Aussie Grit (41 page)

There is a degree of selfishness involved: after all, you’re the one in the cockpit trying to get the job done. Any elite athlete will admit to this side of his or her make-up. We’re demanding, we have priorities, we want to focus on areas that are important to us, and nothing else matters. And being an elite athlete is no nine-to-five job: in fact it can come very close to consuming every waking moment, and that makes it particularly tough for those who have to live with you! Luke could certainly testify to that: with so much of our time and energy focused on my career, our home life took a back seat, certainly in the early years. At weekends Ann and I would be off racing somewhere in the UK or Europe, so Luke didn’t have the same family life as his friends. With the help of a fantastic support network we did our best to ensure he had as normal a childhood as possible, but he still ribs us to this day about missing out on Sunday roasts and family holidays.

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Looking at my racing heroes like Brabham and Doohan another way, I admit it’s a shame that I haven’t done all that they did. Yes, I’m a Grand Prix winner, yes, if I had won many more races it would have been nice, and what would be
really
nice would have been to go out as a World Champion. I didn’t, but I gave it everything I had; my talent,
my willingness to fly back to Australia in the early days for three frantic days to try to find a sponsor, full of cold sores, stressed out, on the phone crying – all those days are the capital we put in the bank. At times we thought I’d never even get to Formula 1. Once you reach that level you are constantly learning more about yourself. I would love to have achieved more but the man in the mirror looks back at me and tells me I did the best that I could. Ours may have been a different journey but we got there in the end.

You look at the sporting greats and ask
why
they got more out of their careers than you did – and I know
exactly
why. Men like Schumacher, Rossi, or rally champion Sébastien Loeb: I’ve been fortunate enough to watch all of them at close quarters. They get priorities and compromises right; they can slow things down mentally when they’re operating on the limit. Mental recall is also a huge strength. A small example: I shared a KTM X-Bow car with Sébastien Loeb at a Red Bull event. The passenger had to operate a paintball machine-gun and hit targets while the driver navigated the course. When he got in the car, Loeb was very fussy over pedal positions, seat positions, making sure the seatbelts were sorted for the driver swap so we could win time there. He also ensured the gun was at a perfect height for most of our targets before we set off for the race. He wasn’t doing it for fun either: our car won! It was all in the preparation.

I’ve been immensely impressed by how Valentino manages to keep finding drive and desire. Even more impressive is his ability to learn new techniques in the twilight of his career. In 2011, when he was at his lowest ebb in terms of results, he was involved in the accident that killed his great friend Marco Simoncelli in the Malaysian MotoGP. To recover
from that tragedy, to rekindle the passion for winning when he could so easily have walked away, proved his enduring love of the sport.

Men like them had something extra in each column, or maybe there were some columns I hadn’t covered at all. But I believe Aussie grit really helped me a lot; my preparation certainly helped me massively in getting to Formula 1 and surviving in that environment. I was tenacious; I think my bravery helped me as well; and as Lance Armstrong once said to me, I’m the most intense Australian he’s ever met!

To let that intensity down a little I have always enjoyed watching other sports: Manchester United at Old Trafford, the Olympic Games in London, watching Mo Farah coming off the final bend in the 5000 metres – the veins standing out on his neck, a man on the absolute limit and in the loudest stadium I have ever been to in my life! True grit … Or the Isle of Man TT: the sheer courage involved in what a man on a motorcycle can do, just off-the-charts stuff – I never, ever take days like that for granted.

I’ve loved meeting some of the world’s greatest sportspeople too: I once had 10 minutes with Pelé. It was just the great footballer, one other person and me in a room and he was such an amazing, friendly gentleman. Pelé changed a lot of people’s lives: if he hadn’t done what he did, so many others would never have had the opportunity to try to follow in his footsteps. I had a very small taste of that in Pelé’s own backyard, and it simply whetted my appetite. Before my first victory in Brazil, in São Paulo in 2010, I visited a youth boxing club on the Wednesday: I said to Red Bull I wanted to go and see these youngsters and to their credit
they helped me make that happen. And it was a great experience: you can see it in their eyes, this is their way to escape and it’s just brilliant, I really enjoy seeing that spark. You can give them a chance, a bit of light in their lives, something to aspire to.

