Aussie Grit Read online

  ‘How the f#*k are you going to get to Formula 1 coming from Queanbeyan?’ Anyone who wants to trace my journey should start with a piece of paper that Ann drew up on 6 July 1995. According to ‘Mark Webber Career Path Options’, I would be in Formula 1 within seven years. What was she on? She had it all mapped out: a move to the UK, graduation through the racing classes, and the ultimate target, a seat in a Benetton Grand Prix car at the turn of the century. It was all there in black and white: whether I started in Europe, Asia or the United States, all roads led to a Formula 1 cockpit.

  Looking back, we were pretty naïve. We weren’t short of people telling us we were crazy even to entertain the idea of making it to F1. In fact if we’d known back then what we know now I doubt we would even have contemplated it. But now Ann and I had a plan and our assumption was that if we worked hard and refused to take no for an answer we would succeed. It never occurred to us that things beyond our control might stand in our way, but then perhaps our naïveté worked in our favour. And anyone who expressed doubts was doing us a favour as well: they simply made us all the more determined to show them what we could do.

  We were thinking along the same lines in one way: I was quite keen to go to England and check out the racing over there. Formula Ford enjoyed a worldwide reputation as the stepping-stone from karts to single-seater, open-wheeler racing, and it had been the bridge to racing success for some very famous names over the years. As Ann well knew, the Formula Ford Festival, staged each year at Brands Hatch, was the unofficial World Championship of the category: do well in that and you would attract the attention of some very important people on the European motor-racing scene.

  The original idea for ’95 was just to go over and see this festival for myself. Ann arranged a meeting with Ralph Firman, the founder and boss of Van Diemen race cars, perhaps the biggest name in Formula Ford. Ann, Luke and I went over and stayed with Ann’s mum, Bettine. Here was I, thinking, ‘Wow, Van Diemen, this is going to be awesome, stuff of legends, Ayrton Senna drove for these guys …’ I was a little taken aback by the look and feel of the place when I actually went there in early October 1995.

  But what I quickly realised was that Van Diemen epitomised the British motor-sport industry as it had developed over the years since the Second World War. The history of it all is very special, moving from one-man bands in lock-up garages – which some of my future F1 employers had been! – through to the internationally significant industry that thrives in the UK today. Look beyond the gleaming, state-of-the-art premises we see today: the British motor-racing industry’s beginnings were far more humble, in fact it all began very much as a cottage industry. Once I got my head round that, I still knew I was in a special place.

  That impression was reinforced by the photographs on the walls, by seeing more brand-new Formula Ford cars together in one place than I had ever seen before, and especially by seeing one of Ayrton Senna’s Van Diemens sitting under wraps in the workshop. When he came to the UK from Brazil at the start of the 1980s he won Formula Ford 1600 and 2000 titles in Van Diemens; in those days the Brazilian superstar lived just up the road in a humble bungalow in Norwich.

  Annie had already pulled off a coup of sorts by organising that first meeting, because it meant my sights could be set higher than just going to the festival as a spectator. My goals were still so modest then: I just wanted to try to race in the UK to see how I would go. The category had been founded on Ford’s famous 1600cc Kent engine in the sixties; by the early nineties Ford had made its 1800cc Zetec power units available, so there was something of a two-tier system in operation, although in Australia we were all still in the less powerful cars. When we started to think about taking part in the Formula Ford Festival in October 1995 I had a ‘second-tier’ 1600 car in mind. The 1800 was the plant to have, as all the big names were in that division.

  Ralph was very straight with me about my prospects on track, especially as he knew I would be ring-rusty after the early end to our own national series back in Australia.

  ‘Look, mate,’ he said, ‘you’re actually going to get creamed, you haven’t raced for four months, these guys are festival specialists.’

