Aussie Grit

  About Aussie Grit

  In the high-stakes world of Formula One, only the fastest make it to the top. Few know this better than Australian Formula One legend Mark Webber. His career in F1 stretched an incredible 12 years, saw him earn 42 podium finishes and triumph in nine races, including twice-winning the crown jewel of F1, the Monaco Grand Prix.

  But the road to the top of F1 racing is long and full of deadly twists and strange turns. In his long-awaited Autobiography, Webber tells the incredible true story of the small town pizza delivery boy who climbed the apex of the world’s most dangerous sport. With startling candour, Webber takes us on a thrill ride through the highs and lows of his amazing career, detailing the personal struggles that drove him, revealing the truth at last behind his rivalry with Red Bull Racing teammate Sebastian Vettel, and allowing us access-all-areas into a very private life played out on the public stage.

  Filled with anecdotes about the great drivers, epic races and characters of Formula One, Mark Webber Aussie Grit is a fascinating account of a life in the cockpit of an F1 rocket and the inspiring, no-punches-pulled story of a great, gritty Australian.

  Contents

  Cover

  About Aussie Grit

  Foreword by Steve Waugh

  Prologue:

  ‘Multi 21’: A Rag to a Red Bull

  In the Cockpit: A Marathon in Shoes Two Sizes Too Small

  1

  No Wings, Learning to Fly: 1976–94

  2

  Wingless Wonders: 1995–96

  3

  A Wing and a Prayer

  4

  Getting Ready for Take-off

  5

  Nightmare at Le Mans: 1999

  6

  A Pawn in the Game: 1999–2001

  7

  Base Camp at Everest

  8

  ‘This Can’t be Happening . . .’

  9

  Smile Back on the Dial: 2007

  10

  A Challenge of a Different Kind: 2008

  11

  Yes I Can: 2009

  12

  In High Places

  13

  In Rare Air

  14

  One Day You’ll Look Back

  15

  Finishing Strongly

  16

  In Another Cockpit: 2014 and Beyond

  Epilogue:

  A Life in Sport

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  About Mark Webber

  Also by Mark Webber

  Copyright page

  Foreword

  BY STEVE WAUGH AUSTRALIAN CRICKET CAPTAIN 1999–2004

  HOW COULD I SAY NO TO MARK WEBBER, ESPECIALLY WHEN he was raising funds for various children’s cancer research charities? After all, what he wanted of me sounded like a once-in-a-lifetime adventure – to be helicoptered into the untamed west coast of Tasmania to compete in the inaugural Mark Webber Challenge. Sure, it would take me out of my comfort zone, but I assumed the fitness required for this task was not beyond that of an Australian Test cricketer.

  How wrong was I?

  Twenty-four hours later, having somehow completed the Challenge, I woke in my Hobart hotel bed in readiness for a pre-game training session with the New South Wales Sheffield Shield team. The very instant I attempted to take my first steps for the day, I experienced a searing pain in my upper hamstrings that quickly cascaded into every nerve-ending in my body. I couldn’t move beyond a geriatric hobble. I was in a world of hurt with no place to hide. But what at the time seemed like a recipe for disaster in fact became a godsend, because the next day I blazed my way to a swashbuckling century. My legs were still tortured and begging for mercy, so my only option was all-out attack, culminating in adventurous strokeplay and a stream of boundaries. I guess my forced plan B wasn’t a bad option!

  That’s the power of Mark Webber. He is a guy you want to be with in the trenches, a man who exudes calm yet has that down-to-earth character that every Aussie can relate to and respect. We have all admired his exploits on the track. Mark’s statistics are extraordinary: 12 years in Formula 1, 215 starts, 13 pole positions, 19 fastest laps, 42 podiums and nine wins. However, these remarkable achievements aren’t the only reason Australians connect with Mark, for he is one of us, a man who has never forgotten his roots, stays true to himself, remains humble and always gives 100 per cent every time he suits up. Throughout his F1 career, we all felt like we knew him and as such we joined him on the journey, celebrating his successes and experiencing the pain of defeat. It was as if he was driving for us all, spreading goodwill and the spirit of Australia around the world. I was a big fan, following his progress from wherever I was in the world and regularly sending text messages, which he always replied to even when the issues of the day were complex and challenging.

