by Mark Webber
Ford decided a shake-up was needed; the new man in charge, Richard Parry-Jones, insisted that performance on the track was the only measure by which progress would be judged. There were now two P’s in the Jaguar pod in the shape of David Pitchforth and Tony Purnell, running the race team itself.
‘Pitchy’ was great: a Yorkshireman, solid as a rock, and everybody loved him, but he was never going to do the schmoozing and cruising; he was never one for the politics of the F1 world. Tony was the boffin of the two, while Dave was far more down-to-earth, but the noises they were both making were encouraging. Tony had been quoted as saying that he was laying the foundations for something outstanding in years to come and that he was looking five, even 10 years ahead. To me it seemed they could construct something worthwhile if, I thought, they didn’t end up having their hands tied behind their backs by the parent company. All right, we were a lean machine, one of the leanest on the grid, but we could take it one step at a time, build some momentum and, who knows, by 2005 we might find ourselves in a position to start winning races.
A new team of people had been thrown together and we had ‘Jungle Boy’ in the other car. That was Antônio Pizzonia, the Brazilian, four years my junior (I was 26), who had cruised through the apprentice formulae and picked up the British F3 title on the way to becoming a Jaguar driver. In pre-season testing the R4 proved very unreliable: we were doing a lot of engine development work with Cosworth, and we were working hard on the aerodynamics.
At the first test session in the first week of January 2003 I managed the grand total of 17 laps in the car. Michael’s Ferrari set the pace in the 1 minute 15 bracket. We were down in the 1:18s so clearly there was a bit of work to be done. But I believed there were still a lot of good people in the team and that we could make real progress together.
Unfortunately that wasn’t much in evidence in Melbourne. I made rather a meal of the new one-lap qualifying format, and the first race of the second phase of my F1 career ended prematurely with a broken suspension component at the rear of the car. In Malaysia we were running in the points in eighth place but a catalogue of mishaps conspired against me: there was a persistent fuel-feed problem, I had a drama with my clutch at my pit stop that cost me half a minute, and to cap it all off the fire extinguisher went off in my face! I posted another DNF.
In April 2003, at Interlagos in Brazil, three remarkable things happened. The first was that we put the R4 on the second row of the grid. You have to remember that the F1 ‘tyre war’ between Bridgestone and Michelin was in full swing at that time. The R4 went through its Michelins very quickly: I used to bring them up to the proper racing temperature as soon as I could, but the car was still very hard on them.
Qualifying was an area I thought was going to be a real challenge in 2003 because the system had changed to virtual one-lap banzai runs, whereas I used to like building up to it, having a few runs and getting everything ready. So at one of our winter tests I asked my engineer Pete Harrison to drop in a short run randomly throughout the day. We would go out fresh and pull out a big lap.
‘Boom – just keep surprising me’, I told him.
In the long run it turned out to be a bloody big strength and Brazil was one of the first signs it was paying off. On Friday we took advantage of changeable conditions to take provisional pole ahead of local hero Rubens Barrichello in his Ferrari; he got his own back on Saturday in dry running when we were carrying a tad more down-force than either the Ferrari or David Coulthard’s McLaren, but we still set third-fastest time, just five one-hundredths off the final pole position lap. Rubens was on provisional pole when I started my lap at the end; the crowd were apparently going quieter and quieter the further I got round.
Come the race it was wet again; we had too much water in the foot-well and Tim Malyon, my rack-runner (the bloke in charge of the car’s electrics), was highly nervous. So was everyone, really – a Jaguar on the second row? The stress levels were off the charts.
We had a problem on the grid with the throttle: it wasn’t calibrating properly. For the first few laps the team were ringing up, saying, ‘Press this button, press that button,’ asking me to clear and reset functions in the car.
