Aussie Grit

by Mark Webber

  Point 2

  At the time of writing this letter, I still don’t have a full understanding of what happened in terms of the discussions that took place on the pit wall.

  I had been under immense pressure from Hamilton for the whole of the first stint as he was incredibly fast on the soft tyres. I felt I had soaked up this pressure well and was clearly focussed on building a gap over the rest of the field. My holding Hamilton out for the first stint gave Seb the chance to jump Hamilton at the first stop (which worked well) as Seb wasn’t quite on our pace during the first part of the race.

  Maybe I was naïve in thinking that we were trying to control the McLarens from the first stop to the flag but this is what I set about doing. Yes, at times there were surges in pace from all three of us for the next 23 laps but keeping in mind that I was the leader, I was the first car to arrive to clear backmarkers and also the first car to arrive at corners where it was spitting with rain; it wasn’t easy. And last, but by no means least, as the lead car I was giving a very good slipstream at certain sections of the track.

  However, from the cockpit everything felt fine and repetitive (i.e. the status quo was being maintained) until lap 38/39 when the alarm bells started ringing after obeying instructions from the pit wall to change my fuel mixture. I radioed the team immediately to ask what Seb’s engine situation was as I was now concerned about ‘friendly fire’.

  At this section of the race, Seb was certainly under pressure but no more or less than he had been from Hamilton in the previous 23 laps.

  I was thinking 17 more laps of this … yes, admittedly tough but I strongly felt that the top four positions would not have changed in the race. All four of us had pushed very hard up until that point. It was true that at that particular point of the race, Seb’s car was the fastest out of the four but only by a sniff.

  Let’s not ignore the fact that I had led the last 180-odd Grand Prix laps (combining the three GPs together until the point of contact in Istanbul) and I wasn’t leading the Turkish GP by any fluke. So, I felt that after the first part of the race when I had dealt with severe pressure from Hamilton, and Hamilton and I had both edged a small gap over the rest of the field, I had earned the right and was capable of finishing the job off by leading home a RBR 1–2. Yes, there was a lot of pressure from McLaren but I don’t believe it had reached a critical point as Hamilton wasn’t attempting any overtaking moves into Turn 12 at that stage.

  In the future, there should be more communication between drivers and the pit wall about how they see the race. We shouldn’t be paranoid about talking and using our radios during Grands Prix in fear of people eavesdropping (i.e. TV networks) because at the end of the day, we have people who are well able to control Grands Prix to the very best advantage of the team.

  It’s a fairytale what has happened to our team in the last two years, and I say ‘our’ team because I have certainly felt a part of it. We have to recognise though, how difficult it is to get two cars into first and second place in the closing stages of a Grand Prix. We have had many 1–2s in the past under no pressure and we have proved we can handle it. But this was the first time that we were under severe pressure trying to execute a 1–2 and we caused ourselves extra pressure from within our own troops.

  The stakes are high for us as a team as our own performances and commitment to Red Bull Racing have lifted the bar to a very high level. We are a unique team and I believe this remains a huge strength in our quest for the world titles.

  Kind regards,

  That was my letter in its entirety. Dietrich was fine about it – but Christian went apoplectic!

  After Turkey, as much as the team denied it, it became slowly but painfully evident that Marko was pulling the strings. More than that: there was an agenda – his. I had been assured by Christian that as long as he and Adrian were at Red Bull I would be looked after. They said they wanted me to win races; they even wanted me to win the title and I believed them. I did wonder, though, what would happen if they weren’t there!

  That summer my management and I tried speaking to Christian and asked him as bluntly as we could to abandon his pretence of even-handedness and just tell us exactly where I stood within the team. Not that we were going to trumpet it to the outside world: behind closed doors, we said, just level with us and be straight. If there was an agenda, we needed to be told clearly what it was.

  We tried to make him understand that he was doing a great disservice to himself by allowing himself to be undermined by Marko. On the other hand, it’s important to see that Marko was already a very useful conduit between the Red Bull Racing team and Dietrich, with whom Christian had little rapport. Marko had positioned himself between them, which helped Christian bypass bureaucracy and go straight to the top when important decisions had to be taken. In a sense, Marko had made himself indispensable. I have no doubt that Christian was put in a very tricky situation as that 2010 season unfolded. Not only did he have two drivers capable of winning races, it was looking more and more likely that they would also be in contention for the greatest prize in the sport. I’m sure he must have been asking himself, ‘How do I keep them both happy? I’ve got to keep Marko happy as well …’

  To him it perhaps seemed the lesser of two evils if his down-to-earth Australian was the one upset, not the blue-eyed boy from the Red Bull Junior Program in the other car, and he played that game all the way through, right to the end. Ultimately siding with me and upsetting Marko wasn’t an option for him. To maintain harmony within the team (and you’ve got to remember there were 800 people involved), the focus had to be on keeping Marko happy, which meant making sure Vettel’s side of the garage was happy.

  Team Webber was old enough and ugly enough to understand that, but Christian insisted on keeping up the pretence that everything was even-handed, despite growing evidence that it was anything but. All we wanted was to be told the truth but he couldn’t do that, and for me that was a sign of weakness. It was at this stage that I began losing respect for him. It must have been uncomfortable for him to be a front-line spokesperson for the team without enjoying any real power within the hierarchy.