  Mark has always made himself available to help out my charity, the Steve Waugh Foundation. A recent ‘Day at the Racetrack with Mark Webber’ event raised an incredible amount of money, such is his popularity.

  I’m sure there are many more chapters yet to be told in the racing career of Mark Webber, but some key constants remain. He is still the same guy who treats everyone with respect and courtesy, but underneath this disarming veil lies a passion and desire to be the best that he can be.

  Prologue

  ‘MULTI 21’: A RAG TO A RED BULL

  WHEN THE TELEPHONE CALL CAME, MY FIRST REACTION WAS one of surprise.

  ‘Wow,’ I thought, ‘that’s a pretty big statement with 12 laps to go, given we’re running this way round!’

  ‘Telephone call’ is the expression we use to describe radio communication from the pit wall to the cockpit. The statement being made over the radio was ‘Multi 21’. Even in a sport where mixed messages are the order of the day, ‘Multi 21’ was the clearest order we could have been given. Both Sebastian Vettel and I, in Red Bull Renaults #1 and #2 respectively, knew exactly what it meant: that our cars should finish the Malaysian Grand Prix, second round of the 2013 Formula One World Championship, in that order, #2 followed by #1, with me first and Sebastian second. That’s how we were running at the time, with me leading my teammate late in the race and no threat from anyone else.

  Why was I surprised? Rarely had the call come when it was in my favour, that’s why. But this time the circumstances were very much in my favour: I had timed my crossover – the moment at which to make the mandatory tyre change from one Pirelli compound to the other – perfectly. Seb had got tangled up with the pursuing Mercedes and I found myself in clear air, so I was out in front.

  I was a lot less surprised by Sebastian’s reaction to the ‘Multi 21’ message.

  After the final stops, when he was cruising up behind me, I could see the ‘letter-box’ opening on the rear wing of his car: he was using its Drag Reduction System (DRS) to increase his top speed. Straightaway I knew he was going against what the team had asked us to do. He was going to make it hard for me.

  Not for the first time another thought followed: ‘How the f#*k are we, as a team, in this situation?’

  In hindsight I should have turned my engine back up and got into the fight, but there was so much going on in my head that it never occurred to me to do so. We came home first and second, but instead of finishing with the cars in #2 and #1 order, Vettel took the victory.

  The incident was the final nail in the coffin of my relationship with Red Bull Racing at management level. ‘Multi 21’ was just one flashpoint in a sequence that began as far back as Istanbul in 2010. It was an important stage on my journey, but it’s not the whole story.

  This book is.

  IN THE COCKPIT: A MARATHON IN SHOES TWO SIZES TOO SMALL

  IT’S A CLOSED WORLD.

  All your senses are either severely limited or u
nder unremitting assault. The space you occupy is small and bloody hot.

  The helmet is tight-fitting. Your view is confined to what you can see through the ‘mailbox’ opening in your helmet and in two postage-stamp-sized rear mirrors.

  And you are in this minor hell, all going well, for two hours. You’re in isolation, but it’s far from splendid.

  The cockpit gradually becomes a lonely place as the clock ticks down to race start. In many ways it’s similar to sitting in any racing car – except it’s a lot more claustrophobic.

  A Grand Prix car is built for speed, not comfort. The driver doesn’t get into his car, he inserts himself into the cockpit as a living component of the machine. The cockpit is a compact place, especially for a driver of my dimensions. At around 184 centimetres and a fighting weight of 75 kilos I was never the ideal size or weight for a Grand Prix driver. There have been tall F1 drivers – men like Dan Gurney in the old days, Gerhard Berger more recently, Jenson Button today – but they are the exceptions who prove the rule. Better to be a jockey than a Michael Jordan.

