Aussie Grit Page 4

  I also got the chance to compete on the track where my addiction to racing had begun. We went to Adelaide to take part in the non-championship Formula Ford races on the undercard at the Australian Grand Prix. Before we set out I had a monster shunt in the final championship round at Oran Park. I lost control at the dog-leg at the bottom end of the circuit, got on the grass, hit the wall and destroyed the car. It was my first big crash and it hurt! It was a relatively small injury, but a massive wake-up call. Dad had to spend money, and Andy had to spend so much time putting everything back together as best he could – and I spent plenty of cold winter nights in the workshop helping him and Michael to rebuild the car. I remember thinking that this could be the end of the road for me; the shunt had dented my confidence and serious doubts had set in: was I cut out for the job of being a racing driver?

  Earlier that year the death of three-time Formula 1 World Champion Ayrton Senna in the San Marino Grand Prix had also weighed on me. After watching that Imola race I went to bed expecting that Senna would be okay. When Mum woke me with the terrible news I cried into my cornflakes. Dad sat at the other end of the house because he didn’t want to watch the news reports confirming Senna’s death with me. I didn’t go to school that day; Dad granted me a rare day off. Next day even friends who didn’t follow motor racing tip-toed around me because even they knew what had happened and what it meant to me. It was a nightmare: Ayrton Senna wasn’t supposed to be killed in a racing car, he was invincible. I was shattered.

  But ultimately neither Senna’s death nor my own Oran Park mishap affected my determination to keep racing. F1 and Ayrton Senna were a long way away from where I was, after all. But by the time we went to Adelaide we were really at the Last Chance Saloon. If we got blown away in these races, with no results to speak of and no cash, we would probably have to pull the pin on the whole thing. But I fell in love with the street track straightaway, and we were quick the whole weekend.

  So much so that we were on the front row alongside that year’s champion, Steven Richards – and then the bloody battery failed. Once I got going I drove through the whole field on the formation lap to take up my position, which you are not supposed to do. The stewards black-flagged me – the sign that a driver has been disqualified. I was livid, but all I could do was complete the first part of the race and then dutifully pull in. We returned to Queanbeyan spitting chips, but happy that our first crack at Adelaide had gone well despite that final disappointment.

  2

  Wingless Wonders: 1995–96

  THE END OF 1994 WAS A CROSSROADS FOR DAD. HE HAD TO decide whether to put up the money for us to go round again or not. In that first year he had funded me himself and he couldn’t commit to another year without finding some sponsorship support and seeing some results.

  At the first round of the 1994 Australian Formula Ford Championship at Amaroo Park in Sydney in February, everyone – Dad and me included – was being introduced to the category’s new media and PR officer.

  I remember saying to her, ‘You must be important, then!’

  Little did I realise just how important Ann Neal was going to become, not only in my racing career, but in my life. She thought I was a bit of a smart-arse when we first met. ‘But I liked how bold and cheeky he was,’ she says, ‘and how mature he seemed. When I asked someone how old he was, I was shocked when they said 17 – he was confident beyond his years.’

  Ann was born in England; she got into motor-sport journalism by writing for a magazine and local newspapers about oval racing. She took a passing interest in the exploits of Derek Warwick, whom she’d seen in Superstox racing on the ovals and who became one of the few drivers to graduate from there to car racing. When Ann met Derek at a function years later she was introduced to his brother Paul, who was 10 at the time. Paul wanted to emulate his big brother and when he moved up to Formula Ford, she followed, handling his press and PR work. One thing led to another: she was introduced to Mike Thompson, the founder of Quest Formula Ford cars, who asked her to look after the media for a young driver, Johnny Herbert, in 1986. Johnny had just won the prestigious Formula Ford Festival.

