Aussie Grit (8 page)

We pulled up on the grid again, I lined up on pole, Jacky van der Ende from Holland was second, Vítor Meira from Brazil fourth or thereabouts. This time, surprise, surprise, I didn’t make such a bad start, but Vítor made an awesome one. So Meira was now leading – but not on aggregate over the two starts, so I was cool with that. I was happy just to
stay in touch. We were quicker than anyone else and I knew that if I stayed there the win was mine. I wasn’t going to go anywhere near Meira, there was no point. I’d done the hard work and I was leading the race overall. On the second or third lap after the restart, Vítor outbraked himself and crashed. After that I was on a test run, happily driving around in the wet … and not going off! I was wide awake and I wasn’t going to let it go.

It was an important victory for me. There were 120 guys from different countries having a crack, and only 25–30 made the final, so to win it was a bit of a statement. But it was an early reminder of something I would remember throughout my career, namely that talent is no guarantee of success. There was a lot of quality in that Brands Hatch field but a lot of it was never realised because most of those young racers didn’t have the iron self-belief and determination that makes you keep going.

A win like that is important because it leads nicely into Formula 3. People realise you’ve got the head to win the festival, and the pace; drivers who have done well there must be doing something right. Of course there was still a lot I needed to be tested on, but that win gave me some confidence and, more importantly, it gave people around me some confidence as well. As Ann says, you can do so much off the track but you’ve still got to go and get the results, and if I had crashed and burned in that final, who knows where we might have ended up.

Opportunities certainly opened up after that half-hour race. I was given a free test in a Formula 3 car, and that was to have enormous consequences later on. In fact I drove just about every car known to motor-racing man in the
month after my festival win. Formula Opel at Zandvoort in Holland was an enjoyable experience; I did a Redgrave Racing Formula Renault test at Snetterton and one for Hayward Racing at Mallory Park, but our thoughts were already turning quite firmly towards F3.

As a footnote to that Brands Hatch weekend, I remember a juicy little confrontation that took place long after the track action was done and dusted. Fans may remember a Grand Prix driver called Martin Donnelly, whose F1 career was ended by a brutal accident in his Lotus at Jerez in Spain in September 1990. Well, Martin’s dad was at Brands that weekend. The Kentagon’s a famous pub at the circuit; everyone goes there to eat and drink after the race, win, lose or draw. It was pretty special to have the festival trophy presented to me a second time there in the pub, but Donnelly Senior had had a bit too much to drink. My parents had come over to watch me race – in fact Dad spent a fair amount of time with us in England during 1996 – and this bloke said or did something that left my mum less than impressed. My mechanic was a guy called Micky Galton, and Micky was not a man to be messed with – his hands were the size of shovels. Dad can usually take care of any nonsense, but he was in the background at this point, so Micky went up to Donnelly’s dad, grabbed hold of him so that his little toes were dangling off the floor, and said, ‘If you f#*k up this young boy’s night …’ We had a few lemonades after that and I drove home a happy man!

*

With the festival win under my belt, Team Webber was ready to take on the world. First we were going back to Australia
to find lots of money, and that was our first mistake: there wasn’t any to be found. Corporate Australia was convinced that Craig Lowndes was Australia’s next F1 driver, because he had just embarked on a career in F3000 after winning in V8 touring cars at home. This was so frustrating to hear: no disrespect to Craig, he’s a great driver, but there was no way in the world anyone could pitch up in Europe to race F3000 without doing the junior categories first. They’d get eaten alive.

One group of people in Australia who showed faith in me and did their best to keep the Webber name in people’s minds were the guys at Channel 9, who in the early days of my motor-racing career were the F1 broadcasters in Australia. Whenever I came back home, they would ask me into their Sydney studios to offer my own comments on their F1 telecasts alongside Alan Jones and their larger-than-life host, Darrell Eastlake. They also invited me on to their popular weekend program
Wide World of Sports
, where skilled presenters like Ken Sutcliffe and Tim Sheridan worked very hard to get stories about me on air – Tim even brought a crew to Snetterton as early as 1995 to watch me in a Formula Ford race. But once again – and understandably so – there were just so many people asking me that familiar question: ‘How the f#*k is a boy from Queanbeyan going to get into Formula 1?’