  The space is really tight around your knees – it’s like sitting in an old-fashioned bathtub with your feet higher than your backside. The pedals are actually moulded around your racing boot, both for comfort and to counter excessive vibration: the last thing you want is for your foot to slip off the pedal at high speed in the middle of a race. The boots are thin-soled so you can feel everything and they are the one item I’m very fussy about – once I break a pair in nicely they generally last me for a season.

  Helmets are different: I go through between four and seven. The exterior takes a bit of a hammering, especially if you are coming through from the back of the grid as the ‘marbles’ (small pieces of rubber coming off other cars’ tyres) come pinging at you on the way through. I used to push my head back into the headrest a lot because that way I could move my head around in the helmet a bit. The interior is customised for each driver, although not the straps, and I found they used to sit a little too far rearwards for me. At fast tracks like Monza, Red Bull Chief Technical Officer Adrian Newey used to hate running any little windscreens in front of the cockpit because of the aerodynamic effect, and I had to open my mouth to counteract the helmet lift from the onrushing air. I would end up with two bruises under my neck.

  I had only one superstition: I always got into my car from the left, a hangover from my karting days – if you got in on the right side of one of those you ended up with burns on your arm from the engine!

  But I did have a race-day routine. It began with a last visit to the treatment couch to have my hips and pelvis loosened up a little and my shoulders and neck rubbed.

  In F1 the pit lane opens to let the cars out on track for their final warm-up procedures half an hour before race start. At that stage I was always happy to talk to my partner, Ann, or Dad but people I didn’t know were kept well away.

  Then it was time to hop in. Or, more accurately, step, slither and bump into your seat, which has been almost literally tailor-made to your unique dimensions. The driver is the biggest component in that cockpit: they make the seat up around him, starting from behind. It couldn’t fit more snugly if it came from Savile Row.

  The seatbelts intensify that feeling. They come together in a six-pointed star at your centre: two of them come up through the groin area on either side of your manhood; and there are two lap straps and two shoulder straps, all designed to the nearest millimetre around your size. What most people don’t realise is that if you’re not careful the edges of the belts can fold or ‘pinch’ and when they do those edges can be quite sharp, especially around the more sensitive areas of a bloke’s anatomy.

  With the help of one of your pit crew, the belts are pulled extremely tight, for two reasons: the first, obviously, is to hold you in place in the event of what we call a ‘shunt’; the second, less obviously, is to help eliminate the muscle fatigue that would come from trying to keep yourself properly in the seat without belts. You need to be a fixed component of the machine.

  How tight are the belts? Back in 2001, when I won the F3000 race at Imola, I was on painkillers to counter the effects of a broken rib caused by the extreme cornering loads in a recent F1 test in the Benetton-Renault.

  With less than 15 minutes to race start, I sometimes hop out again – the reverse of bump-slither-step – and attend to the physical necessities or, putting it another way, go for a pee at the last possible moment; and stretch the lower back and glutes one last time because they are going to be immobilised for the next couple of hours. Hop back in, check the belts and HANS device, the one that looks after the head and neck, get as comfortable as the car allows, connect the drink bottle.

  So: you are strapped into a space barely big enough to contain you in the first place. You can scarcely move, except for your feet, arms, hands. The headrest comes in pretty snugly around you; down goes the visor, the radio sits about 3 millimetres off your lips, earplugs in, drink tube coming in beside the radio … and the sensation of enclosure is heightened even more. With that comes stress and elevated heart rate, which goes up because of the pressure on your ribcage; you can’t breathe normally as you would standing or running or riding a bike, you’re in a quite different position.

  Don’t focus too far ahead, just concentrate on getting the immediate things right. Talk to your race engineer: how strong is the wind out on the circuit? What’s the track temperature? Have we got our plan right for controlling the first part of the race?