This was also the race where I had my first little ding-dong with Michael, wheel-to-wheel for several laps. We had to run the car heavier than it needed to be because we couldn’t suck the last 15 kilos or so of fuel out of the tank. So, what with one thing and another – and remember I’m not used to being among these big boys at this stage of my F1 career – I was trying hard to tell myself to stay cool. It was a race of heavy rain and multiple safety cars. In fact we started behind the safety car and it stayed out for the first eight of the scheduled 71 laps. The conditions caught out some of the biggest names in the field. Michael himself was lucky not to come off far worse than he did when the Ferrari skated off on the river of water running across the track just past Turn 2 and he narrowly missed a rescue truck.
The second remarkable event of that Brazilian weekend came on lap 53. I was running seventh after my second stop, working my way back through the field on intermediate tyres, when disaster struck. I had been trying to keep the tyres cool whenever I could, and that included coming uphill to the last corner at Interlagos. It had worked for the previous two laps, but the tyres had turned into virtual slicks and that was what caught me out. I went into the barriers, bounced off and back across, and that hurt! I remember my legs were going everywhere and how hard my knees were banging together. The impacts knocked all four corners off the car and I was left in a canoe, to all intents and purposes, sitting in the monocoque that had kept me relatively safe through my biggest F1 accident yet.
It wasn’t over, though: Fernando’s Renault came barrelling round and hit some of the debris. It sounded like a bomb going off, so as well as worrying about myself I was now concerned for him. The race was stopped. When I got out of the wreckage the first person I saw was one of the long-serving F1 snappers, Steven Tee, and his eyes were out on stalks. Steven’s seen plenty in his F1 time so I knew I had just been through something pretty spectacular.
I wasn’t taken for a medical. My physio, Nick Harris, asked me if I was all right so I dropped on the floor and did 60 press-ups to persuade him that I was. One of the most annoying aspects of the whole episode was that the race result was eventually declared at a point on lap 54 when I was lying ninth. Since points were now being allocated from P1 to P8 and I had been running as high as seventh, what would have been my first points for Jaguar and my first in over 14 months were snatched away from me. Talk about adding insult to injury.
And the third remarkable event of that eventful weekend? Just three races into our relationship Jaguar asked me to sign on again, but this time for five years! A year before, I had been on a three-race deal with Stoddy; now I was being offered five seasons!
By the time Imola and Barcelona had come and gone, my signature was on a new contract for the following year, with multiple-year options. We had suffered another non-finish in Italy when a driveshaft failed, but Spain brought our first points together – no nasty surprises this time – when I finished seventh. I really felt that race, after a test session at Mugello, not far from Imola, had fixed our reliability problems. I also felt I couldn’t do all the hard work I was already involved in for the next season’s car and then go somewhere else. In any case, the first Jaguar I drove was far from a shocker and it was a lot better than my debut year. We had already produced a stellar effort from pit lane in Austria, where I set the third-fastest race lap behind the two Ferraris; that was the performance that first attracted the attention of Frank Williams, but more on that later.
Silverstone brought one of the most bizarre and most alarming moments of my entire F1 career. Things were going well for us at that stage; we came off successive sixth places in one week at the Nürburgring and Magny-Cours and I was inside the top 10 in the championship, but the Silverstone race was overshadowed when I came round at Becketts – and saw a spectat
or in the middle of the track.
It turned out he was some kind of protester, dressed in a lurid green and orange get-up, and he was running towards the F1 cars as fast as he could. It was the most incredible thing I had ever come across on a racetrack. Whatever he was protesting about, it didn’t matter to me: he was putting other people – me among them – in an appalling position. I was pretty shaken up by the thought that I might have been racing my heart out as usual, and ended up killing someone. There would have been kids in the crowd and it made me even angrier to think that he was prepared to risk them witnessing a horrendous accident. As a footnote, the same man, whose name was apparently Cornelius Horan, made headlines at the 2004 Olympics in Athens when he attacked a Brazilian runner in the marathon.