Once again it was Yellow Pages that helped us fan the flames. Bob Copp and his colleagues were particularly keen on seeing progress. They didn’t want to see me in Formula Vauxhall, Formula Renault or any of those other categories that were starting to flourish back then. ‘Formula 3 or nothing’ was their attitude, and they were prepared to
support us to get there because it’s a category that people can understand, especially in Europe. Double F1 World Champion Mika Häkkinen had won the title in 1990, and the man who later put together the longest career in F1 history, Rubens Barrichello, succeeded him in 1991.

There weren’t many drivers going from Formula Ford straight to F3 at that time. A few had done that in the past, Ayrton Senna for one, but in the mid-nineties a lot of younger drivers were going to the middle categories to get a bit more experience before they moved into Formula 3. We didn’t have the time or money to do that: we had to skip a year at university, you might say, missing out part of the apprenticeship to catch up.

The overall cost for the UK F3 season was £245,000. Yellow Pages and Dad put a hundred grand in between them – Dad had had 15 months to recover from the shock of 1995 and there was also some inheritance money from my grandfather. We put it all together to buy a Formula 3 car. We were going to do the season with Alan Docking – the man who had given me the F3 test on the back of my Brands Hatch performance. ‘We’ll just go with the flow, mate, and see how we go,’ was Docko’s approach. Typical Australian way …

So we bought a brand-new Dallara race car with a Mugen Honda engine, which was the best engine-chassis combination available. The way it works is that the driver brings a racing budget with him in exchange for the structure, the technical support and the experience of the team that signs him up. After four races we were fourth in the British F3 championship. I started with two sixth places at Donington Park and Silverstone, finished the Thruxton
weekend without adding to my total, but then I won the fourth race at Brands Hatch on the full Grand Prix circuit, not the shorter layout used for the Formula Ford Festival, starting from pole position and setting fastest race lap as well. We were taking some big scalps like the works Renault team, or Paul Stewart Racing, the title-winning team set up by Jackie Stewart and his son. We were up against some pretty reasonable outfits and we certainly didn’t get the same Honda engines as PSR! That was the only race I won that year, but I was consistent and quick everywhere else.

But after the fourth or fifth race we were out of cash. The money from Yellow Pages and Dad had stretched only as far as acquiring the car and getting going. We hadn’t paid Docko the money to continue racing for him and his patience was being stretched pretty thin.

Then, not for the first time, Annie had a brainwave.

By that time David Campese, the winger Dad once played with in the same Queanbeyan Rugby XV, had become one of Australia’s greatest-ever players. Peter Windsor, a fellow Aussie and all-round sports fan who was team manager at Williams before becoming a respected motor-sport journalist, had been following my progress and suggested that I try to get in front of Campo somehow. The best chance would be while David was in the UK on his final Wallabies tour before he retired to set up a sports management company back in Sydney. Peter gave Campo a quick snapshot of who I was and what I was doing. He also found out when David was flying back to Australia, so he gave me the heads-up and off I went in my B-reg with a copy of my CV and sponsorship proposal tucked under my arm to stalk David at Heathrow. I handed the documents over
to him and said if he was feeling bored on the 24-hour trip back to Australia he might like to read my proposal. When he got back he said he would be interested in managing my commercial affairs in Australia, and that’s how our association started.

But what Ann was proposing in early 1997 went way beyond that. Some months after David agreed to represent me, she picked up the telephone in the middle of the English night, rang Campo and put our future in his hands. I had gone to bed that night destroyed, convinced we had reached the end of our journey. David’s response – as an individual, not as a businessman – was phenomenal: overnight he sent the money we needed to cover what was owing to Docko and enough to get us through the next couple of races. While it was not enough to keep us going for long, it was an extraordinary gesture that let us battle on. It was also a lesson I have never forgotten about hunger, determination – and the need to lend an occasional hand.