  Annie and I spoke about it and felt we couldn’t go home without having done anything. The whole idea was at least to get out on track among these so-called big guns of the Formula Ford world and see where I stacked up. What was the point in trailing back to Australia without doing that? Ralph had left the door ajar by offering me a test in a Formula Ford 1600 over at Snetterton in Norfolk. On the day, though, the test was actually in an 1800cc car; I matched the number-one driver, the guy they planned to try to win the festival with, on the first day. I was a dog with two dicks! I thought I was World Champion already and all I’d done was a little test at Snetterton. But I was thinking, ‘I can go home happy, it’s good, these guys have got two legs, two arms, I can race them.’

  It was just as well I did feel that way, because Ralph rang up a week later and said, ‘Do you want to do the festival in the 1800?’ As the offer began to sink in the doubts started creeping in, too. Ralph was right – I hadn’t raced for four months, and now I had to do the festival for the first time, and in the main category.

  I needed to fork out five grand – pounds, not dollars – for the week, and Yellow Pages again stepped up. All week I tried to focus on keeping it straight and learning as I went; when I reached the semi-finals and finished fifth in mine, that meant I was in the top 10 overall and through to the final itself.

  In the end the only two drivers who beat me were the front-runners from the main Formula Ford series, Kevin McGarrity of Ireland and Brazilian Mario Haberfeld, and it was only when Haberfeld got a tow near the end that he managed to pip me for second place. In point of fact he and I were third and fourth on the road but the guy between us and McGarrity, Giorgio Vinella, was disqualified.

  Unbeknown to Ann and me there were two interested spectators in the grandstand that cold winter afternoon. When we returned to the paddock we found Dad and his old mate Bruce Greentree had made a split-second decision to fly over from Australia. They were on the ground in the UK for 46 hours, and in the air for 49, but they had a ball! As Dad says, ‘It was marvellous to see Mark thrown in at the deep end again, this time by someone other than his father, and coming out with third place. There had been a fair chance that he wouldn’t even make the final but he did, and it was a great job on his part.’

  My introduction to the famous festival was good enough for Ralph Firman to say, ‘Come back next year, you’ve got a works drive,’ and that was how my international racing career really started.

  There was only the small matter of the finance to put in place: it may have been a works drive with Van Diemen but we still had to find the money to pay for and run a car. Back we went to Australia to have our second crack at the support race at the Australian Grand Prix in Adelaide in November – the last Formula 1 weekend to be staged in the South Australian capital, as it turned out. My car was entirely yellow for the Yellow Pages sponsorship but it was like a red rag to a bull: I could imagine the other Aussie guys thinking, ‘Webber’s been over there to the festival, he thinks he’s pretty special, we’re going to kick his arse.’

  I qualified on pole by a big chunk; in the first race a front roll-bar broke and I was getting chucked around a lot through the corners, then I got punted out of the lead and had to retire. But I won the second race, my final outing in Australia in Formula Ford, and I was happy with that. People used to say all the decision-makers in the F1 teams were watching you, but they were forgetting one small thing: we were on the track at 7.30 at night! So you believed in your own mind it was a big deal, but you might as well have been racing in front of five people for all the difference it made.

  Still, it meant enough for me to be introduced to Gordon Message, who was then team manager at Benetton, and I had my photograph taken with a driver by the name of Michael Schumacher.

  Before Ann and I left Australia again to head
over to England for the 1996 Formula Ford season with Van Diemen, on the weekend of 8–10 March I had the chance to race again, this time in a Formula Holden, on the supporting program at the Australian Grand Prix. It was only four months since my Adelaide win because a man by the name of Ron Walker, a former lord mayor of Melbourne, had pulled off something of a coup by snatching the jewel in the Australian motor-racing calendar away from its 11-year home in Adelaide and bringing it back to the picturesque setting of Albert Park, where there had been Australian Grand Prix meetings in 1953 and 1956. The race would be the first one on the 1996 F1 calendar.

  I wasn’t aware at the time how important Ron’s influence would become in my own developing career. I just wanted to show what I could do in Formula Holden, a class introduced in Australia in 1989 to emulate the F3000 category that was taking hold in Europe as the feeder formula to F1. Unlike Formula Fords, these cars were brutal: they weighed in at 675 kilograms, their V6 engines pushed out 300 horsepower, and with stiff suspension and a low ride height they were very physical cars for the drivers to handle.