  The long and the short of it is that we read the whole Red Bull Racing team situation like a book, none more so than Flavio. After my back-to-back wins in Barcelona and Monaco he told us this situation wouldn’t be allowed to continue. Not for the first time, he was absolutely right. Having a washed-up old Australian dog take the title was not part of RBR’s plan!

  13

  In Rare Air

  ALTHOUGH THE BAD SMELL FROM ISTANBUL STILL LINGERED, I re-signed with Red Bull Racing for the 2011 season just before the next race in Canada. My driving contract renewals and negotiations generally began around May or June of the preceding year and concluded, but were not always announced, by the end of July at the very latest. I was well and truly in the championship hunt with my teammate as well as Fernando and Lewis, so I wasn’t about to write off my own chances by announcing to the team I was off to pastures new in 2011. I already felt things were starting to be stacked against me but they would have turned the tap off quick-smart and the momentum would have swung firmly in Seb’s direction.

  In Montreal I qualified on the front row alongside Lewis Hamilton but overnight my car suffered a gearbox problem and the boys had to change it, so I was hit by a five-place grid penalty and started seventh. Towards the end of the race Sebastian too had a problem with his gearbox. If that was a normal competitor ahead of me, like a McLaren or a Ferrari, you’d smell blood – but not when it was Sebastian. I wasn’t free to attack my teammate.

  Ciaron had to be incredibly reserved on pit wall: from that year on there were coded messages between us so I knew when it was ‘not him’ talking to me. Clearly I could have caught and passed Sebastian if I’d known about his gearbox issue. Instead they elected to shut the race down from there and not push his car that hard.

  There were two reasons for their call. They knew he couldn’t deal with being passed by
his teammate; and if the car was nursed home Sebastian would avoid any risk of component failure leading to a grid penalty for the next race. Instead of saying, ‘Sebastian, let Mark through,’ or ‘Mark is quicker,’ they wanted him to do a certain pace at the end of the race which I then had to match. I could have raced at a totally different pace, but that would have meant me going past him at some stage, and that really would not have gone down well.

  So what’s the best solution for them? Turn both of us down. An engineer from Renault came to me at the end of the race in a fury and said, ‘This is ridiculous. You need to do something, it’s just going too far.’

  The same Renault engineer also said that when engines were routinely tested on the dynamometer, the unit showing the higher readings – the strongest engine – would systematically go to Vettel’s side of the garage, rather than alternating as had been the practice previously. The crux of it was that we were always free to race when my teammate was behind, never free to race when I was behind.

  Canada had come just 10 days after Turkey so I bit my tongue. After the race Annie and I were sitting with Christian in the Montreal airport lounge and Sebastian’s name cropped up. Christian commented that the problem with Seb was that he read straight from the pages of the Michael Schumacher manual.

  As I said, it’s on-track happenings that matter most, but there was another little off-track episode in Canada that left us nonplussed. At the time of the Malaysian race Seb had hosted a team dinner. I offered to do the same at the next suitable fly-away race, which would be Montreal. Everyone agreed; we booked a restaurant and paid a deposit. But after all the goings-on in Turkey the Red Bull Racing team manager, Jonathan Wheatley, called Ann to tell her that Christian no longer felt it was appropriate for me to host the evening. Jonathan added that Renault would be more than happy to take the team out to dinner in Montreal, but they had a particular restaurant in mind. Ann explained that cancelling our booking would cost us a bit of money, as we had paid the deposit. Jonathan went off to check with Renault and see if they would simply take over our booking. By the time he rang back to say they would rather not, Annie had come up with a compromise. Since we were so keen to present a united front, why not have Sebastian and me jointly take the team out and share the costs as a sign of team harmony? Of course that idea went down a treat with the senior management at RBR and the evening duly went ahead. We made a point of ensuring that the whole team thanked Seb as well as me. Ann and I settled the balance of the bill on the night – but it took until November for Sebastian to stump up his share. It probably wasn’t his fault, though: we got the distinct impression the team had never actually shared the news that he was going halves with me!

  I left the next race in Valencia battle-scarred and with no points after the biggest accident of my Formula 1 career. I had endured not one but two terrifying moments at Le Mans eleven years earlier; I’d also had a fairly major moment in the wet in Brazil in 2003. But what happened in Valencia was in a different league to any previous F1 shunt I’d been through.

  My first lap was poor, so I had embarked on a comeback drive and pitted early. When I came out I was told I had to clear Heikki Kovalainen in the Caterham as quickly as possible. I cruised up into his slipstream – and Heikki started to defend his position. Clearly I was a lot quicker, so for every corner I found myself still behind him I was losing time to the guys who were now starting their own round of pit stops. I thought he had started to open up the line for me, but there is such a tunnel effect between those concrete walls in Valencia that it’s easy for a driver to lose his reference points on the track and there was slight confusion about the braking-points for the next corner. His car became a launching-ramp – and my RB6 was the missile being flung into the sky.

