by Mark Webber
Most of 2004’s good things came away from racing: an enjoyable visit from George Clooney, Matt Damon and Brad Pitt as they publicised the movie Ocean’s Twelve in Monaco; a trip to the Great Wall and the Forbidden City when F1 added China to its annual travel plans; and the opportunity to go bike riding with one of my then sporting heroes, Lance Armstrong, at the end of the season.
Best of all, late in 2004 Ann and I bought a beautiful property in the small town of Aston Clinton in Buckinghamshire. It put us close to the heartland of British motor racing, with Silverstone close at hand; it’s not so far from Heathrow and other airports, which is always a major consideration when you lead the life of an F1 driver; and it is a listed building, meaning it has certain heritage features that make it part of English history. Annie in particular has poured a lot of time and effort into the house; the dogs and I have become familiar with every blade of grass on every track around the place. It must have been a good decision: I’ve been there longer than I was with any of my racing teams and we have no intention of leaving!
8
‘This Can’t be Happening …’
DURING MY TWO YEARS AT JAGUAR RACING ITS MARKETING guru, Nav Sidhu, came up with the idea for the team to generate some publicity by getting on the bandwagon with a couple of blockbuster movies which were just about to be released in the UK. The first one was Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines in 2003. The premiere took place on the Monday evening after the British Grand Prix, where I had raced with a promo for the film on the side of my Jag.
I had the dubious honour of driving the R4 up the red carpet in Leicester Square in the heart of London, wearing my tuxedo, with the whole cast, Arnold Schwarzenegger included, in attendance! Mum, Dad and a friend from Australia were over at the time and they joined Ann and me for the screening. We were separated when we got inside the cinema, but we had already agreed that it probably wasn’t our kind of movie and that they should keep an eye out for us leaving about 20 minutes into the film and follow us a few minutes later.
I duly slipped out after 20 minutes. Annie followed me a few minutes later and we waited … and waited. I couldn’t work out why Mum and Dad hadn’t appeared, so I went back inside on the pretext that I had forgotten something. Our seats had been next to Jenson Button, who still had a close contractual relationship with Williams at that time, and he gave me a very odd look when I came back, started rummaging around and then disappeared back outside again. Still no sign of Mum and Dad! This went on for a while; Annie went back in and did the same as I had just done, so by this stage JB must really have been wondering what the hell was going on! Annie then went and fetched an usher with a flashlight and the two of them went looking.
This time Mum and Dad must have spotted her. We certainly couldn’t have made it more obvious if we’d tried. Still no sign. By now I was fuming as I wanted to get home but we had all come in the same car. So Annie and I headed off round the corner for a bite to eat.
The story is important because it was the unlikely start of my relationship with one of the greatest names in F1. When my phone rang a few minutes later, it was not my parents, but Sir Frank Williams. He said that much as he would like me to join his team for the 2004 season, his existing drivers were still under contract.
But he would be happy to have me in 2005.
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Sport’s a lot like life. In the end, it’s the people in it who matter – not the numbers, not the statistics, not the petty politics but the people like Sir Frank Williams, founder of Williams Grand Prix Engineering, who live through their sport and are driven by the desire to excel, whatever the circumstances they find themselves in.
In March 1986 Frank found himself in circumstances he could never have imagined. A racer through and through, Frank by his own admission was driving his rented Ford Sierra too fast for the road to Nice airport after an F1 testing session at the Paul Ricard circuit in the south of France. When the almost inevitable accident happened, Frank suffered severe spinal injuries that left him a quadriplegic, paralysed from the shoulders down. But almost 30 years later Frank is still at the helm of the World Championship-winning F1 team that carries his name.
Over the years Williams had attracted drivers of the stature of Nelson Piquet, Nigel Mansell and my boyhood hero, Alain Prost. In 1994 he had finally got his man when Ayrton Senna left McLaren to join Williams. Within weeks the great Brazilian driver was dead, killed in one of Frank’s cars at Imola in northern Italy. It was a blow almost as devastating as the one Frank suffered on that road in France eight years earlier. If you looked closely at a Williams F1 car in 2014 you would see the familiar double-S logo and the words ‘Ayrton Senna Sempre’ – ‘Ayrton Senna Always’ – to mark the 20th anniversary of his death.