  I had already tried one out at Mallala in South Australia, thanks to a generous offer from the man who was largely responsible for the series in its early days, Malcolm Ramsay. Curiously enough, at that Mallala test day north of Adelaide Dad spoke to the great Australian-based New Zealand all-round driver Jim Richards, who confirmed Dad’s suspicion that there was something to build on in my case. But he also told Dad, ‘You’ve got to get him out of here!’ So Annie wasn’t the only one thinking along those lines.

  I didn’t have a great start to the Formula Holden support race program in Melbourne that weekend: in the opening race I went straight on at Turn 3, which F1 driver Martin Brundle would make instantly world-famous when his Jordan flew through the air at the same spot, but I won the second six-lapper when Paul Stokell slowed on the opening lap, and I passed him and led all the way home.

  Television analyst Geoff Brabham – Sir Jack’s eldest son and a brilliant racer in his own right – said this Mark Webber bloke was very talented and trying very hard to head overseas to further his career. How right he was, on the second count at least!

  So at the ripe old age of 19 I was heading back to England. Earlier in the year Ann and I had put together a raffle for places in the Yellow Pages corporate suite at the Australian Grand Prix and raised $3000 in Queanbeyan and Canberra! Annie, my family and friends all pitched in and for a week we hit all the local shops and industrial estates flogging raffle tickets, the proceeds from which went towards helping me set up home in the UK. Not everyone was happy to see me go: Mum had thought it was bad enough when I left Queanbeyan for Sydney, and in those days the other side of the world still seemed a lot further away than it does now.

  When I first left Australia in late 1995, I was desperate to see for myself some of the tracks like Brands Hatch, which I’d only ever seen in photos in Autosport. ‘What’s it going to be like?’ I asked myself. ‘How amazing it’s going to be even to see it, and then to do the race and the festival, have that first little bit of exposure to the European scene, knowing that I’m over here racing …’

  Now Ann and I were going back, not only for a second crack at the festival but to contest the British Formula Ford Championship that preceded it. Who knew what lay ahead?

  3

  A Wing and a Prayer

  RACING IN EUROPE WAS A REAL EYE-OPENER. IN THE FIRST race over there, the yellow flags were out to warn drivers not to overtake and guys were still trying to punt each other off at the next corner! Talk about uncharted waters – we were pushing off in our little boat out into big seas, and the waves kept getting bigger the further we went!

  The good thing about 1996 was that Dad didn’t have to put in much money at all; Annie was working too, and together we just chipped away. Everything had to be done the cheapest and fastest way possible because we didn’t have the luxury of hanging around. I was already nearly 20 and couldn’t worry about winning Australian titles as some people like Peewee wanted me to, or do two years in Formula Ford and then another two years in F3 before I had a crack at F1. Stalling would have cost money we didn’t have – a lot more money. We had some momentum behind us and just had to take advantage of it while it lasted.

  For those first few months in England, we stayed with Ann’s mum at Hainault in Essex, which isn’t exactly the leafiest suburb in England. I was in a box room – a very small box room – which was absolutely freezing and very different to what I had grown up with. The room was so small that when I lay down in bed my head touched the wall at one end, my feet the other. I missed my family and my mates and the comforts of home.

  There was a gym nearby so I used to get the tube there, but I had no idea what I was doing, I was just tootling around and believing I was getting fit. At that time Michael Schumacher was starting to win World Championships and everybody was saying what a super-fit guy he was, so off I went to the gym. I’d never been in a gym in my life!