Some of that feeling spilled over into my decision to help my young fellow Aussie Will Power when he needed someone to give him wings of his own, racing in Europe before going on to really make the grade in the United States. More recently I’ve been taking a close interest in young New Zealander Mitch Evans as he finds his way in Europe. While they still need to possess that raw hunger, drive and determination, it seems only logical that young drivers should learn from what I achieved or how I coped with all those setbacks on the way through. David Campese, just to repeat the clearest example, was trying to give a young Aussie bloke wings when he helped me all those years ago. In motor racing and elsewhere I want to give something back in my own modest way in terms of helping people realise their potential. The word ‘can’t’ is not really on: encouraging people to understand that, accept it and then act accordingly is a very rewarding thing to do and see.

In certain cases success comes only if you are prepared to put your reputation – your own self-respect – at risk. Think Michael Schumacher at La Rascasse back in 2006 when he deliberately ‘parked’ his car in qualifying for the Monaco GP after he messed up his own lap. More recently, Seb exposed a side of himself that was at odds with his cheerful, boyishly charming image with that egotistical,
Numero uno
forefinger gesture to the cameras after every pole, every victory. The public rarely see F1 drivers with
their helmets off, which is why I removed mine on my slow-down lap at my final F1 race in Brazil. It’s really only the men on the podium the fans get a good look at, and I thought Seb repeatedly shoving his finger in front of the camera could have a negative effect, not just on how he was perceived by the fans but, more importantly in my eyes, by other elite sportspeople. You want to earn their respect. You do that when you win with sincerity, style and grace, the way Roger Federer always has.

The finger gesture culminated in the booing after Malaysia 2013, but that was just one of several tricky podium situations with Seb when he was given a hostile reception, even as the Grand Prix winner. Monza in 2013 was the worst, with at least 25,000 spectators beneath the podium. John Surtees, the 1964 Ferrari World Champion, and Jean Alesi (another ex-Ferrari driver) were trying to conduct the podium ceremony; I could see John was having difficulty containing a crowd that was threatening to spoil the presentation of the trophies, so I asked Jean to try to bring the situation under control.

Passions were running high that day: neither of the local Milan soccer teams, Inter and AC, were playing that weekend so the F1 crowd was bigger and more vocal than usual. In the post-race press conference I said I thought the hostility shown towards Seb was too much on the day. At the same time I was disappointed to see Red Bull Racing doing a very good job of convincing themselves that the booing was because of how successful Seb had been. Everyone knew that wasn’t the reason at all: the team could have done a lot more to help Seb manage his antics out of the car and the public’s perception of him.

Going back to helmets, it was interesting that the FIA decided to ban changes to their colour-schemes in 2015. Seb was one of the biggest culprits when it came to changing his, and when he turned up at the 2010 British Grand Prix with a helmet design featuring mug-shots of ‘his’ boys, the members of his crew, we thought it was a tad inappropriate. Everyone heaped praise on him for showing how much he thought of them. Although it was a nice touch it left me in an awkward position with the boys on my car asking when I was going to do the same. I’m a no-nonsense sort of bloke so it never crossed my mind that I needed to show how much I valued the boys in such a public manner! The team didn’t seem to be unduly concerned; in the end Seb satisfied everyone by putting the entire team on his helmet at the next British GP!

On another occasion, Seb showed just how far he was willing to go to when he crashed and damaged his front wing in practice at Suzuka in 2012. Christian told me Seb promptly forked out the money for a private plane to fly a new wing out from the Red Bull Racing factory with team personnel on board still working on it. It was probably a 300-grand exercise! Impressive – but it makes you wonder how the discussion to do just that first arose! It’s an extreme length to go to but this is F1 and there are championships to be won!