  Ann married Australian Rod Barrett in November ’87. He had gone to the UK to seek his own fame and fortune as a saloon-car driver and was working at the famous Jim Russell School for up-and-coming racing drivers. Rod lived at Carlton House in Attleborough in Norfolk, a bed-and-breakfast that was home away from home for many young international racing drivers. Every young Aussie was beating a path to their door at that time too, guys like Paul Stokell, Russell Ingall – they always had a nucleus of Australians around them. After they married they bought a house in Kent and Rod became Media Director at Brands Hatch. Ann was providing copy for all the Brands Hatch programs, which meant four race circuits in the group as a whole, and was part of the press team at the British Grand Prix when it was staged at Brands. Even so, she wasn’t a big F1 fan, preferring grassroots racing.

  Ann’s next position was with a public relations company where she looked after the motor-sport interests of the big oil firm Duckhams. She also worked on behalf of Ford and one of their projects was Formula Ford. ‘By 1989,’ she says, ‘the formula was failing to attract young drivers because there were so many other forms of racing springing up which had better prize funds and offered more opportunities. I produced a report for Ford which they took on board; they got serious about it and I took over the media/PR role on their behalf in 1991.’

  That was the good news.

  ‘The unbearably bad news,’ Ann recalls, ‘was that ’91 was also the year when Paul Warwick lost his life in a big accident at Oulton Park, a famous racing circuit up in Cheshire in England’s north-west. I was at Cadwell Park that day on Formula Ford duty – six months pregnant with my son Luke – and wasn’t able to attend Paul’s race, as I often did. A week later Rod rolled a production saloon at Brands Hatch and we decided we didn’t want any more to do with motor racing.’

  Rod couldn’t get out of his contract so Ann worked the ’92 season and they emigrated to Australia after her last day, which was that year’s Formula Ford Festival. It was won by the young Danish driver Jan Magnussen, whose manager called Ann the next day to ask if she would be interested in handling Jan’s media! She told him she was on a plane out of the UK – and those who follow F1 will recall that Jan’s son Kevin made his F1 debut for McLaren in 2014 at Albert Park and finished on the podium. A familiar name through my own F1 career has been Jenson Button; at that same stage Ann was contacted by John Button, Jenson’s father, about playing the same media role for his son.

  After six months Rod was going back to his old employer, Coca-Cola, as State Manager. The trouble was that the state in question was Western Australia, which Ann found too remote. Luke was coming up to his first birthday and they knew no one. Then Coke took Rod to Sydney, and hey presto, work opportunities began to open up for her. She hadn’t lost the motor-racing bug despite Paul’s death; she accepted an offer to become press and PR coordinator for the Australian Formula Ford Championship. She also began working for Wayne Gardner’s new V8 touring car team in Sydney’s western suburbs, but no sooner had they started settling in Sydney than Coca-Cola offered Rod a job in Malaysia, which was too good for him to refuse.

  Looking back, Ann says, ‘I didn’t want to give up my career yet again. I hadn’t migrated to Australia to end up living in Kuala Lumpur. We tried to keep the relationship alive by commuting back and forth but it was never going to work out and I was also getting into my stride with my work, which I loved. Rod and I separated and ultimately divorced; it was difficult for a while but we’ve been good friends for years now and Rod even joined Mark and me at some Grands Prix.’

  Ann remembers our first meeting and my opening remark about her being so important. She can even remember what I was wearing – a stripey green and red top, one of those United Colors of Benetton things – so that was pretty prophetic, as things turned out! After that first meeting we kept in touch. My family so
metimes met up with Ann and Luke for weekend get-togethers, and I ensured she got her motor-sport fixes by dragging all my old F1 tapes out. By way of revenge she would bring down all her British Formula Ford tapes for me.

  In those early days Ann and Luke hadn’t been in Australia for very long. Luke was an only child with no cousins or anyone remotely close to his age in Australia, so it was a great experience for him to see life in rural Australia, particularly on the family farm, and to meet everyone – it was a family lifestyle he didn’t have. Something a lot of kids in Australia would take for granted, no doubt, but Luke had been parachuted into life Down Under and it was great that we were able to show him a snapshot of what we were all about.

  Late in 1994 Dad asked Ann if she could help us find some sponsorship. It wasn’t the kind of work she enjoyed most, but she had been keeping an eye on this family trying to find their way in the big wide world of motor racing and she must have seen something she liked, because eventually she agreed.

