Aussie Grit (4 page)

Dad was a huge open-wheeler fan. He loved going to watch Jackie Stewart and other international drivers racing at Warwick Farm against our local heroes in the Tasman Series. Touring cars, which are so popular in Australia, just never cut it as far as we were concerned – it was the Indianapolis 500 and Formula 1 for us! The best drivers in the world were in single-seaters and Dad loved the precision and accuracy of that kind of racing. I guess most young boys follow what their dads love, and that’s what I did.

Mum could hardly get me off to school on Monday mornings after a Grand Prix; I’d tape every race, watch it ‘live’, then watch it again when I got home from school. Mum and Dad used to have friends round, parents of other kids I knew and while they sat there I’d be watching a Grand Prix for probably the eighth or ninth time, the same race over and over again, with a bowl of my favourite ice-cream.

The Australian Grand Prix was staged in Adelaide starting in November 1985, when I was nine years old. It was televised by Channel 9 in those days. I needed eight video tapes just for that one race weekend alone! It was always the final race of the season, so after Adelaide I’d be in mourning for four months before F1 came round again, the first race usually broadcast from Brazil, to see the new drivers in their different helmets, and all the different teams. It was just brilliant, I loved it. Dad and I couldn’t wait for each new season to start.

The first year Dad took me to the Grand Prix was 1987, when I was 11. The drive took us 14 hours and I got the sulks
when Alain Prost, who was my hero in those days, retired after 53 laps with a brake disc failure. At that stage Alain had won two of his eventual four World Championships; he had also recently overtaken Jackie Stewart’s long-standing record of 27 Grand Prix victories.

How could I possibly have dreamt that 25 years later Alain Prost and a kid from Queanbeyan would go cycling together on one of the most famous stages of the Tour de France and be on first-name terms?

But I will never forget the first impression these cars made on me in Adelaide. Our seats were on the front straight; Martin Brundle, now a popular television analyst of the sport, was first round in his Zakspeed and I nearly lost my breakfast! It went past us so fast I just couldn’t believe there was a driver at the wheel. To me, these guys were absolutely bloody awesome – I even climbed trees trying to get a better view. That’s when F1 started to become religious for me.

But for all the passion I put into it, I never thought for a moment at that stage that I would get any closer to Formula 1 than hanging off a tree in Adelaide to watch those great names rip past me. These drivers were a million miles away from the kind of racing I had first been exposed to, which revolved around dirt-bikes, sprint cars – brilliant little rockets designed for high-speed racing on short oval tracks – and midget cars.

For several years, starting when I was just eight and going through to my early teens, Dad took me to our nearest speedway at Tralee, in the Queanbeyan suburbs, where I perched on his shoulders to watch the exploits of local blokes like George Tatnell and Garry Rush, a 10-time national sprint car champion. Some of the big American
names came over as well. I remember Dad being blown away by seeing Johnny Rutherford, the multiple Indianapolis 500 winner from Texas who was nicknamed ‘Lone Star JR’, out here in a sprint car and behaving as if he was just a normal bloke.

A particular favourite of ours was another American called Steve Kinser. It was mesmerising to watch him – he seemed to be able to put his car wherever he liked, he could pass anywhere at all. Dad had never raced but he was what you would call a petrol-head and I was delighted to go along with him. But even later, when the idea of racing in my own right first began to take hold in my mind, the question remained: ‘How the f#*k are
you
going to get to F1, coming from Queanbeyan?’ It was a legitimate enough question. You can count the number of Australians who have achieved anything significant in Formula 1 on the fingers of one hand. When I was a boy F1 was in the air because of Alan Jones, and before that because of Jack Brabham, but as far as we were concerned it was a game for Europeans, Americans and Brazilians, not for people like us.

*

I’d been riding motorbikes since I was a little tacker of about four or five when I had the run of DG’s farm at weekends. Dad would set up little tracks for me and I’d race around for hours on end on my Pee Wee 50. One day I had a massive shunt which knocked the stuffing out of me. I would have been eight at the time and I was covered in blood and black and blue all over. Dad wasn’t too keen to take me back to the farmhouse for fear of incurring the wrath of Disey – my mum. Instead he drove me straight home to
Queanbeyan and cleaned me up the best he could. I also had a decent stack with my auntie Pam: I was sitting on the tank, grabbed full throttle and if I remember rightly the two of us cleaned up a fence.