*

While Ann and I were going cap in hand to Campo, a quite different avenue was beginning to open up for us. At the Australian Grand Prix in March 1997 I introduced myself to Norbert Haug at the official Grand Prix Ball where Yellow Pages always took a table, not only to entertain their own guests but also as an opportunity for me to network with F1 names. I’m not sure where I summoned up the courage to approach Norbert, but I seem to remember Ann pushing me towards him!

Norbert was the man in charge of the Mercedes racing program, which at that time supplied F1 engines to the
mighty McLaren team, and his influence spread far and wide through the Mercedes-Benz empire. This 20-year-old Aussie gave him his card and said, ‘Hi, I’m Mark Webber, I won the Formula Ford Festival last year, I’m doing Formula 3 this year and I wondered if you would mind if I kept you in touch with my results.’

To my surprise he said, ‘Thanks, no problem,’ and Ann was good about making sure we kept him informed of my progress. We weren’t totally ripping up trees but we were getting good results, and she was determined to make people aware of what we were trying to do. In those pre-internet days that meant getting the results out – good, bad or indifferent – by the now antiquated method of faxing them. We sent them to Norbert and anyone who might be half-interested in following a young Aussie’s journey as he tried to come up through the ranks. It was a team effort: Ann and I would come home from a race meeting on Sunday evening shattered, but both of us would still be at the fax machine in the early hours of Monday morning, punching in more than 30 individual numbers! I was always reminding Annie to make sure her release didn’t run on to two pages because it then took twice as long to feed the sheets into the machine.

As things turned out, the fax mill worked. One morning – 15 May 1997, to be precise, just as I was getting ready for the sixth round of the F3 series at Croft up in North Yorkshire – I’d just jumped out of the shower to answer the phone at the top of the stairs. Luckily I sat down to take the call, otherwise I might have fallen down the bloody stairs.

It was Norbert Haug himself on the other end of the line. It seemed Gerhard Berger, who was then driving for
Benetton in what would turn out to be his last season as a Grand Prix driver, was unwell. Regular Mercedes sports-car driver Alex Wurz, an Austrian like Berger, was going to stand in for him.

‘Alex drives with Bernd Schneider for us,’ said Norbert. ‘Do you want to come and do the Nürburgring sports-car race in his place?’

It blew me away, being asked to race at one of the most famous circuits in the world, up there in the Eifel Mountains in Germany, for one of the most famous teams in the world.

That was one of the biggest phone calls I’ve ever had in my career. I told Norbert I was absolutely thrilled to be considered but asked him to let me think about it. I wanted to ask Annie what she thought: it was only six months since I had been driving in Formula Ford, let’s not forget, and here were Mercedes asking me to go to a track I had never seen, to try out a car, the CLK-GTR, that would take me to a whole new level. When Norbert rang back I suggested that it would be a good idea for me to do a preliminary test in the car, and he agreed.

To make it a truly representative test they were going to call in a guy by the name of Roberto Moreno from Brazil. F1 fans will remember that Moreno never really got the breaks he deserved in his career, but he did take part in 42 Grands Prix and he was second in a Benetton one–two finish behind Nelson Piquet at Suzuka in 1990. So here’s Roberto Moreno, whom I used to watch over and over again in those Formula 1 races I used to tape as a kid, and they were going to compare me to him. Bloody hell!

The test took place in Austria at the A1-Ring, just days before my F3 race at the 1997 British Grand Prix. Alex Wurz
was present and he was so helpful, telling me what I needed to do, what I needed to be careful of. I needed all the help I could get. Bear in mind the size of the teams I had been racing for, and the categories I was racing in. Then switch your mind to a highly prestigious international sports-car-racing class featuring many of the biggest players in the business. It would have been easy to feel overwhelmed.

This was my first exposure to the German way of doing things. You can imagine the garage, how professional everything was. They had everything laid out for me, the suit, the boots, the helmet – it was incredible. When I rocked up to the circuit at the start of the big day the first thing I saw was all the transporters: there were five trucks there just for the testing, and a Bridgestone tyre truck to boot. It was very nerve-racking because I knew how much rested on the next eight hours. I could have made a complete fool of myself – never been to Austria before, never been to this track before, never driven this car, don’t know any people here. All I could do was put on my gear, jump in the car and get on with it.