by Mark Webber
Then I added: ‘I was disappointed you did it, really disappointed. I’m not expecting you to tell me if it was for real or not, but I wanted to come and tell you on my own, not in front of everyone else at the GPDA – because for sure it’s going to be brought up.’
And he said, ‘Mark, sometimes you go down a road and you can’t turn back.’
It was exactly what I wanted to hear from him. He told it to me straight and it showed me what he was prepared to do in order to win. I was happy he had the respect for me to tell me the truth. Michael was an absolute phenomenon, but the levels he would go to just to keep being successful … That’s the way he was wired, he was such a ferocious competitor, always on the edge. Would you be comfortable in your own skin, looking in the mirror, saying, ‘This is what I did to achieve some of that success?’
At the next GPDA meeting when, sure enough, the Monaco incident did come up, I was very relaxed about it because I’d taken issue with Michael individually. But some of the other drivers were getting ticked off with me because they claimed I wasn’t standing with them. I encouraged some of the other guys to follow my lead and talk to him directly, but obviously they never did.
Back on track, two sixth-place finishes in Bahrain and Imola were the peak of our performance at Williams in 2006. Why? We simply weren’t good enough. With FW28 the switch from Michelin to Bridgestone was a big change because feeling how they perform is a big part of a driver’s skill set. In fact we enjoyed almost zero continuity. We lost BMW engine power as they moved to join Sauber, and Williams used Cosworth’s CA2006 V8 units instead; and in Rosberg I had another new teammate to think about.
The final race of that 2006 season summed it all up. It was in Brazil, as usual in those days, and it was an unmitigated disaster. Both Williams cars were out on the opening lap – because we had tangled with each other. Nico rammed into the back of me; I lost my rear wing, he lost his front. I limped round to the pits to retire; Nico carried on but crashed heavily in the second-last corner and brought out the safety car. My exasperation with Williams came out when someone asked on the radio if Rosberg was on his way back too, and I couldn’t resist a misplaced crack at the blond, self-consciously good-looking guy in the other Williams cockpit. ‘No, mate,’ I answered, ‘Britney’s in the wall …’
My last race for Williams could hardly have gone worse, and my next comment – ‘What a waste’ – summed up not only that Grand Prix but the whole season. In fact, this could be said of the whole two years I had spent with Sir Frank’s team. My second year at Williams was effectively a long goodbye.
In case it all sounds like doom and gloom at Williams, other aspects of life under Frank and Patrick did raise a chuckle, and Jackie Stewart was at the centre of a couple of them. Jackie was still a prominent member of the team through his connections with sponsors the Royal Bank of Scotland. When I first went to the UK one of Australia’s most respected motor-racing people, journalist and former top driver David McKay, had mentioned me to Jackie and asked him to keep an eye out for me. He certainly has: Jackie and Lady Helen, and their sons Mark and Paul, have been kindness itself in the intervening years and have included Ann and me in their lives as if we were family. Those Williams years brought my first close professional dealings with Jackie, and an insight into just how meticulous this legend of motor racing could be.
There seemed to be endless demands on us drivers away from the track in those years, and on one occasion in Hong Kong we were due to attend a couple of public signing sessions. Jackie had decided he would like to sign all of his picture cards in the car en route – and that’s where the problems began. His PA Niall Brennan had been out on the tiles the previous night and he was still at breakfast when JYS issued the instruction that those cards had to come with him in the car. Unfortunately for Niall, in his less-than-perfect state he took the pile with a few JYS cards on top – and all of mine underneath. You didn’t want to be in the gun with Jackie after committing a faux pas like that and wasting his precious time.
Jackie loves being well dressed and could never understand my preference for jeans and sweatshirts. Different generations, I guess. In those years he would insist on trying to get me into more acceptable clothes, which meant multiple visits to Dougie Hayward, the Savile Row tailor who had supplied him with his suits for years. Dougie by this time was well into his eighties and found it hard even to move around the shop. His suits were a bit different, to say the least, but the meticulous side of JYS came through again: one cuff had to be a few centimetres shorter so that it would be easy to shoot the sleeve back and display the timepiece, supplied by Rolex of course, underneath.
