Aussie Grit (15 page)

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Every driver remembers when he first got his chance in a Grand Prix car. My first F1 opportunity came in December 1999 when I went to Barcelona to conduct a two-day test for Tom Walkinshaw’s Arrows F1 team, which Stoddy had organised and dangled in front of me as a bit of a sweetener for the F3000 deal, hoping that it might just twist a corporate arm back home in Australia to get behind me. Imagine, an Aussie in an F1 car!

Tom wasn’t blind to the publicity an Aussie connection would bring, because he was already a well-known player in racing Down Under. He set up Tom Walkinshaw Racing back in the mid-seventies both as a business in its own right and as a vehicle for his own driving talent, which was good enough to make him European touring car champion in 1984. In 1985 he was in the thick of things at the Bathurst 1000, Australia’s own ‘Great Race’, when John Goss and Armin Hahne co-drove a TWR Jaguar to victory and Tom shared the drive with Win Percy in the sister car that finished third.

Tom, who died in December 2010, was never a stranger to controversy, either on-track or away from the circuits, but as a team owner he did a hell of a job. It was Walkinshaw-run Jaguars that won Le Mans twice in the late eighties, with top drivers like Martin Brundle and with an emerging technical genius by the name of Ross Brawn. Later Tom became Engineering Director in the Benetton F1 team in 1991 as it began the rise that would see both the team and Michael Schumacher win back-to-back world titles in 1994–95. Two years after that Tom had his own F1 team, Arrows, and persuaded the reigning World Champion, Damon Hill, to leave Williams and drive for him.

At my Barcelona baptism I couldn’t believe the lightness of the vehicle, how nimble it was and how precise. Then, after five or six laps, you start thinking like a racing driver again, you realise it’s got some understeer or some other characteristic you’ve encountered before. Then it’s a matter of putting your trust in the car and getting over that balls-out-down-the-front-straight feeling and getting on with the job. You can’t really prepare yourself for that experience and, reaching the end of the straight, standing on the brakes and feeling the old eyeballs hanging off the nose as you pull 4.6G, is not something you forget in a hurry.

It was really rewarding finally to drive a ‘proper’ racing car again. In fact it was 10 times everything I had done up to that point in my career. My compatriot Chris Dyer, later to play a key role at Ferrari, was the engineer for the day. The car in question wasn’t brilliant – Arrows had managed just a single point in the 1999 World Championship, after all – but it wasn’t a heap of rubbish either. I was sitting in the garage as the guys warmed the car up, thinking, ‘This is pretty special!’

Jean Alesi smoked out of the garage right next to mine in the Prost car and the whole place came alive. My own plan of attack was pretty basic: do the simple things right, don’t be too cocky about doing what was really a pretty basic job, don’t go about it as if my life depended on it. It was more a reward than a real stepping-stone to my F1 dream, but we had been working night and day to make something happen again and so it
was
a big day in a lot of ways.

I’m no businessman, just a driver, and it’s common knowledge that drivers are not supposed to be the sharpest tools in the box. But there are some decent street-fighters in an F1 paddock. There was no way I was going to do anything that day to try to really impress them because there wasn’t the opportunity, but I knocked a fair bit off the learning curve and there were lots of little rewards for me in the car. But looking back I wasn’t so much a cog in a machine as a pawn in the game that was going on between the team owners: the Eddie Jordans, the Tom Walkinshaws, the Paul Stoddarts – the people who really pull the strings.

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Formula 3000’s a strange category. In testing at Jerez again in late January we were doing okay, although we weren’t chasing out-and-out lap times, then in Valencia at the start of March there were 19 drivers within a second of each other. You just never knew where you were. By the time we went to Silverstone for the final test on 23 March I had announced a personal sponsorship deal with Aussie icon Foster’s, which in those days enjoyed a major presence at F1 circuits around the world.

The Eurobet Arrows F3000 team was launched at Leafield on 4 April 2000, the cars sporting the same orange and black livery as the Arrows F1 outfit. Lola chassis as standard, Ford Zytek V8 engine pushing out 470 horsepower, and a 10-race season ahead with an Australian driver desperate to get back out there and show what he could do in a racing car.