  ‘When I met Mark it struck me that maybe this was the driver I could try and manage,’ she says. ‘That was the challenge for me: having worked for Johnny Herbert’s management as he made his way up from Formula Ford to F1, I wanted to see if I could step up to the plate. When I got to know Mark I could see we had a lot in common and we both had a burning desire to be successful. One October day at Bathurst, where we had gone to watch the “Great Race”, he said, “I want to do something with my life.” He already knew he didn’t want to spend his whole life in Queanbeyan – he wanted something more and he was hungry, which stuck in my mind. I don’t think he particularly knew what he wanted out of life and he certainly didn’t know how to carve out a career in motor sport, but the fact he wanted something gave me a great foundation to work with.’

  *

  By this stage both my parents were putting a bit of heat on me. Mum insisted that I finish my Higher School Certificate, which I did, although my results might not have been what she was hoping for. In Dad’s eyes getting results on track was the priority if I was to keep doing what I really wanted to do. Otherwise I would have had to get a ‘real’ job, and I knew how fortunate I was – I could work with Dad, I had that safety net and I think inside I believed I would use it at some stage.

  But I was keen by now to make racing my focus, and that meant taking the first major step on my journey: getting out of Queanbeyan. So I did something that horrified Disey: I went to live in Sydney. We’d met Spencer Martin in 1994 when his son Matt was racing with me in Formula Ford. When we went to that first Amaroo Park meeting Dad and I were driving in to the circuit when he spotted Spencer and said to me, ‘Mark, I’ll tell you a bit about this fellow in a minute but right now we’re going to pitch camp alongside him.’

  He was well aware of Spencer’s background and thought he was one of the best drivers Australia had produced. Spencer had won the Gold Star as Australia’s outstanding racing driver in 1966 and 1967, he had taken a break from the track to marry and start a family, and then returned to excel in Historic racing and Porsches. Among other claims to fame, Spencer drove for well-known Australian racing identity David McKay’s Scuderia Veloce team, worked as a mechanic to Graham Hill in the Tasman Series, and generally knew everything there was to know about starting a career as a racing driver. Dad and Spencer hit it off from the start. He felt it was like our relationship with the Dukes family: good people, and in the end we are still great friends to this day. ‘Another good decision by old Al!’ as Dad likes to remind me. When I moved to Sydney, it was the Martin family who took me in and I stayed with them up until the time I first travelled to the UK late in 1995 to go and see the Formula Ford Festival.

  I earned my keep as a driving instructor at the Oran Park circuit. Meanwhile Ann and I put together six sponsorship proposals, though we didn’t have a huge amount to put into the document because I hadn’t achieved much in 1994. But she put me in a professional studio to get some decent shots done and we had the proposals ready just before Christmas. It had to be done then because by the time everybody straggled back to work in February it would be far too late.

  One of the proposals landed on the desk of Bob Copp at Yellow Pages. He called us up straightaway. So Ann flew down to Melbourne, where Bob was based, the following week – and she flew solo because my services weren’t required at that stage.

  That’s how Ann started working with us. As a woman working in a very male-dominated industry in Australia I think Ann has always felt she had to make her point a bit harder or more strongly to be taken seriously, something she never had to do back in the UK. But when she secured that Yellow Pages sponsorship she had something she was in charge of. She took ownership of it, and it was down to her – and me – to show Yellow Pages we could make it work.

  Bob Copp got it from the start: he understood the need to rejuvenate the company image for the internet era. He knew that a third and more of the Yellow Pages client base was in the automotive business sector, they had already had some involvement at Bathurst and he knew the way forward wasn’t with touring cars, so Ann’s proposal had turned up just at the right time. I had youth on my side, while innovation and technology – key parts of the Yellow Pages profile – were crucial ingredients of single-seater racing. Bob Copp was looking for emerging talent; Ann was fervently hoping that I was it.

  For that second Formula Ford year I ran a new car in full Yellow Pages livery, which looked great. For the small Team Webber, as we began to call ourselves, it was great, and the start of a terrific relationship with the company.