  I earned some money by buzzing up and down to work as a driving instructor at the circuits at Brands Hatch, Snetterton and anywhere else that would have me. I had an old B-registration Ford Fiesta (thanks to that raffle money), which I used to drive round the M25, jumping the Dartford Toll to save a couple of quid here and there. I was doing big mileage in my B-reg and I remember only being able to put £10 worth of petrol in at times. My wages were £43 for almost a 12-hour day, but I had a ball. Most of my fellow instructors were aspiring young drivers like me, so we would all go off in our different directions at the weekend to race and then come back on Monday morning with colourful stories of what had happened. We were all trying to forge a career, trying to keep the dream alive. I always had to work and all the guys I was instructing with at Brands Hatch were in the same boat. It was a struggle for all of us.

  In stark contrast to this were the Brazilians, most of whom would rock in with a full racing budget and turn up at race meetings driving flash BMWs or Mercedes. They were semi-professional drivers, even at Formula Ford level. I never let it get to me, in fact I turned it into a positive and used it as motivation. I was turning up in my B-reg on a wing and a prayer, hoping it wouldn’t fail me.

  One of my fellow instructors was Dan Wheldon, the talented British driver who would be tragically killed in the States in 2011. The other instructors were a bit older than us; they’d tried to make a go of their careers too but had either run out of money or simply hadn’t made it, though they were still good enough to teach other people how to drive around a racetrack.

  Ann and I rented a partly furnished house in Attleborough. We were stretched financially on a personal level but Ann was freelancing in PR and earning enough money so we could pay our way, and I was contributing where I could. A lot of our money would go on rent – not just the house we were living in but a TV and video player as well! It didn’t come with either but we couldn’t afford to buy luxuries like that. The house was a few miles south-west of the cathedral city of Norwich, so I could be close to the Van Diemen factory. Any racing driver will tell you how valuable it is to forge close links with the team you are racing for, getting to know the people, being a part of the team as fully as you can.

  Because many of the junior racing teams were based there, Norfolk was a hub for young racers from all over the world. I remember coming home after being at the pub with the Van Diemen mechanics and excitedly telling Ann that Jan Magnussen had been there too. He had just graduated to F1 at that stage and had popped in to catch up with his old mates. I couldn’t believe that I was actually moving in the same circles.

  I spent a lot of time at the Van Diemen factory. I have vivid memories of Ralph Firman himself, a chain-smoker, always with a cigarette in his mouth, even when he stuck his head into the cockpit to ask for some driver feedback, so the ash fell off around your feet … Ralph single-handedly bringing a testing session at the Snetterton circuit to a stop when his old Merc clipped the bridge over the track and knocked an advertising hoarding int
o our path … Me in my B-reg Ford waiting to cross a junction near the factory and Ralph in his old tank of a Merc sneaking up behind me, sitting there behind the wheel in his trademark Coke-bottle glasses and deliberately pushing me out across the very busy A11 … Me picking up the odd extra £90 to drop his mum off at Gatwick Airport in that same battered old Merc of his!

  The 1996 season started well enough for me and my teammate, Kristian Kolby from Denmark. I won the second race of the series at Brands Hatch and led the championship for a while, then had a run of absolute rubbish results. I spun out of the lead at Oulton Park; I threw Thruxton away because I was way out in front and cruising and thinking about other things rather than concentrating on the race, and all in front of Alan Docking, an expatriate Australian who enjoyed a very big reputation as a successful team owner. Docko, who was eyeing me up for F3 the next year, went ballistic at me. He was a patriotic, passionate Aussie who knew I had thrown an easy win away. I couldn’t afford to make those mistakes.

  I decided then that I wanted to go home. I was homesick; I wasn’t sure what I was doing so far away from my family and friends. Was it all worth it? Was I missing out on what was happening back home? I figured I’d head back Down Under for two or three weeks and have a break, but as soon as I arrived in Australia I saw that everyone was still doing exactly the same thing, nothing had changed. Within two or three days I realised that I was kidding myself; I’d been given a tremendous opportunity over in England and I needed to get my arse back over there again and take that opportunity seriously.

  It’s hard to explain just how tough leaving Australia had been, how difficult it was to raise the cash to fly home – always economy, always exhausting. But we were determined to make this work. As Mick Doohan had said to me, it’s a long way to go home with your tail between your legs.