  Shades of those trees at Le Mans: as the car went up I had it in my mind that there was a bridge over the track somewhere nearby. ‘Jesus,’ I thought, ‘if I hit something up here …’ But the car came down, landed on its roll-hoop and thankfully righted itself. There was no deceleration process – the grip was non-existent. By this time, like Interlagos 2003, I’m no longer in a racing car, I’m on a bobsleigh: no steering, careering towards the wall.

  As the car strikes the track, instantaneously you hear it starting to break up. However, the violence of carbon fibre disintegrating quickly becomes a second thought as you try to hold your body in the right position: the hits will inevitably come, but you don’t know when they will happen. At this point you want speed and inertia removed but you can do little about that as you’re only a passenger. When the car comes to rest, the initial feeling is relief that you’re okay. Of course the adrenaline is high, as is the shock, but very quickly you’re thinking that it’s a lost result. It’s amazing how the mind works.

  It certainly must have looked dramatic – ‘fourteen seconds of hell’, my dad called it – but the car was strong and my belts did their job. Just as bloody well because I moved the concrete barrier several metres back, snapping the brake pedal in the process, which meant the pressure had been up around 250 kilograms! In an accident of that force your body stretches a lot, but ironically all I suffered was a fair bit of toe-bashing. Still, in the scheme of things a sore toe is nothing. I had always made a point, if I was involved in any kind of accident, to move as quickly as I could in order to reassure my girls, Mum, my sister and Ann, that, as Dad puts it, I’ve ‘still got two arms and two legs and my head is together’. But the first thing on my mind this time was that some championship points had gone begging. This time, unlike Brazil seven years earlier, I was taken to the medical centre and quickly given the all-clear.

  One of my mechanics wrote on the wreckage, Thanks for taking care of my mate. By the way, I wasn’t thinking about it at the time of the accident but I was in the car which had carried me to those race wins in Barcelona and Monaco and it was supposed to be mine at the end of the year!

  After Monaco my third victory of 2010 came at my adopted home track, and the British Grand Prix pretty much summed up my entire 2010 season. It was a bittersweet weekend, one that started with a very angry Australian and finished with another victory at the home of the World Championship, a circuit that had been very kind to me over the years. I had already won there in Formula Ford, in F3000, in the FIA GT Championship. I only had the big one to add to that list. But in F1 in 2010 Silverstone would be where I learned that despite the company motto, Red Bull Racing didn’t give us wings – at least not both of us.

  My team, I felt, made the task of adding a British Grand Prix victory to my Silverstone record unnecessarily hard for me. They discovered after practice that they had been left with only one example of a crucial new component – the front wing. The one they had was already on my car at that point. Sebastian’s had been damaged and was no longer usable. So they decided to take the new wing off my car and give it to my teammate for qualifying and the race. I was furious.

  The logic the team tried applying to the situation was that Seb had been quicker in the final free practice session, so he should have the sole remaining wing. That was all well and good but I had been forced to concentrate on long-run work rather than focusing on pure performance after my car had problems in Friday’s second free practice. Likewise, their reasoning that Seb was ahead in the championship was flawed: if that was the case, then why, in Turkey, when I was ahead in the standings, did I still have to play second fiddle and wait for my new rear wing to arrive in time for qualifying? It seemed to me the goalposts were forever shifting.

  If truth be told, neither Sebastian nor I particularly liked the new wing, but our Friday end-of-day briefing had shown that factory data suggested there was a gain to be had from using it, so the team wanted us to persist with it. I was a bit bemused when a story was leaked to the media, allegedly by a senior RBR engineer, saying that I didn’t want the new front wing as I didn’t find it any more effective than the old one and I only asked for it when there was only one of them!

  At Silverstone, experts sa
id the new wing was worth around two-tenths of a second on a quick lap; Sebastian beat me to pole by 0.143.

  In the post-qualifying press conference it would have been obvious to Blind Freddie that yours truly wasn’t thrilled with what had gone on, and slamming my glass of water down on the desk would certainly have helped to get that message across! A respected F1 scribe called it ‘quite possibly the unhappiest team front row of all time’. Later that evening I headed home to Aston Clinton – one of the joys of the British GP was that I could commute from home – and watched my Aussie mate Crumpy win the British Speedway Grand Prix. Next day Mum and Dad came to the race, but Annie didn’t. She was so incensed she decided to stay well clear of Silverstone. She didn’t even watch the start on TV, but she told me afterwards she knew it must have gone all right because of the flood of text messages she started receiving just a few minutes later!

  I was utterly determined to win the start, and I did. Seb bogged down, I got away beautifully and although he tried to squeeze me I was having none of it. The first corner was mine; so was the race. I beat Seb off the line fair and square and simply stood my ground. Perhaps it was inexperience on his part, perhaps it was something else entirely, but he didn’t back off and inevitably his car ran over the kerb just as he was having to turn his attention to the man behind him. That was Lewis Hamilton; when the two touched it seemed at first the Red Bull – new front wing and all – was unscathed, but it had picked up a right rear puncture and Sebastian had to make an unscheduled call to the pit lane.