by Mark Webber
Most of all, my own question – ‘Can I do this?’ – had been answered. On my slow-down lap after crossing the line I gave vent to all those pent-up emotions. It went something like this: ‘Woo-hoo! Yee-hah! Yes! Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! Ha-ha! Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!!’
I think it meant: ‘Yes, I can.’
There was just one little cloud on that memorable day. It drifted over when a well-known television commentator came into the Red Bull hospitality area in the immediate aftermath of the race. As he looked around the place at other members of the team he asked Ann, ‘Why the long faces?’ Then the penny dropped: ‘Ah, I see,’ he added. ‘The wrong driver won!’ It was a telling comment and although it did nothing to spoil our pleasure, we realised later that it went right to the heart of the matter. There was a bit of celebration and showbiz for the cameras but it was clear some of the senior management weren’t all that happy that I had turned the tables and won in Seb’s own backyard.
After Germany I felt I had got through another stretch of uncharted waters: pole position and a Grand Prix victory. Clearly a lot of other people thought the same! My first pole attracted something like 90 messages, and that figure seemed to double after I won the race. I didn’t realise so many people had my bloody contact details but I was blown away to receive messages from world champions like Sir Jack Brabham, Nigel Mansell, Jody Scheckter, Valentino Rossi, Troy Bayliss, Casey Stoner and so many of my racing colleagues and friends.
Twenty-four hours later I was enjoying the company of the Australian Test team, who had been such an inspiration to me and were in the UK on an Ashes tour. Ricky Ponting was hosting a foundation dinner for the charity he had established and it was phenomenal to be with some of my cricketing heroes. But they seemed to think I’d done something pretty heroic in my own field and I was given a heart-warming reception. Luke and I went to Lord’s again to watch some cricket later that week and I was overwhelmed by the response of people around me on the train heading into London and then at the hallowed ground.
A funny moment happened when the Aussies invited Luke and me down to their dressing-shed. Luke’s a massive cricket fan and devoted to the Baggy Green, but he was completely overawed and speechless when he was introduced to the Australian captain. Ricky was great, Luke was silent. He’d met the likes of Fernando Alonso, Lewis Hamilton, Jenson Button and Sebastian Vettel over the years but cricketers were on another level as far as he was concerned. He’d seen so much of them on TV, they were pros, the real deal. We spoke to Ricky and the rest of the lads, and of course we had a lot in common, but Luke came away as if it was his first date with a supermodel – he should have said and done a lot more! ‘That was crap,’ he grumbled as we were going down the stairs. ‘I had so many questions to ask Ricky but I froze.’
Another happy memory of that day in Germany was that my buddy Bernd Schneider was there to see me win. He never managed it himself in F1, but he played a role in helping me get there and he sent me a nice message after the race to say how happy he was that he was so close to me on such a special day. Soon after I got home there was another one: a telegram from Bernie Ecclestone. It was pretty special, not only for the kind words: it was made entirely of silver.
The next step was to keep the momentum going but after another podium in Hungary our charge stalled. Valencia, Spa, Monza and Singapore came and went without any more points, but the prospect of returning to Suzuka for the first time in three years helped lift the spirits. The circuit has always been one of my favourites and I felt sure we could pull off a great result there.
‘We’ did, in the sense that a Red Bull Racing car won the race. Unfortunately it wasn’t mine. A free practice ‘off’ meant I missed qualifying, started from pit lane – and had to come straight back in when my headrest worked loose. Out again, same thing, in again. A puncture on the fourth lap meant all I could do was treat the rest of the afternoon as an unscheduled test session. I was the last classified finisher in 17th place. When that happens, not even the satisfaction of another fastest lap is enough to redeem the weekend. That was the first time in 2009 where I felt there was a very good result to be had and I wasn’t there to get it. Suzuka was a low point, no doubt about it.