One of the bonuses of my career at the top level of motor racing was the chances it brought to see and do some different things. Two other moments from the Williams years took me to opposite ends of the spectrum. One was a visit to Iceland for Hamley’s, the big London toy store, and that was a cool trip, if you’ll pardon the pun. I took Annie with me and we went to the capital, Reykjavik, but I also got the chance to go on a mountain-bike trip out into that unique landscape. So barren, and so remote – so much so that we were all encouraged to hop off the bikes, strip down to the absolute buff and hop into the warm water from the geysers! It was a terrific experience, just one of those little perks that came with the job.
The other end of the spectrum was a trip to Croatia in the recent aftermath of war in that part of the world. One of our marketing people, Matt Jones, had fought in Serbia; we went over there and our trip included a visit to a school. It was an eye-opener in a completely different way: graffiti, barbed wire, facilities as basic as you could possibly imagine. Talk about getting out of the F1 bubble.
Grove was a tough part of my career: I had to restart after that two-year stall. To be honest, it was worse than simply stalling. I had gone backwards, just when I had been travelling nicely. From Minardi to Jaguar to Williams, that was a normal, in fact a very positive progression for a Grand Prix driver. But it’s amazing how fast a phenomenal corporation or team – the Lakers, an NRL team, a Williams Grand Prix Engineering – can implode when success is not happening any more. I was there for the first phase of that implosion at Williams.
Frank’s one of the most sensational team bosses ever, and that partnership between Patrick and him was deadly for a long period, but when people of their stature fall off by five per cent it’s equivalent to a lot more as it filters down: it translates into 30 per cent among the people in middle management and by the time you get to the factory floor you’re toast. In fact it wasn’t until 2014, with Mercedes power, that Williams really showed signs of becoming a force in F1 again. The dynasty continues with Frank’s daughter Claire doing a splendid, unfussy job as Deputy Team Principal.
Ironically Williams did approach me again after those unhappy two years, but by then I was comfortably installed at Red Bull Racing, in a racing environment that suited me down to the ground.
Besides, I often say you do a lot of learning when you get your arse kicked. When you win a race by 30 seconds you don’t learn much, not only about that day, but about how to handle yourself and deal with getting beaten. And if you’ve been beaten fair and square, if you’ve done everything you can, they’re the days when you learn that you’ve got to come back and work harder. That’s what happened to me at Williams. At the end of 2006 my stock was at its lowest since I arrived in F1. My record now read five seasons, 86 Grands Prix, one podium finish, 25 races in the points, of which three had come in 2006, and a career tally of 69 World Championship points. While I had taken some enjoyment from my time at Jaguar, my last two years with Williams had been a period in the F1 desert. Some expert witnesses were ready to come to my defence: the annual review of the F1 year in Autosport magazine said, ‘Here was a classic gritty Williams driver. The tragedy was, this was no longer the classic Williams team.’
There was only one question in my mind: where to next?
9
Smile Back on the Dial: 2007
IT’S STRANGE, BUT THE YEARS THAT DEFINED MY F1 CAREER and gave me my greatest successes are the ones I’ve struggled to find the motivation to write about. I don’t think it’s because I’m disappointed how it panned out for me personally because I’ve never forgotten where I came from, or what I managed to achieve. When I left Australia to follow my dream, I was determined to stay in Europe for as long as possible. That could have easily been no more than six months but as it turned out, I’m still racing 20 years later and remain a paid professional, and we’re becoming few and far between these days.