Around the same time Silverstone was the location of another, more welcome event. Team Webber gained a new member when Kerry Fenwick came on board. She had ambushed Ann while we were watching Kerry’s then boyfriend, Australian racing driver Will Power, compete in F3. She told Ann we needed her to come and work for us! Ann hadn’t even thought about the need for a PA but Kerry wouldn’t take no for an answer and she hounded Ann until she invited her to come and do a half-day for her, working in the spare bedroom at home which had been converted into an office. It was obvious from the start that she was a chip off the same block as Ann and very determined to drive Will’s career. She figured out that aligning Will with Team Webber might open up some opportunities and contacts for him and to a degree she was right. We later invested in Will’s World Series by Renault season and although F1 proved a bridge too far for him, he went on to carve out a very successful career in America, winning the IndyCar title in 2014. Kerry has remained with us and is responsible for maintaining order in our office and household.
Normal service, or something like it, was resumed two races later when I produced what I felt was the best drive of my fledgling F1 career. We qualified third again in Hungary, then a strong first stint laid the foundations for another sixth-place finish. Though I lost out to Montoya in the stops and was overtaken by Ralf Schumacher fairly late in the piece I thoroughly enjoyed myself, not least of all because it was the first time we could look at the results, point out that we owed nothing to other people’s misfortunes and believe that we had achieved the position purely on merit. Seventh at Monza next time out would be my last points of a season in which I scored 17 altogether and finished 10th in the Drivers’ World Championship.
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At Germany’s famous Nürburgring in 2003 Ann and I were able to make a significant announcement, one which had nothing to do with my driving career. We were setting up the inaugural Mark Webber Challenge, a new adventure race in Tasmania, set among some of the most ruggedly beautiful scenery Australia has to offer. The first 10-day Challenge would take place in November after the completion of the Formula 1 season.
The inspiration behind it was a familiar one for most top-flight sportsmen and sportswomen: the desire to give something back. The idea was to force people out of their comfort zone, which just happens to be the title Steve Waugh picked for his autobiography, one of the finest sports books I have ever read. Steve was coming with us to Tasmania as were James Tomkins, a member of Australia’s ‘Oarsome Foursome’ of Olympic rowers, tennis Grand Slam tournament winner Pat Rafter and the athlete who thrilled the whole country with her magnificent 400-metre sprint victory in the 2000 Sydney Olympics, Cathy Freeman.
Designed to showcase Tasmania as a world-class adventure destination, the inaugural Challenge took in a thousand kilometres and a range of sporting activities that included cross-country running, mountain-biking and kayaking. In addition to its fund-raising aims, the Challenge answered another need. It would really help with the all-round conditioning a modern F1 driver requires to do his day job. You want as many strings in your bow as you can have to prepare you for racing the car on the limit lap after lap and for the bloody big bang that’s also going to come one day – as I had seen in Brazil.
Grand Prix drivers have to condition themselves to make sure they don’t get run down during a hectic schedule of worldwide travel and racing. They are generally fit people, they can take the strains and the pressures of the different countries we race in, and specialist trainers had always encouraged me not to have what they call too tight a pyramid. You want your physical fitness to be built on a good, broad foundation, and that’s what I had been working towards for years: going for a long paddle, going for a long run, sprint sessions, lifting weights, swimming, covering as many bases as I could. The Mark Webber Challenge encapsulated all of that, and it had two other key elements for me: the chance to work within a team, and the competitive urge to see how I might go against some pretty serious athletes.
Being on the Challenge – seven so far – puts me in a completely different world from the one I normally operate in. In F1 you live in a fishbowl, where price means more than value, relationships are built on false foundations and the moral compass is sometimes distorted. The Challenge was the perfect antidote to what Ann often calls ‘that Formula 1 life’, a professional environment that became more and more disenchanting as the years went by. To me it is a happy coincidence that we announced the creation of the Mark Webber Challenge at the place where, six years later, I would rise to the challenge of being a Grand Prix winner.