I had never scored a point in seven attempts at Interlagos in Brazil, but I had to stop beating myself up and move the bar up another level. As a result I went to Brazil better prepared than ever. Heavy rain made qualifying very long – two and three-quarter hours, to be precise – and very dangerous, and in the end a small mistake meant I couldn’t quite match hometown hero Rubens Barrichello as he took his third Brazilian pole position. Still, I knew we were in good shape to give Brawn a run for their money the following day. To ensure we did, I was rather harsh and leant on Kimi Räikkönen at the start and took his front wing off. It was crucial he didn’t come past me; he had KERS and I didn’t, so passing him later would have been hard.
I came through unscathed as the safety car came out. When it retreated after four laps Rubens opened up a handy little gap, but he pitted after 21 laps and lost ground when he came back out in traffic. His absence freed me up to reel off some quick laps, including fastest race lap for the third time that season, and I was still ahead when I emerged from my own first stop. My second was as well executed as the first, I got out just ahead of JB, a puncture cost Rubens any chance of a home win, and I was home free: a second win to go with the big breakthrough in Germany.
It had felt like playing chess, where we had the advantage of knowing all the moves that were coming and being ready to counter-punch. It also confirmed the runner-up spot for Red Bull in the Constructors’ Championship, and my green-and-gold chest was puffed out even more when my good mate Jason Crump took out the World Speedway title that same weekend and Casey Stoner won the Australian MotoGP down at Phillip Island. After the Brazil race Valentino Rossi sent me a text: Two is double of one! which I think was Italian for There’s a lot more to come. Whatever the translation, it meant a great deal to me and helped me realise that when you achieve at sport’s highest levels, you have a natural affinity with people who have also competed on the world stage.
The celebrations started in earnest when I caught up with DC and a few of the others in the bar at the hotel post-race. Somehow, we managed to screw up logistics with too many people going to the airport, which resulted in four on the back seat and DC sitting on the centre console between the driver and front seat passenger. Brazilian roads aren’t the smoothest so I think DC spent most of the trip head-butting the roof. He probably never felt a thing! We carried on drinking in the airport lounge and when we had boarded and levelled out, we were at it again. Two hours later we couldn’t work out why our fellow first-class passengers were pissed off with us so we decided to take ourselves off to business class and wake up as many passengers as possible. I seem to remember we played a little game with the non-F1 personnel on the flight who were asleep and fell victim to a few of our shenanigans!
One race to go. It took us to another spectacular new venue for the F1 calendar, the Yas Marina Circuit in Abu Dhabi. It turned out to be, slightly disappointingly, a track of two halves: a nice first sector with some high-speed stuff, but a lot of corners packed into a tight space in the second half of the layout. Lewis took pole for McLaren, with Sebastian alongside him and me in third spot. Lewis’s race finished early with brake problems on the McLaren and with Sebastian proving just a little bit quicker on the day – or night, as we raced into the darkness – I was left to fend off a late challenge from the new World Champion, JB himself. I admit to struggling to have any real feel for the option tyres in the closing stages as Jenson closed in, and I knew it was going to be pretty tight by the end of the race.
Isn’t it funny what pops into your head at the strangest times? As JB was reeling me in, it came back to me that after Tasmania he was probably the only bloke among the drivers that I have a good relationship with (and still do) who didn’t get in touch with me, and that had left
me feeling a little disappointed. Looking back, in late 2008 he was under a bit of stress himself, unsure about his own destination for 2009 after Honda’s withdrawal from F1, so I shouldn’t be too hard on him. But I confess that right then I was thinking, ‘Righto mate, this is going to be interesting …’
The aim was to be totally accurate with my braking-points and leave no room for error when he attacked. That long straight was definitely a window for him to create some pressure and we knew the Brawn – or the Mercedes engine – had a little more top speed. Sebastian had it won, this was down to a race for second between the two of us now, so I had to make sure I caused as much havoc as I could getting onto the straights. On the last two laps it got very tight: he attacked, I defended, it was a lot of fun. I was pretty pleased with my defensive drive, especially when it secured Red Bull’s fourth 1–2 finish of the season.