Dad had the Yamaha dealership in Queanbeyan for 16 years, but he never encouraged me to get into bikes in a serious way. He once sold a road bike to a fellow who was killed on it a few months later. Dad had felt misgivings about the sale at the time and he took it badly – he felt very sorry for the family. He and I never did anything competitive with bikes, but Bridge Motors did have a little team in motocross and speedway. Dad used to say those kids would ride over the top of each other to win, never mind what the other competitors might do!

But it wasn’t until I got to 12 or 13 that I put my foot on the first rung of the motor-racing ladder. One of my schoolmates’ father was doing some racing of his own in midgets, but he also had a go-kart and I was pretty keen to have a go at that. Dad reminded me that the whole Webber family had had a crack at go-karting one time at a fun park up in Surfers Paradise. He wasn’t particularly impressed by my skills on that occasion!

But as most motor-racing people will tell you, karting is the perfect way for a budding racing driver to get started. You can drive them as young as seven, or even earlier, and it was through karting that some of F1’s biggest names – men like Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher – were introduced to the sport they would eventually dominate.

Karting trains the young driver in precision, car control, basic setting-up of the kart, and the hustle and bustle of racing wheel-to-wheel. I will admit I found it quite
intimidating. Those things are pretty quick when you’re only 13 and they don’t have bodywork to protect you – but once you get the hang of it and relax, it’s brilliant.

To help me develop my fledgling skills, before delivering pizzas to the wrong addresses I worked at the local indoor go-kart centre, where Mum or Dad had to come and get me, often at two or three in the morning – and I had school the next day. The other boys and I used to finish up there at midnight, then we’d drive the karts for two hours ourselves. There would only be three or four of us but we’d switch the tyre barriers around to make much more advanced tracks than the punters would use. We also used fire extinguishers to wet certain corners on the braking points, the apexes or exits, really mixing up our skill sets and our feel for grip from the tyres.

Dare I say it, there were even nights when we’d take the karts out onto the road! The centre was on an industrial estate and at two in the morning it was a very quiet place. The only other traffic we might see would be the cars visiting the nearby red-light district!

I guess the karting bug bit me, but at first I was still doing my ball-boy duties for the Raiders and I couldn’t attend all the meetings. By the time I was 15 Dad had bought me a second-hand kart, which we used in 1990 and 1991. On the karting scene there was a meeting roughly once a month out at the Canberra Go-Kart Club.

There were six meetings in 1991, the year in which I turned 15, and there would be four heats at each. Dad didn’t actually come to my early races! He was busy building the new service station so I went with my schoolmate Matthew Hinton and John, his dad.

In 1990–91 in that second-hand kart we were doing pretty well at meetings in and around Canberra. Then Andy Lawson, who ran the Queanbeyan Kart Centre, custom-built a frame to fit me. Andy was a plant engineer but Dad reckons he could easily have made a living as a race-car engineer in Formula 1. He fabricated his own go-karts, did all the engine preparation and he was able to coax the last ounce of power out of them. Dad insists we owe a great debt to Andy, one of those brilliant backyard engineering blokes that Australia and New Zealand seem to produce who can put something in the lathe and 10 minutes later the component is made. Dad had known of him for quite a while without getting to know him well. Andy also prepared karts for a family called the Dukes. The boy, Ryan, had already won an Australian title; Dad thought he could learn from his father, Ray, and I certainly learned quickly from Ryan. They were what Dad likes to call ‘decent people’: no helmet-throwing, no tantrums, just good, down-to-earth sporting types, the kind of people he was more than happy to be associated with.