  When I tell you I scored 158 points and finished fourth overall that year – 128 points better than in 1994 – you can see how much work went into getting there. But while fourth was a fair improvement from my first campaign, it also shows that I simply wasn’t consistent enough. It was the same old story: we had no set-up on the car at all. We had started out working with a bloke who was recommended to Dad by Peewee. But at our first meeting at Sandown in Melbourne in early February 1995, things went wrong from the start. We couldn’t even get out for the warm-up at the first of the two races there because the car was too low! That same afternoon Dad was on the phone to Peewee again.

  Despite all the drama I kick-started the year with a pretty good win in the first Sandown race. I took the lead on the opening lap in tricky wet conditions and increased it all the way to beat Jason Bright and Monaghan by a country mile. The second race at that meeting was wet as well, but I was spun round by someone on the second lap; I fought my way back up to second but then had an even worse spin and that was that. Still, Dad was reassured by my efforts. Peewee came back to him with an alternative and the next name to crop up belonged to Harry Galloway.

  Harry was one of the first men in Australia to grasp the importance of aerodynamics when it came to racing cars. Like Andy Lawson he was a brilliant fabricator, although he hadn’t worked for a little operation like ours. We enjoyed a terrific relationship with Harry and he was a big help as things started to pick up out on the track.

  Phillip Island was another wet race – and I used to love it when it rained! I couldn’t believe the lines other drivers would use, and I’m talking about the big guns. You would cruise up on some of the guys you were fighting with and they just weren’t being creative, they didn’t have the trust in the car in those conditions. The heavier the rain, the less the visibility, the more I enjoyed it. It was so heavy at Phillip Island that they cancelled the Supercars – but they put the Formula Fords out there! We had a misfire in qualifying so I started from eighth and I was leading after the first lap. Mind you, we nearly didn’t make it out in the first place. Someone put the Channel 7 on-board camera and film on the car and it caught fire: Dad had to put it out before it took hold! Then we got out there and I put 20 seconds into the rest of the field in eight laps …

  But poor scores in the next couple of rounds cost me dearly. No consistency: I was either winning by 20 seconds or crashing; the Brights and Monaghans were experienced, go
od Formula Ford drivers who were not only quick, but also knew what they needed to do to win. I didn’t.

  There was one particular lesson I still needed to learn, and that was the importance of feedback and setting the car up properly. The direction came mainly from the people in my corner: both Harry and Peewee’s partner, Steve Knott, were experienced and had worked with some good drivers. Steve enjoyed a fine reputation as an engine-builder in Australia and he seemed to take a shine to this young bloke from Queanbeyan.

  But I was very shallow at that stage – I was a late developer in that respect and I must have been frustrating to work for. I never pushed for any changes to the car, I just got in and drove it. I thought I could drive fast enough without worrying about all the little details. I had more poles in 1995 than anyone else but found it hard to convert them into wins on race days. Formula Ford was renowned for its rough-and-tumble style of racing and I’d get involved in scraps, lose a few spots, regain them and then knock a corner off the car. The end of the 1995 Australian Formula Ford Championship was a fairly typical Webber weekend, at Oran Park: I was on pole, but I had a big crash and, as they say in the Eurovision Song Contest, it was nul points once more.

  I once read something by Stirling Moss saying that his first aim was always to win whatever race he was in, and that’s why he never won a championship. I could relate to that: back then I was never concerned about trying to build up for a championship; I never felt particularly rewarded by playing the percentage game – I always wanted to try to win the race I was in at the time. If it didn’t come off, I would come back and try again next time. But time showed that to be a strategy that didn’t really work in terms of trying to put championships together.

  But Ann had a plan …

  By the end of 1995 Annie told me, in no uncertain terms, that – and I quote – I had to get my arse out of there. She didn’t just mean Australian Formula Ford, either: she meant Australia. She thought it was time for me to go and have a crack at some of the big guys, and she proposed to help me go about it in a serious, business-like way.