Sport’s a lot like life in another important way. Sometimes the heart rules the head, because sport is emotion or it is nothing at all, and sometimes our passions run away with us. When a man like Frank Williams called me and asked if I would like to drive for him, how could I say ‘No’?
Flavio wanted me to go to Renault after my spell at Jaguar. His master plan had been to have a Webber–Alonso pairing by 2005 and we were on the brink of it. But I looked at Williams – the man and the team – and I saw pretty well everything that I liked in Formula 1. My compatriot Alan Jones had helped Williams win their first titles at the start of the 1980s. Drivers as different as the stylish Piquet and the bulldog Mansell had won countless races in their cars. The name and the man behind it had been enough to lure Senna away from the team that took him to his three world titles. More importantly, the Williams team had emerged from its recent doldrums to win the last race of the 2004 season in Brazil.
Their current drivers Juan Pablo Montoya and Ralf Schumacher were both moving on at the end of 2004; Williams wouldn’t name my teammate until months later but obviously they were pretty keen to get the deal with me done and dusted and I took that as a feather in the Webber cap. In fact my new teammate was to be a German by the name of Nick Heidfeld. ‘Quick Nick’ had won the 1999 F3000 title; since then he had been to the short-lived Prost team for his F1 debut in 2000, moved on to Sauber for three seasons and spent 2004 at Jordan.
For me, the decision was easy. I followed my heart. The interest in me from Williams had begun as early as my sixth race with Jaguar. At the A1-Ring in Austria in May 2003 I set the third-fastest lap of the race, bettered only by the two Ferrari drivers, Michael Schumacher and Rubens Barrichello, and even then I was only five hundredths of a second behind the Brazilian.
Williams started sniffing around, and just over a year later the approaches became serious. Ann and I thought this was, at last, the opportunity to launch ourselves. I remember driving the race-winning Williams from Brazil 2004 at the end of that year and thinking, ‘This is going to be awesome.’ The Webber backside was going to be in a car previously graced by names like Jones, Reutemann, Piquet, Mansell, Prost, Senna, Hill, Villeneuve …
The deal first offered in 2003 was confirmed on 28 July 2004, and I called it ‘the most significant milestone in my career to date’. As a result I endured the lowest time in my entire F1 career.
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FW27 was the first car to come from a new group of Williams people headed up by my compatriot Sam Michael. Sam had just been named Technical Director in succession to Patrick Head, the design genius behind Williams’s early title-winning cars, who had been made Director of Engineering. Williams were making sweeping changes; they had also appointed a new aerodynamicist in Loïc Bigois, who came with serious credentials, and the chief designer of the new car was Gavin Fisher. But they seemed to have been caught out by late regulation changes to F1 aerodynamics for 2005.
When I drove the FW27 at Jerez early in January I somehow posted the quickest time, but without telling anyone I privately thought, ‘Bloody hell, we’re gone …’ As early as that first test I rang Ann and told her we’d made the wrong decision. Ironically there is a moment in Terminator 3 when one of the top brass trying to c
ounter the latest invasion says disbelievingly, ‘This can’t be happening.’ I knew how he felt.
All of us in the F1 paddock broke one long-standing record in 2005: with 19 races between 6 March and 16 October it was the longest season in the sport’s history to that date. Bahrain and China had come on to the calendar in 2004; in 2005 they were joined by another new venue, Turkey, which would be the scene of some drama in my own career a few years later. The tweaks continued: we weren’t allowed tyre changes mid-race, which may have been a contributory factor as Ferrari’s six-year stranglehold over F1 came to an end. They were a Bridgestone team, and the change seemed to suit Michelin better. McLaren were super-strong, as you would expect from a driver line-up of Räikkönen and Montoya, but there was a young Spaniard by the name of Alonso who threw a spanner in their works.