The real problem stems from the fact I fell out of love with Formula 1. I was disappointed to discover a darker side of the sport which I was unaware of when I was racing for lower-ranked teams. But when there are race wins and championships at stake and the big money that goes with them, you enter a world where you simply become a pawn in someone else’s game, where politics and hidden agendas are the order of the day. I remember Sir Frank Williams saying when I signed for his team that I was the most apolitical person he had ever met in F1. I knew what the word meant all right but I couldn’t understand why he would use it; after all I was just a racing driver so what did politics matter …
Disillusionment with life on the inside, as it were, was increasingly matched by disappointment with how the sport was evolving. I’m old-fashioned; as a Grand Prix driver I loved to race and liked those races to be sprints from start to finish. In recent years, that component has been diluted almost to the point where the drivers are either vastly over-qualified for the job they have to do or the job has become so easy that anyone with half an idea could graduate to F1 with relative ease. Where once being granted an F1 super-licence was a privilege and something you aspired to – you could only get one if you had finished in the top three of an FIA-affiliated championship – in more recent years it seems you can apply for one on the back of a cornflakes box!
I also became frustrated with the sanitising of the sport and how attempts were made to quash any kind of individuality, which is why larger-than-life characters are sadly missing from the sport these days. I found it insulting to be told what my response should be to certain questions, sometimes about subjects that carried us outside the safe (or blinkered) confines of the paddock – like going to race in Bahrain, where the escalating civil unrest had resulted in the 2011 race being cancelled. I was carefully drilled by Red Bull Racing’s PR machine about what to say – or not to say – to the media so it didn’t go down well with RBR’s powers-that-be when I said to the press, ‘So, Bahrain?’ and tried to answer their questions as honestly as possible. I was a grown-up, a man in his mid-30s at that time, and funnily enough, I was capable of forming an opinion and was interested in what was happening in the wider world beyond F1.
This is such a sad feature of F1 nowadays; at one stage at the height of the Max Mosley sex scandal I was asked my opinion, and Red Bull Racing’s Dr Helmut Marko actually said to Ann that we should try not to buck the system, just play the F1 game whenever we found ourselves in the paddock. Maybe it was his way of warning us about how to behave to get ahead, but he didn’t like it when Ann politely asked if that meant checking our brains in at the turnstiles on the way in!
Funnily enough even the publication of this book has been affected by my final few years. After I published Up Front, my honest assessment of the 2010 season, my later RBR contracts always included a clause that prevented me from writing about or being involved with any publication that might be deemed critical of the team for 12 months after leaving. The irony is that they actually did me a favour because it afforded me the luxury to put my hindsight goggles on, take into account what happened at Red Bull Racing and at other teams in 2014 and write about my time with the team in a more reflective manner now that I can see the bigger picture much more clearly.
After the debacle at Grove I didn’t want to argue with Flavio again. He had said Renault, I had said no, and Alonso had ended up with two world titles in a row! When Flav started nudging me towards Red Bull Racing, I could see the sense in that, and the potential they had in their ranks.
There was the initial attraction that Red Bull Racing had been built on the foundations of Jaguar, my old team, which meant a return to familiar territory at Milton Keynes. Ford had decided to offload its F1 racing arm in the European autumn of 2004; while Red Bull got it at a fairly good price, Dietrich Mateschitz, the Austrian billionaire behind the Red Bull brand, made a three-year commitment to keep it going. Three years is a long time in Formula 1, so he was clearly prepared to invest some of the money coming from worldwide sales of his famous energy drink, launched in his native country in 1987.
Dietrich is a modest and private man who shies away from the spotlight. I only ever saw him at one or two Grands Prix or tests each year as he wasn’t involved in the day-to-day running of the team, leaving it to the people he had put in charge. But over time I got to know him better away from the racetrack and would visit him regularly at his office situated within Red Bull’s Hangar 7 at Salzburg airport in Austria. He has a great passion for aviation, and Hangar 7, an edgy building with a futuristic look about it, is home to his amazing Flying Bulls collection of historic planes and helicopters, and numerous Red Bull-sponsored racing cars.
Within a year of the Jaguar purchase Dietrich Mateschitz and former Austrian F1 driver Gerhard Berger had also acquired another of my former teams: Minardi, renamed Scuderia Toro Rosso or ‘Team Red Bull’ in English. I knew Christian Horner, the Englishman appointed to head up Red Bull Racing trackside, from my F3000 days. He used to race himself but was honest enough to recognise he didn’t have the talent to make it to F1 and so did the next best thing and set up his own race team, Arden, with his father, Garry, who helped fund it.