What a roller-coaster ride 2009 was. High anxiety through the European winter of 2008–09 after my accident in Tasmania … Low morale for a while as I felt the pain of driving the car again … High expectations dashed at Silverstone … The penalty in Germany followed by the incredible high of my first Grand Prix win … The dip from Hungary onwards offset by another taste of success in Brazil … 18 points out of 20 in the final two rounds.
In the end I got from the year what I believed I deserved. I was fourth in the drivers’ standings on 69.5 points, the odd half coming, of course, from our abbreviated race in Malaysia early in the season. From a team perspective too, 2009 was special, a unique season when Red Bull Racing ticked a great many boxes.
It was nothing compared to what 2010 had in store.
12
In High Places
MY EARLY F1 YEARS TOOK ME TO BASE CAMP AT EVEREST. IN 2010 I would learn what it was like to attempt K2, which most serious climbers agree is the toughest mountain of them all.
In his autobiography In High Places the great climber Dougal Haston said that the climber has to control self-doubt and fear; that climbing happens as much in the mind as in the battle of body against mountain, and sometimes the challenge seems unreasonable. But then Haston asked a pertinent question: what could be more reasonable than finding out about yourself?’
Switch ‘mountain’ and ‘F1’ and you have a pretty fair summing-up of where I was now in my career: in high places. The year ahead would bring incredible highs like Monaco, moments of fear when my life seemed to have been taken out of my hands, and moments of self-doubt. Could I go higher still? Climbers start out quite often as a large group; they build camps at key positions on their route up the mountain; as they go higher the group gets smaller; in the end only the climbers capable of making the final push for the summit remain. And to make that push they need all the help they can get from the people behind them. That’s how it was in the 2010 Formula 1 World Championship. By the end of the season we were down to four title contenders, two of us from the same team. The summit was within reach.
Going into 2010 the Webber stocks were higher than they had ever been. I was an F1 race-winner now, in a front-running team, and I felt I belonged there. But the bar had been raised higher again: could I go on and win more races and, if so, what else might come my way? Could we – the whole Red Bull Racing team – continue on this steep climb and put ourselves in World Championship contention?
In 2009 we had a quick car in the shape of the RB5, but it was found wanting on a number of tracks. Adrian Newey’s priority for 2010 was to come up with a successor, the RB6, that would be quick on every track – and that meant 19 of them, because 2010 was scheduled to match 2005 as the longest seasons in F1 history to that point. While the team considered a switch to either Mercedes engines (vetoed by their other partner, McLaren) or Cosworth (ultimately short on development), we stuck with the Renault units that Adrian thought were somewhere around 4 per cent down on the German engines’ power. As the season loomed I was pretty optimistic. The key performance ingredients that make these things go fast were not really changing much for the new year, Sebastian and I had finished first and second in the last race of 2009 so we clearly had a great base to design the RB6 on, and we had developed the RB5 quite well in-season, so looking at a 24-month cycle there was nothing to suggest that progress shouldn’t continue. As a unit we were one of the most stable teams over the break, and that continuity was only going to help our cause.
Most crucially of all, I believed Adrian had the hunger back again. We flew down together to Valencia for the MotoGP race at the end of their 2009 season along with two of my bike racing mates, Jason Crump and John McGuinness, and you could tell that he was excited by the potential of his latest design.
For 2010, quite simply Adrian had designed the best car. He had come up with a system at the rear of the RB6 where the engine’s exhaust gases were channelled through a slot in the car’s bodywork into the central section of the diffuser. That would boost the down-force and increase cornering speed: it would prove a valuable aid in the early part of the year.
The one regulation change of note was that refuelling had been banned, meaning we would have to run the cars heavy from race start. My feeling was that 2010 would be all about tyres because the additional weight in the car would affect their reliability. That meant there was room for a bit of tactics on the fuel burn – how to do a Grand Prix with the minimum amount possible.