I had a great start at Imola when I qualified third and took my first F3000 podium, a great relief since it was my first single-seater race for two-and-a-half years and my first race of any kind since October 1998! Things got even better in round two at my adopted ‘home’ track, Silverstone, where I qualified on the front row in the wet and went on to win the race, just as I had done for Mercedes in the FIA GT series two years earlier with Bernd. But a three-race string of ‘DNF’ results in Barcelona, at the Nürburgring in Germany and in Monte Carlo put a serious dent in my early championship hopes. Those results proved two points: if you qualified poorly it was hard to stay out of trouble among the midfield hotheads, and if you went to Monaco in less than peak condition you were cooked.

In qualifying for that Monaco race, trying to put in the big lap, I put the car in the barriers; in the race I was lying fourth when dehydration caught me out and I lost it at the left-hander after the chicane. My physical condition had let me down, and as a consequence my concentration had wavered – and that’s a recipe for disaster in Monaco, which is so physically and mentally demanding. But I made a vow to myself that Monaco would never catch me out again. Little did I know how big a place it was going to occupy in my career.

If Monaco was tough, so was the next round at Magny-Cours in France on the first weekend of June, for different reasons. In the strange world of motor racing you can finish well down the field but know in your own heart that you have performed as well as you possibly could. That’s what happened in France. I suffered a right rear puncture when I ran over some debris early in the race, re-joined dead last after a tyre change and fought back to finish sixteenth. Ann still swears it was one of the best performances of my career.

Hockenheim in Germany brought my final visit to the podium for that 2000 season, which I finished in third place behind Bruno Junqueira and Nicolas Minassian. At the start of the season I would have been happy with an overall finish in the top six, so there was real satisfaction in breaking into the top three.

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Racing in F3000 was important, but my main objective through 2000 had really been to focus on F1, keeping myself in the frame however I could, and that included doing some further testing. Not for the first time, things turned pear-shaped. I was scheduled to have a major test in the first week of July at Silverstone with Arrows, in the latest car on the full Grand Prix circuit with a proper allocation of tyres to work with. It would have been my first serious Formula 1 test, a day to get into it and feel the car properly. We’d organised for some of the people who were helping me that year to come along and watch.

But about 10 days out from the test Tom Walkinshaw threw a spanner in the works with a contract which he wanted me to sign for the following year – before I got in
his car. Stoddy went ballistic. In the middle of that year, the July test was a big opportunity to try out the pukkah race car against some of the other drivers there; it was going to be a pretty big day for me, to say the least, and Paul was fighting my corner.

The proposed contract would have bound me to Tom. Finding myself in a very weak position, it would have been incredibly easy to buckle – you’ve got your name on the side of the car, they’ve done everything to put you in that situation and you’re absolutely busting to do it – but I said ‘No’. Things got pretty juicy between Tom and Stoddy for a while, and that was the end of that test.

Just a few hours later we strolled down to the Benetton garage and renewed contact with Gordon Message, whom I had met several years earlier in Adelaide. Gordon was now Sporting Director at Benetton and said he would work on Flavio Briatore, the Italian who was then in charge of the team. Meantime Ron Walker had come over for a meeting with Bernie Ecclestone, the man who effectively ran Formula 1, during which Ron said how keen he was from an Australian promoter’s point of view to get my backside in a Grand Prix car.

Bernie said, ‘He’s under contract to Tom, isn’t he?’ but of course I had refused to sign at gunpoint. When Ron said ‘No’, Bernie rang Flavio there and then and told him to ‘give the kid a go’. Then Gordon phoned us back and it happened!

‘It’ was a three-day evaluation test from 11–13 September 2000 with Benetton, whose drivers Alex Wurz (funny how Alex kept popping up at my first tests) and Giancarlo Fisichella had just helped the team finish fourth in the World Championship. Admittedly they were light years behind
Ferrari and McLaren, but still, this time I would have a genuine chance to show what I could do in a quick F1 car.

The test took place at Estoril in Portugal. Before going down there I had a chat with Ricardo Zonta, my old teammate and sparring partner from our Mercedes sports car days, who had since raced in F1 for BAR and Jordan and knew the track.

Ricardo said to me: ‘It’s bumpy, I hate it, enjoy!’