I had difficult moments with Seb, but then the camaraderie with my fellow F1 drivers in general was never particularly strong. Maybe we’ve become rather blasé about the safety of our sport and we don’t have the same level of respect for what we are doing against each other week in, week out as they did in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s when fatalities were
more commonplace. You placed a lot more value on friendships when you feared they might be short-lived. The layout of the paddock doesn’t exactly encourage F1 fraternising either. As the motor-homes became more palatial, you would simply walk between those giant structures and the cars in the garage, work with your team and go home. It was quite rare to find a driver somewhere else in the paddock chatting to another team or having dinner there.

But I always got on well with David Coulthard, Fernando Alonso, Jenson Button and Robert Kubica. I first came across Alonso in 2000 when I raced him in Formula 3000. He was extremely young and had a lot of puppy-fat on board! I think we naturally had a bit of respect for one another as we were both driving for fairly average teams at the time and winning races and scoring podiums. From what I know of Fernando, his upbringing in rural Spain has similarities to mine in Australia. It takes a long time to gain his trust. We talked to each other at race weekends and sat together at drivers’ meetings – to be fair, the media probably portrayed a stronger relationship than we actually had. We played a bit of tennis when we were testing or at fly-away Grands Prix where we might be staying in the same hotel for a week. Our friendship and mutual respect grew more when we started talking about me joining him at Ferrari and more recently his desire to compete with Porsche at Le Mans in 2015. Neither story was ever leaked to the media – they were always a good six months behind what was actually happening! Fernando is a shy bloke and not super-confident in himself out of the car but put him in a race car with his heart rate up and you’d struggle to find a better racing driver anywhere in the world.

I’ve known Jenson Button for a long time and we’re from a similar generation. JB’s had a phenomenal career; he’s a tenacious bastard. It’s funny how fitness was a chore and a challenge for him at the start of his F1 career but when he had a very uncompetitive car in 2008 he took up triathlon racing. I think it kept his hunger, self-drive and motivation going. We got a bit closer at the end of my career as we’d both grown up a bit and could see things differently. We spent a great few days in Tokyo between the 2013 South Korean and Japanese Grands Prix; I remember having breakfast the next morning with his dad, John, and whiling away a couple of hours talking about how the sport had changed and how JB and I had changed even within our own careers. Ann, Dad and I were shattered when John Button passed away at the start of 2014. The last thing he said to me at my final Grand Prix in Brazil was that he’d see me at Le Mans as he was planning to come to the race. I know Jenson has felt his dad’s loss immensely but Ann and I have always admired the supportive, tightly knit group of family and friends around him, including his now wife Jessica and Mikey Collier, his trainer.

Like Fernando Alonso, Robert Kubica – the only Pole ever to win a Grand Prix, which he did in Canada in 2008 – was one of the few other drivers I felt I could relate to on a genuinely personal level. There were a lot of similarities between Robert and me. He got to F1 in the hardest possible way, and he had to leave his native country of Poland to do it. We were both tall, which brought problems in its wake in the car, and like me he had no time for any of the fun-fair stuff in the paddock, so we always had something to talk about.

Robert was – still is – a real warrior and he had an unbelievable talent. He was a tough prick, I have to say, and he
deserved everything he got, except the shocking accident in February 2011 that nearly killed him and cut short his F1 career. It happened when Robert was rallying for fun on the Italian Riviera and it was staggering to realise how close he must have come to losing his life when a piece of guardrail pierced the entire length of his Skoda. We visited him in hospital, where he had endured seven hours of surgery on his hand and arm injuries, and it was horrible to see him in bed there. Of course I could relate to all of that, but he was so gaunt, so downcast – he broke down a little and it all affected Ann quite badly, seeing someone she knew looking so vulnerable and distraught. I remember having dinner with Robert at Monza earlier when he told me he was already disillusioned with F1 and how much he loved his rallying. He got some of his pace notes out and the passion in him was obvious. I believe he would have gone on to win the world title, in fact probably more than once, and I’m pretty sure looking at the man in the mirror would never have troubled Robert.

The new order of F1 is currently led by 2014 world champion Lewis Hamilton. While I might not have much in common with Lewis, we’ve always got on well and I think he is proving his worth as a world champion in and out of the car.