Setting off with around 160 kilograms of fuel on board, the cars would get quicker through the whole race to the tune of about four seconds per lap as the fuel load burned off (each litre weighs around three-quarters of a kilogram). But the driver’s job wouldn’t change massively: every corner is on the limit, to a point. People think that when the cars are heavier they’re at their worst but I think they’re easier because the lap time’s slower so the G-forces are lower, and the car’s less nervous, more docile in the driver’s hands.
As for this driver, I was in pretty good shape too, although not without a minor alarm. I had been hoping to have all the remaining metalwork in my leg removed in one hit but the recovery period from that would be too long. The screw inserted in my leg had a small cap in the top and this had been giving me quite a bit of discomfort since the original surgery 12 months earlier. It had been cross-threaded and was sitting proud, and that’s why it was causing me pain. The start of December 2009 was the only window I had to allow my new case surgeon Dave Hahn to put things right. It required a full incision at the front of my knee and Dave couldn’t guarantee the recovery period.
It was a relief to get the work done but I infuriated Dave when I resumed training way too soon. I thought the knee might have become infected; I remember being at the Red Bull Racing Christmas party a week later in excruciating pain and on crutches. I panicked and drove up to Nottingham to see Dave the next morning. He said, ‘You stupid bastard, you’ve been doing too much on it and not enough on the crutches. When I say rest, I mean rest.’ He got a syringe out and withdrew a lot of fluid, knowing full well it wasn’t infected. I did what I was told this time and the leg was happier and better. I was back in light training again just four weeks post-op.
The 2010 season marked the return of one Michael Schumacher. He had been tempted out of his three-year retirement by the prospect of teaming up again with Ross Brawn, who was now in charge of the born-again Silver Arrows. The Mercedes F1 team were coming back into the sport in their own right, rather than as engine suppliers to other teams, for the first time since 1955. For Michael it was a case of ‘full circle’, as it was Mercedes who had really launched his career in their sports-car program in the late ’80s and early ’90s. His teammate would be compatriot Nico Rosberg.
I was all for it: we all knew only too well what Michael had already achieved, but comebacks are something else. You don’t hear of many absolutely phenomenal comebacks. You hear a lot more about the ones that haven’t gone to plan – think Björn Borg, for example – because generally the people under scrutiny have had phenomenal careers first time around. They left on a slightly high
er level than everyone else in their chosen sport; they think they can come back, have a crack and be right back where they were.
Personally I didn’t think Michael would be the same driver he once was. Still bloody awesome, but the hunger, the willingness to go the extra mile and then some, all those things he used to take in his stride … Would he still have it? I reckoned he would be half a yard short in a few areas here and there: like a footballer short of match fitness or a boxer who’s been out of the ring too long. But hats off to him for coming back and having a crack, because the young guys still knew where their right foot was and he wasn’t about to be given any preferential treatment. He wouldn’t want it anyway.
His return meant we would have seven German drivers on the grid, a mark of how powerful their nation had become in our sport. And one of them was in the car right next to mine.
I totally agreed with some of the tweaks that had been made to the 2010 regulations, such as the ban on in-season testing: I was all for that because I hated driving round and round doing 15 Grand Prix distances on top of all the racing. I wasn’t so happy with the decision that had been taken on World Championship points though, with the introduction of an inflated 25 points for a Grand Prix win and a sliding scale of 25–18–15–12–10–8–6–4–2–1 for the top 10 finishers in each race.
Why? As a sports fan I can relate to however many runs Bradman made, or his batting average, or how many goals Eric Cantona scored. To my mind it showed scant respect for the tradition of our sport. Compare my points to Jack Brabham’s now and the picture is skewed. I’m a traditionalist and I like the way tennis, cricket or golf have stayed consistent. It’s a shame that the powers that be in F1 keep tweaking the small things instead of looking at the big issues.