  As the countdown intensifies, all the people begin to melt away. Just moments before the start of the warm-up lap may be the first time this weekend I have seen, ‘live’ as it were, the Ferrari or Mercedes alongside me on our row of the grid.

  A practice start at the end of pit lane was part of the pre-race routine; so was a full throttle check, always insisted on by engine-supplier Renault; then a radio check and an electronics check on the clutch. Coming through the grid was like threading the needle, manoeuvring the car through the literally hundreds of people – pit crew, media, race officials, VIPs and countless hangers-on – who manage to find their way out there.

  The warm-up lap is broken down into three sectors. Sector 1 is all about getting the engine cooled after sitting, sometimes for an alarmingly long time, waiting for the signal to go. Use high gears, say up to seventh, and sit at around 6000 revs if possible. I’m working the tyres, veering sharply from side to side to get them warm, but not overdoing the zig-zag stuff. ‘Engine temp fine,’ crackles through my earplugs, so it’s time to focus on the brakes. Now I can open the throttle and hit the brake pedal to warm them up without worrying about the effects of any overheating on the engine behind me. In Sector 3 I’m off the leash to do whatever I like on the engine front; now it’s all about making sure brakes and tyres are up around their ideal working temperatures.

  F1 fans will be familiar with those sudden bursts of pace – burn-outs – from the drivers midway through their warm-up lap, and that’s another little bit of information to be retained. We used to be given documents telling us where we could start those burn-outs on the circuit in relation to visual cues like sponsor hoardings – all very well if you could remember the right sponsor!

  Another factor in the equation: fuel. Is this a circuit where our fuel consumption is critical? Or, just as importantly, someone else’s? In my latter F1 days the Mercedes cars were known to be fuel-sensitive: if the two Red Bulls were on the front row we sometimes debated whether we should do an unusually fast formation lap to help set their nerves on edge, though in practice we never did. Pull up in my grid slot, select neutral … and wait for the moment of truth.

  I used to get a call from pit wall when the 17th of the 22 cars had reached its grid slot. That’s when I selected first gear. Then I built the engine revs from the moment when the second of the five red lights on the gantry came on. Waiting for the lights to go out, the drivers feel their heart rate rise. Mine was less dramatic than many: with a resting heart rate in the
low 40s when I was at peak fitness, it would climb to around 120 at a Grand Prix start and the maximum I ever recorded was 182. A big part of it is simple adrenaline; I could sound perfectly normal in conversation with my crew but my heart rate would be noticeably higher than before.

  The simple truth of a Grand Prix start is that you must react to the lights as best you can. People probably think you’re trying to get a jump on everyone else by anticipating that moment – but that’s a reasonably good way to get yourself penalised for a jump start. It’s hard to anticipate in any case because there is a random ‘window’ of 3–5 seconds in which the lights will go out. You’ll be doing 100 kilometres an hour in less than three seconds and it’s risky to get ahead of yourself.

  Raw acceleration, braking, cornering – everything is on an extreme level. Even people who are used to racing at a high level in other categories struggle to totally calibrate with what a Formula 1 car can do. The more experience you gain, the slower things get, but the inputs – the movements the driver makes on steering-wheel, throttle and so on – are unbelievably fine.

  If the two Red Bulls were on the front row of the grid I would regularly lose 3 or 4 metres to Sebastian in the first couple of seconds of a race. We tried various techniques to help reaction time; I did a warm-up routine before getting into the car but I binned that idea because my reaction times were actually better on a lower heart-rate, not higher. That’s to do with your unique physical make-up. In the days when they were teammates at Ferrari, Eddie Irvine’s reaction times were markedly superior to Michael Schumacher’s, and another Ferrari favourite, Felipe Massa, was always very quick. But bear in mind that we are talking about a range of around only two-hundredths of a second …