Around this time Dad made a business decision that had a big impact on both our lives. ‘I never forced Mark into racing,’ he will tell you. ‘He just wanted to do it, he had a natural aptitude for it and he was able to run at the front pretty quickly. It’s also fair to say that the racing was a means to a short-term end: it allowed me to spend more time with Mark than I had been doing. I invested long hours in Bridge Motors, time that took me away from family life, so I decided to lease the service station to Caltex. It was probably the best goal I ever kicked because it gave me two things: money, as it left us comfortably off, and that even
more precious commodity, time. It allowed me and Mark to go racing together – and it gave him a privilege I never enjoyed because he was given Fridays off school to travel with me to his next race meeting!’

Through ’93 we kept the Lawson kart and also ran a Clubman with a bigger, more powerful engine. Dad decided we should try our hand in places like Melbourne and Sydney – he loved to see me winning all those races close to home but he had the bigger picture in mind and he felt he needed to throw me in at the deep end. The idea was for me to learn, to improve my racecraft, and competing at Oran Park or down at Corio in Geelong was a good way to do it.

I won quite a few races and the 1993 NSW Junior National Heavy title. I wasn’t the right size or weight for karting; I wasn’t an absolute gun but I probably could have done better if Dad had put in the resources others were putting in. On the other hand he was probably aiming a bit higher already.

*

Halfway through 1993 a well-known face in Australian motor-racing circles, ‘Peewee’ Siddle, ran a Formula Ford trials day at Oran Park. Greg, to give him his real name, was the Australian importer, in partnership with Steve Knott, of the famous and internationally successful Van Diemen race-car brand from the UK. For many decades, Formula Ford was the worldwide entry-level category for aspiring racing drivers. It kicked off in the UK in 1967 and soon spread through Europe and across to the States. It reached Australia in 1970.

The idea behind Formula Ford was to provide a basic single-seater car, each with the same engine – they started with Ford Cortina GT power units – and without wings in order to keep the design as simple as possible. The essence of Formula Ford is learning how to handle yourself in ‘traffic’, as we call it, because the lack of wings means the cars can run in close formation and the racing is often spectacular, wheel-to-wheel stuff.

The day at Oran Park cost $5000. Ten drivers from Canberra and Queanbeyan – or their families – tipped in $500 each. They made two cars available, one set up for smaller drivers, the other for us taller blokes. I had a go in both and at the end of the day I was 1.6 seconds quicker than anybody else. That was the first time I’d driven a Formula Ford and I thought they were shit-boxes compared to the sharpness and agility of a go-kart!

But I enjoyed being in a car with a gearbox, sliding it around, and what I really liked was being on a big track – checking the kerbs, using big lines, coming right out wide through the corners and nearly touching those walls at Oran Park.

Dad reckons that day was when the penny dropped: ‘Over a second and a half – that’s light years in motor-racing terms. I couldn’t get my head around the fact that he was going so well, but I figured it couldn’t all be down to the engine because everybody had the same one. I thought, “Maybe he
has
got some ability after all.” ’ As for me, I was still very young and I believed Formula Vee, an open-wheeler class a step below Formula Ford, was as far as I was ever going to go. Dad was thinking about the path ahead: Formula Ford, on to Formula 3 – the first acquaintance with
cars with wings and aerodynamic characteristics – then on to one of several possible stepping-stones to the pinnacle of Formula 1. But that never crossed my mind.

Through Peewee (who probably knew more about my ability than Dad did, given his long experience in motor racing) we learned that Craig Lowndes’s 1993 Australian Formula Ford Championship-winning car was available. Dad had a careful look at it, thought it had been pretty well maintained and we bought it, but we did struggle a bit with it in our first year. It was Andy Lawson who set the car up; he’d never worked on a Formula Ford and it was a hard first year for us, especially as we jumped straight into the national series. I didn’t really have much of a clue about setting a race car up. I was still at school; some of my mates and I used to play computer games, but of course they were of limited use when it came to the real thing and there wasn’t a lot of spare time to go and learn on-track rather than on-screen. It’s fair to say that in year one in Formula Ford my feedback to my team was useless, and it hadn’t improved a lot by the time we went into our second season either.

That first year Dad and I put about 100,000 kilometres on the old Landcruiser as we criss-crossed this huge country on our way to and from race meetings. The trip from home to Adelaide in South Australia, across the endless Nullarbor Plain to Wanneroo in Western Australia and back to Queanbeyan was 10,000 kilometres on its own.