A second test with my new team in Barcelona later in January was followed by a pre-Australian Grand Prix publicity stunt that involved me driving a Williams F1 car over the Sydney Harbour Bridge – quite an eerie experience with no other traffic allowed up there with me.
That year’s was the 10th Australian Grand Prix to be staged in Melbourne, and for me it was a pretty exhausting week of media engagements and behind-the-scenes stuff that left me once again relieved and happy to get into the paddock and shut the gates behind me.
The race itself was low-key, to say the least. I qualified third in the new split format, but that didn’t translate into a top-three finish because I got bottled up behind David Coulthard’s Red Bull Cosworth and came home fifth. Oh yes, and Giancarlo Fisichella, Fernando’s teammate, came out and won the first race of 2005 in a Renault. Talk about rubbing salt in the wound!
After Melbourne we went to Malaysia, which should have brought my first podium. But I touched wheels with Fisi between Turns 15 and 16: as I was passing him, he got on the dirty stuff on the inside of the next corner, his rear tyres were shot, he braked too late, needed to use me to get his car round the corner and ended up on top of mine. I had a taste of what was coming when Patrick Head, who was still very much a driving force at Williams, got stuck into me about that – ‘stupid place to pass’ and other comments along those lines. Two sixth places in Bahrain and Spain were some consolation, even though I believed we were doing far too much of our learning about FW27 in the races themselves rather than having the car sorted out by the time the red lights went out.
Thank goodness for some light relief: Barcelona brought one of those occasional rewarding experiences I have enjoyed so much through my career in the form of a pro-am tennis tournament staged by Barcelona-born tennis star Arantxa Sánchez Vicario and her brother Emilio, no slouch on court himself.
With the help of my compatriot Chris Styring, who also organised tennis hit-outs in Melbourne to help the Mark Webber Challenge Foundation, they always put it together superbly: there were several of the top Spanish stars there (and it was an eye-opener to realise just how huge tennis is in Spain, particularly on clay), but there were also French players and a handful of people from other sports, including me. It was my first snapshot of being on court with professional players and seeing how phenomenally good they were. The mutual respect among elite athletes from different disciplines is obvious, and those tennis players were just such great people to be with. If memory serves me correctly I actually won the tournament once, but I think the standards had been deliberately lowered to help the amateurs! Interestingly, one of the photographs we have from those days shows a young Andy Murray standing at courtside looking on. He obviously learned from what he was watching!
Then came Monaco. The Monte Carlo race did bring that long-awaited first podium, but it was a disaster. I had absolutely towelled Heidfeld all weekend, every session. In the race we were stuck behind Fernando; the team made a call to bring Nick in and make a pit stop, which I’d had in mind because I was worried about losing more track positions. The way it worked out, I was pissed off that they gave Nick the chance to stop, come back out, enjoy two laps in free air and jump Fernando that way. I lost a position to my teammate, finished third to his second, and my engineer was livid. Heidfeld’s engineer had a lot better relationship with the man in charge of Williams’s strategy than mine did, so it was a bit of internal fun and games, which is why I was disappointed. I knew I was better than my teammate all weekend and he finished up on a higher step to me, that’s what made me look so unhappy.
The Nürburgring was another no-score even though I qualified on the second row again. I was taken out by Montoya’s McLaren while I was trying to defend my position against Trulli and Alonso, but fifth place in Canada in mid-June – my first points in Montreal – poured a little oil on what were clearly troubled waters. And then Indy! That was the year of the absolute shambles over the tyres when only six cars actually raced. Ours weren’t two of them.
Before we got there I was caught up in a little adventure that’s worth recounting. I was asked to do another appearance, and for once I was really looking forward to it. This one involved a group of us – Alex Wurz, for one, and some NASCAR drivers as well – going to Colorado for a three-day cycling camp at which there would be some pretty serious scientific testing to go through. It was being put together by Morris Denton of AMD, then sponsoring Ferrari, and Chris Carmichael. Anyway, off we go to Montreal airport on Sunday evening post-race, check in, see our bags trundle away on the conveyor belt, and shortly after learn that we can’t actually fly to Chicago to pick up our Colorado flight because the city’s O’Hare airport has been closed in by bad weather. Too late for those bags – they’re on their way. Frank’s personal pilot heard about our plight and came up with the perfect solution. They were going to fly down to Indianapolis later in the week, the North American races being back-to-back: why didn’t we borrow the plane, with Frank’s blessing, to get to our interim destination?