I knew Christian well enough to have the odd conversation here and there and it was obvious he had a big passion for the sport. However, I had no idea then just how lofty his ambitions were, nor the motives that inspired him to become such a force in F1. In later years I got to know him a lot better as we flew to races together. Ann and Garry went into business together with a GP3 team and we socialised regularly with the Horner family. Initially Christian did well to keep his feet firmly on the ground as he started to mix in supposedly higher circles, but inevitably you could see him being seduced by the trappings of an F1 lifestyle. It wasn’t all negative: he’s ambitious, a good politician and he has worked hard to be accepted in the right places. But, because he likes to keep everyone happy and doesn’t like confrontation, over time he’s become less than consistent and I eventually found I couldn’t rely on what I was being told.
So Red Bull Racing came into F1 in 2005, the phoenix out of the Jaguar ashes. In their second season, 2006, they had scored more points than Williams, which admittedly wasn’t all that hard. The real lure for me at Red Bull Racing was Adrian Newey. He was, and has remained, one of the real technical geniuses of the Grand Prix world; his cars had won umpteen races and many championships for Williams and McLaren. While my time at Williams had been barren, that was in the post-Newey era, as he had already moved to McLaren.
It had been a real feather in the cap for Red Bull to attract him. He joined the team early in 2006 but such is the way F1 works that the 2007 machine, the RB3, was to be the first of ‘his’ cars for his new team. Not only that, but it would be powered by Renault in a new long-term partnership after RBR’s one-season arrangements with Cosworth in 2005 and Ferrari in 2006.
F1 tweaks for 2007 included the move to a single tyre supplier, Bridgestone. The FIA had mooted this possibility some time before and Michelin had decided that, as a company whose entire philosophy was built around racing and the competitive edge, they didn’t want to be in a formula that had no competition … On the wider F1 scene, Fernando had left Renault for McLaren, where his teammate would be British whiz-kid Lewis Hamilton – but not for long. And McLaren would find themselves embroiled in one of the biggest controversies in F1 history, with a very large sum o
f money at its end.
Interestingly, it was another year when that recurrent theme, team orders, enjoyed the headlines, albeit briefly. As a season-long fight between Ferrari and McLaren developed, the FIA investigated the possibility that, in Monaco, McLaren had instructed Hamilton to slot in behind Alonso to protect him from the threat of Räikkönen’s Ferrari. No action was taken, but once again it was clear that there were racing situations that could place considerable strain even on the oldest-established teams on the grid. So much so that McLaren’s two drivers ended up virtually at war. Fernando’s relationship with Ron Dennis at McLaren broke down beyond repair and after one year with the Woking team he was off back to the Renault team where he had obviously felt so much more comfortable.
As I prepared to go racing with Red Bull, there was one small nagging question in the back of our minds. It wasn’t a deal-breaker at the time but I wanted to know what the situation was with Helmut Marko. The name will figure prominently in the coming years so it will be useful to know that he is Austrian, he was a schoolmate of 1970 World Champion Jochen Rindt and co-drove a Porsche to victory at Le Mans in 1971. He tried to make the step up to F1 but had his career cut short by an accident at the 1972 French Grand Prix in which a stone pierced his helmet and blinded him in the left eye.
He went on to establish a team of his own, RSM Marko, in F3 and F3000, and for many years was a major contributor to the Red Bull Junior Program and a consultant to Dietrich Mateschitz. Let’s just say he didn’t command unquestioning respect around the junior categories because of the ruthless manner in which he dealt with young drivers. Although I was never on his radar or he on mine as our paths never crossed before Red Bull Racing, everyone knew someone he had upset along the way. In fact, I later made a point of asking people from across the generations, including those he used to race against in the 1970s, whether I had simply got it wrong about him and they assured me I hadn’t!