Although I wanted to test my own limits, the Mark Webber Challenge was not conceived as a competition, more as a personal test for anyone who wanted to join me in one of the most beautiful but also most daunting places on our planet. Since its inception, I believe it has become one of the most respected multi-sports challenges an athlete can face.
The first Mark Webber Challenge was incredibly physical: big, big days, and 10 of them – one of the hardest things I’ve done in my life, by a long way. One of the most pleasing things for me after the first Challenge was the reaction from Bernie Shrosbree, the rugged ex-marine who played such a part early on in my own quest for genuine fitness. It was Bernie who introduced me to the whole idea of multi-sports training; he came on my team for the first Challenge, when there were some demons in me asking, ‘Well Mark, can you get through this thing yourself?’
After those 10 days Bernie said to an interviewer, ‘Mark is walking 10 feet taller than he was 10 days ago. The Challenge was mentally more difficult than he anticipated; he had some incredible bad moments – a bad fall, a knee problem, but whatever condition he was in, he wanted to stick with it.’ Bernie added that James Tomkins had noticed a change in me as well. Apparently his comment to Bernie was, ‘He’s flipped over to pure leadership.’
It was a relief to me that I had come through it, but the last thing anyone should think is that the event that carries my name is all about me. It’s about encouraging people to step outside their comfort zone and discover what they are capable of. Every participant has his or her story about why they are there in the first place – it gives me goose bumps when I first hear those stories. I’m reminded of Wayne Bennett’s memoir, The Man in the Mirror, one of the finest sports books you will ever read. The book and its author have been twin sources of inspiration to me for years. The poem Bennett borrowed his title from sums up everything I believe: if you can look yourself in the eye, you have passed the sternest test of all. I believe many of the men and women who have come with us on the Challenge have passed that test – even if they didn’t think they would.
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After the extreme high of the inaugural Mark Webber Challenge in Tasmania in November 2003, the start of the 2004 racing year brought me back to earth with a bump. It would be an understatement to say that we expected more from R5, my second car at Jaguar, than it was willing to give us in 2004, a fact I quickly grasped at the first test session in January in Valencia where we were a full two seconds off the front-running pace. In F1 terms that’s a huge margin, and while things seemed to have improved by the second test in late February, the season simply underlined our shortcomings.
We always had a go
od engine but we never seemed able to capitalise on any virtues the car possessed. The year can be summed up pretty easily: four points-scoring races in Bahrain, the Nürburgring, Silverstone and Hockenheim, but instead of the hoped-for podiums the best of those four results was sixth in Germany.
Among the few highlights was my first F1 front-row start in Malaysia, next to Michael’s Ferrari. Being next to Michael’s Ferrari in 2004 wasn’t easy for anyone; his final World Championship-winning season was a stunner, with a new record of 13 race victories – 12 of them in the first 13 rounds. So it was a big lap!
I hadn’t always felt comfortable in Malaysia because there are no reference points, no markers to help a driver on that wide and varied Sepang layout, and it was good to crack that circuit. But all that hard work went out the window when we endured a start-line fiasco with the clutch. It had oil all over it, so when the lights went out the Jaguar was going nowhere.
That led to one of my most aggressive first laps, because of course I did go somewhere – back down the field to seventeenth. By the end of the first lap I had clawed my way back up to eighth. I overtook Ralf Schumacher, which he didn’t like, so he came charging up from behind, gave me his front-wing endplate in the left rear and left me with a puncture.
I had to limp all the way back to the pits, damaging the floor and the diffuser in the process, so when I came back out again the car just wasn’t working. I spun under braking for the final hairpin and retired. Monaco brought two days from hell with fires, hydraulic failures, electronic glitches; it wasn’t until the British Grand Prix at Silverstone in mid-July that I took my first World Championship point at Silverstone. I dedicated my eighth place to ‘John-Boy’ Walton, the team manager at Minardi who had died after a sudden heart attack the previous week.