent racing.’

To me that sounded ideal: I wasn’t ready to give up racing just yet, but it was the right time to leave ‘that Formula 1 life’ behind. I was tired of the travel, weary of all the goings-on in F1 paddocks around the world, and I was seriously over the politics. It got to the point where in the end many of my family and friends, Ann and Dad included, no longer felt like coming to see me race. They had grown weary of the way I was being treated. There was no point in wasting any more energy: nothing was ever going to change.

Maybe I’m too trusting by nature. I didn’t think I needed to ask for an even-handed approach from my own team.
By mid-2010 I knew from some of the mechanics any even-handedness had gone. I started asking questions: did I have the best floor spec on my car, were all the micro-parts with the finest detail going to the other side of the garage? It saps your energy levels. Adrian was adamant that I did get the same parts, but there were just too many occasions when they were arriving late, so preparation of my car was compromised. In the end I wondered why Christian broke down in tears in the debrief after my last race in Brazil: was he feeling guilty, or was he just glad to see the back of me?

So in many ways the World Endurance Championship was perfect for me, especially as I had been offered a plum role with a marque whose Le Mans record is second to none. There is another crucial difference between being in the cockpit of a Grand Prix car and sitting in the Porsche: it’s not all about me. In endurance racing you are genuinely a member of a team, inside the cockpit as well as outside.

Each race in the WEC is six hours long, with one exception. Each of the Porsche 919s has a team of three drivers. In Formula 1 you and your teammate are in the same livery – end of story. That teammate is the first driver whose times you look for at the end of a session: did you beat him? In the WEC your teammate is your brother: no secrets, no games, we are there to help each other at all times. It’s not my car, it’s ours. My teammates for 2014 were German Timo Bernhard and young New Zealander Brendon Hartley.

It’s our car not only in spirit, but also in its physical make-up: I need to make sure that I am comfortable in the car – the seating position is a lot more upright than the ‘lie-down’ position in F1, so we use different muscles in the back, the stints in the car are long so you need to guard
against numbness in the legs – but I also have to remember I am sharing the office with two other drivers, so compromise is essential to a degree. That was difficult to get used to, I must admit. I was taken aback at the first few test sessions when I saw drivers hanging around with time on their hands. It was very different from the pressure-cooker world of Formula 1, where we operated in a very narrow band, with data input coming from just two sources, each with his own car. Now it was coming from six drivers spread across two cars. It was frustrating at first not to be able to stamp my authority on the direction the car should take. It was tough, too, getting to know so many new people after seven years in the familiar environment of Red Bull Racing. The Porsche team was in its infancy; it would take time for 250 people to become a tight working group. It certainly wasn’t all about me.

It
was
about Porsche’s decision to return to the highest echelon of sports-car racing. It was also about the most famous race in the world: the Le Mans 24 Hours.

*

By the time I joined them, Porsche had won Le Mans a record 16 times. Their first success was in 1970; ironically, the last time they won there was in 1998, when I was among their opposition in the Mercedes-Benz. At Le Mans that year the two works Porsches came out on top, an outstanding way for Porsche to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the company’s creation. But no sooner had they won Le Mans for the 16th time than they announced it would be the last. But times change, the world moves on, and for 2014 Porsche decided it was time to return to Le Mans.

They were ready to rise to the challenge of building a sports prototype – a car designed solely for track racing – in the era of hybrid power. The Porsche 919 would race in the LMP1 category, which is divided between the hybrid-powered machines (LMP1-H) and the conventional private entries (LMP1-L).

LMP1 is purely for full-time professional racing drivers. At 870 kilos the sports prototypes are almost 200 kilos heavier than a Grand Prix car. At Silverstone, where the opening WEC round was to take place, we could anticipate being around 10 seconds a lap off F1 pace, but sports prototypes are definitely the closest cars in performance and handling to a Formula 1 machine.

If Porsche were keen to get back to grips with sports-car racing at the highest level, the same applied to their new driver. Yes, I had sworn in 1999 that I would never race in a car with a roof again. Yes, I felt then that I never wanted to see Le Mans again either. But this new breed of hybrid sports prototypes was an exciting alternative to F1. The lure of Porsche and their Le Mans history was immense. It was a challenge I just had to accept.

I was happy, too, not to have to be down at racing weight as early as February. With only eight races as compared to 18 or 20 in F1 the time-frame wasn’t quite as demanding. In the later stages of my F1 career people asked if I was unwell because they thought I looked so gaunt – Dad said I looked ‘as poor as wood’ – but that was simply a result of keeping as much weight off my frame as humanly possible. It got so ridiculous that my race engineer Ciaron would ask before a race if I had managed a ‘#2’ before getting into the car!

Physically, perhaps, the sports-car challenge would be a notch below the demands F1 places on the driver. But on the mental side I knew concentration levels would have to be consistently high to cope with the speed differential between the various classes of cars in endurance racing, to be on the ball when it came to passing back-markers and of course for driving through the night.

The Porsche team conducted a private endurance simulation to get the cars battle-ready for six-hour races at Silverstone and Spa to kick-start the WEC season, then the 919’s first public airing came at a two-day test session at the end of March at the Le Castellet circuit in the south of France, a former F1 venue now used largely as a testing facility by other racing categories. People always read more into testing results than they perhaps should, but we were pleased with the way the car behaved: the #20 which I co-drove with Timo and Brendon was quickest overall.

Silverstone on the third weekend of April 2014 was an auspicious place to return to racing with a roof over my head. It was the scene of my first major international race win – in a sports car – back in 1998 when Bernd Schneider and I brought the Mercedes home. This time there were no real thoughts of victory: this was all about seeing whether the 919 was up to the task of six hours’ high-speed racing on a quick, challenging circuit against world-class competition from Japan in the shape of Toyota and Germany’s Audi team.

Qualifying sixth was no disgrace, especially as we were keeping an eye on preparation for the race itself rather than sheer one-lap speed, so we were doing a fair few set-up changes as the day went on. Claiming a podium for third
place on Porsche’s return to the international sports-car elite was a remarkable achievement. The race had to be red-flagged because of heavy rain, but we had 163 laps under our belts by then and while I still felt like a bit of a rookie in the class I was thrilled to have brought the car home.

It was a terrific learning experience too, especially when it came to threading the car through the back-markers, and getting through my first ‘live’ pit stop with the driver change routine. It’s quite different from the F1 equivalent where you come in, hit your marks, 20 or more people swarm around your car and send you off again about three seconds later. In the Porsche, on the way in I was already running through the procedures: unplug the radio, disconnect the drink bottle, loosen the belts so I could exit quickly and let my teammate hop in. In endurance racing getting the crew bedded in to their own routines and responsibilities is a crucial factor; at Silverstone it went well and set us up nicely for the second round.