Great plan, until we were informed that we couldn’t take off in Canada and land in the US in a private aircraft without a full US visa, and we were travelling on the visa waiver system. No problem: the resourceful pilot suggested they take the plane over, land at Burlington, very close to the border, and meanwhile we cross over in a rental car and pick up the flight from there.
Then we discovered that the same visa issue would stop us: you couldn’t do a one-way trip in a rental car either. Talk about trains, planes and automobiles! By this time it’s early Monday morning; eventually, somehow, we got hold of a van that deposited us on the airfield to pick up the flight to Colorado – and our bags were waiting for us there! Doubly amazing because we had gone to great lengths to explain, after the Montreal check-in fiasco, that they should be sent to Indianapolis. Bear in mind that this is security-conscious America post-9/11: where those bags had been and how they got to Colorado I will never know.
Once we all, bags and drivers, finally got to the famous Brickyard it was pretty clear early on that trouble was brewing. There were monster shunts: my former sports car teammate Ricardo Zonta, test driver for Toyota, was the first to find himself in trouble, on the infield section on Friday after his left rear tyre failed. Worse was to come. That afternoon Ricardo’s Toyota teammate Ralf Schumacher went into the wall hard on the banked Turn 13 when, he said, he felt something give way on the left-hand side of his car as well. The medical men forbade him from taking any further part in the weekend.
So alarm bells were ringing early on about the casing on the Michelin tyres, and we were experiencing a lot of loading on that side of the cars on the Indianapolis banking. Ironically it was Jarno Trulli in the other Toyota who grabbed pole position on Saturday, but that turned out to be a furphy as they had put a thimbleful of fuel in the TF105 to rescue some good publicity, and possibly because they already knew their man would not be in the field the following day. I qualified ninth, with a disgruntled teammate back in 15th between the two Red Bulls.
Ours was not a happy camp for other reasons, namely the widening rift between Williams and our engine partner BMW, but there were more immediate problem
s to contend with. We had our normal team meeting that night, and it never crossed our minds that we wouldn’t be racing next day. We just thought there would be some magical solution. Different tyre pressures, a change of camber on the wheels, and it would be all right on the night. The show would go on.
But in the background Michelin were in a state of near-panic. At Williams we drivers were kept a little bit in the dark. There was a further meeting that night down in the pits with all the Michelin teams’ technical directors trying to work out what to do. The French company had brought in some different casings by then, a stiffer sidewall meant originally for the Barcelona race; in fact they threw everything at the problem overnight. On Saturday morning one of the Williams cars had a bulge on the sidewall of a tyre, which is the first indication that the tyre in question is about to fail. We limited ourselves to short runs, said we’d do qualifying, take it from there and have a look at our options for the race. Everyone got through the qualifying session and the tyres were fine.
But Michelin were adamant that the specification of tyre available to us was not guaranteed safe for racing speeds unless those speeds could somehow be reduced through the banked section of the famous oval. Don’t forget Michelin were supplying two-thirds of the field, but they’d got their calculations wrong and we couldn’t use these tyres on this track. So then it was down to the FIA and Michelin to work things out. There were a lot of voices from within the Bridgestone and Ferrari camps, saying the show must go on, which is understandable when you are at one of the temples of motor sport and people have come from all over America to see what’s supposed to be the absolute pinnacle of motor racing taking place in their own backyard.
By now it was all about these fans and what we could do to give them something for their money and their support. In the end we couldn’t find a way to do anything. Whenever some compromise was put forward the response was just ‘No, no, no’, there was no real flexibility. We were not going to take part in the United States Grand Prix. Early in the season, assessing the new Williams, I had said to myself, ‘This can’t be happening.’ On the Indianapolis grid I came across Bernie Ecclestone and he was saying, ‘This shouldn’t be happening …’