I studied the circuit like hell on videos because I’d never been there before. I was training really hard to convince myself that I was ready, trying not to leave too many stones unturned. My agenda: keep mistakes to an absolute minimum, fit in as best I could with the team, drive as quickly as I could, draw on all my experience, channel and focus it all into those three days. I just loved the balance of the car. I was lucky because Wurz is a tall bloke so I had a lot of room in the cockpit. I felt comfortable, and that was a massive confidence boost. I drove on the first day of the test and wasn’t a million miles off Ralf Schumacher’s session-leading time in the Williams, but next morning Fisichella got in ‘my’ car and blew my time away.

‘Bloody hell,’ I thought.

The team said, ‘Don’t worry, the track was rubbish yesterday,’ but I was
very
worried.

When I went out again, within five or 10 laps I realised it
was
just the track conditions that had made the difference and this time my times were very close to Giancarlo, who had laid down a benchmark of 1:21.710.

On Tuesday afternoon I was down in 1:22 territory, then on Wednesday I was given the same tyres and fuel load as ‘Fisi’. The team told me they would be happy if I got within
six-tenths of a second of their F1 regular; in the end I was two-thousandths shy of Giancarlo.

Who’s to say how fired up the Italian was, and how seriously he treated the whole exercise? He came in to do a benchmark time but he’d seen enough of that car, he’d been driving around in it all year only to be told he had to go down to Estoril and do this extra chore. But Benetton’s Technical Director Pat Symonds was there with Gordon, and they gave me a totally fair crack. It was a dream week for me, and it was all done very professionally. By that time Computershare, an Australian-owned share-registry company, was already on board with us in F3000 and its help was important in making that Estoril test possible. The Morris family, who founded Computershare, very quickly became a part of Team Webber; they have attended many Grands Prix around the world and Ann and I remain friends with them to this day.

In the midst of finalising the contract for Estoril, Annie and I were also making what now seems the unfathomable decision to buy our own house. Looking back at it now, it was utter madness: I had nothing guaranteed for the following year, so how the hell were we going to pay for a house? I think our logic was that we had been paying other people’s mortgages for way too long: wouldn’t it be better if we were putting our money towards something we could call our own? Annie found a detached house that needed a bit of TLC in a village called Mursley, close to the outskirts of Milton Keynes, which became home, and the hub for Team Webber, for the next four years. It meant Luke had a bedroom of his own for the first time, a place where he could put pictures of his own sporting heroes up
on the wall, and it was somewhere the three of us could call home.

We forged lasting friendships with neighbours Val and Jackie Christensen and other villagers like Tim and Debbie Parker. While Ann and I had kept our relationship private in our professional lives we were openly living together and ensconced in a village community. There were never any questions asked and we were readily accepted for who we were. It was as close to a normal lifestyle as we had enjoyed up until then, and more and more people were beginning to share in our journey. It was a happy and exciting part of our lives as our dream started to come true.

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The conversation was brief and to the point. ‘Look, Webber, I fucking talking now. You want the deal or no?’

‘Oh, yeah …’

The short reply came from the Queanbeyan end of a telephone line connecting me to Europe and the phenomenon called ‘Flav’: Flavio Briatore, one of the most colourful, controversial and successful men to have functioned in the F1 paddocks of the world in the last quarter of a century. The deal in question was my contract to be Benetton’s F1 test and reserve driver in 2001.

It was a mismatch in boxing terms: a 24-year-old bantamweight trying to break into the big time against a 50-year-old Italian entrepreneur already established as one of the heavyweights of the game. He’s certainly got a presence, especially for a youngster trying hard not to let himself be overawed by anyone, and you have to concentrate very hard to understand him, especially on the telephone. He talks very fast and when
it comes round to the numbers he talks even faster, so dates, terms and conditions are always very quick – but never ask him to repeat them because he’ll kill you!

For a man who started professional life as an insurance agent, Flavio Briatore has come a very long way. His connection with F1 came about with his meeting with Luciano Benetton, head of the clothing empire which was then still in its infancy. It was Flavio who went to the USA and got Benetton’s business up and running there in the mid-eighties. By then Benetton had acquired the Toleman F1 team, and in Mexico in 1986 Gerhard Berger secured the first Grand Prix victory for the most colourful team on the grid. The first F1 race Flavio attended was the Australian Grand Prix in Adelaide in 1988; in 1989 he was named Commercial Director of the Benetton F1 team. An early significant move of Flavio’s was to bring Tom Walkinshaw into the team’s management structure.