Aussie Grit (24 page)

After the debacle at Grove I didn’t want to argue with Flavio again. He had said Renault, I had said no, and Alonso had ended up with two world titles in a row! When Flav started nudging me towards Red Bull Racing, I could see the sense in that, and the potential they had in their ranks.

There was the initial attraction that Red Bull Racing had
been built on the foundations of Jaguar, my old team, which meant a return to familiar territory at Milton Keynes. Ford had decided to offload its F1 racing arm in the European autumn of 2004; while Red Bull got it at a fairly good price, Dietrich Mateschitz, the Austrian billionaire behind the Red Bull brand, made a three-year commitment to keep it going. Three years is a long time in Formula 1, so he was clearly prepared to invest some of the money coming from worldwide sales of his famous energy drink, launched in his native country in 1987.

Dietrich is a modest and private man who shies away from the spotlight. I only ever saw him at one or two Grands Prix or tests each year as he wasn’t involved in the day-to-day running of the team, leaving it to the people he had put in charge. But over time I got to know him better away from the racetrack and would visit him regularly at his office situated within Red Bull’s Hangar 7 at Salzburg airport in Austria. He has a great passion for aviation, and Hangar 7, an edgy building with a futuristic look about it, is home to his amazing Flying Bulls collection of historic planes and helicopters, and numerous Red Bull-sponsored racing cars.

Within a year of the Jaguar purchase Dietrich Mateschitz and former Austrian F1 driver Gerhard Berger had also acquired another of my former teams: Minardi, renamed Scuderia Toro Rosso or ‘Team Red Bull’ in English. I knew Christian Horner, the Englishman appointed to head up Red Bull Racing trackside, from my F3000 days. He used to race himself but was honest enough to recognise he didn’t have the talent to make it to F1 and so did the next best thing and set up his own race team, Arden, with his father, Garry, who helped fund it.

I knew Christian well enough to have the odd conversation here and there and it was obvious he had a big passion for the sport. However, I had no idea then just how lofty his ambitions were, nor the motives that inspired him to become such a force in F1. In later years I got to know him a lot better as we flew to races together. Ann and Garry went into business together with a GP3 team and we socialised regularly with the Horner family. Initially Christian did well to keep his feet firmly on the ground as he started to mix in supposedly higher circles, but inevitably you could see him being seduced by the trappings of an F1 lifestyle. It wasn’t all negative: he’s ambitious, a good politician and he has worked hard to be accepted in the right places. But, because he likes to keep everyone happy and doesn’t like confrontation, over time he’s become less than consistent and I eventually found I couldn’t rely on what I was being told.

So Red Bull Racing came into F1 in 2005, the phoenix out of the Jaguar ashes. In their second season, 2006, they had scored more points than Williams, which admittedly wasn’t all that hard. The real lure for me at Red Bull Racing was Adrian Newey. He was, and has remained, one of the real technical geniuses of the Grand Prix world; his cars had won umpteen races and many championships for Williams and McLaren. While my time at Williams had been barren, that was in the post-Newey era, as he had already moved to McLaren.

It had been a real feather in the cap for Red Bull to attract him. He joined the team early in 2006 but such is the way F1 works that the 2007 machine, the RB3, was to be the first of ‘his’ cars for his new team. Not only that, but
it would be powered by Renault in a new long-term partnership after RBR’s one-season arrangements with Cosworth in 2005 and Ferrari in 2006.

F1 tweaks for 2007 included the move to a single tyre supplier, Bridgestone. The FIA had mooted this possibility some time before and Michelin had decided that, as a company whose entire philosophy was built around racing and the competitive edge, they didn’t want to be in a formula that had no competition … On the wider F1 scene, Fernando had left Renault for McLaren, where his teammate would be British whiz-kid Lewis Hamilton – but not for long. And McLaren would find themselves embroiled in one of the biggest controversies in F1 history, with a very large sum of money at its end.

Interestingly, it was another year when that recurrent theme, team orders, enjoyed the headlines, albeit briefly. As a season-long fight between Ferrari and McLaren developed, the FIA investigated the possibility that, in Monaco, McLaren had instructed Hamilton to slot in behind Alonso to protect him from the threat of Räikkönen’s Ferrari. No action was taken, but once again it was clear that there were racing situations that could place considerable strain even on the oldest-established teams on the grid. So much so that McLaren’s two drivers ended up virtually at war. Fernando’s relationship with Ron Dennis at McLaren broke down beyond repair and after one year with the Woking team he was off back to the Renault team where he had obviously felt so much more comfortable.

As I prepared to go racing with Red Bull, there was one small nagging question in the back of our minds. It wasn’t a deal-breaker at the time but I wanted to know what the
situation was with Helmut Marko. The name will figure prominently in the coming years so it will be useful to know that he is Austrian, he was a schoolmate of 1970 World Champion Jochen Rindt and co-drove a Porsche to victory at Le Mans in 1971. He tried to make the step up to F1 but had his career cut short by an accident at the 1972 French Grand Prix in which a stone pierced his helmet and blinded him in the left eye.

He went on to establish a team of his own, RSM Marko, in F3 and F3000, and for many years was a major contributor to the Red Bull Junior Program and a consultant to Dietrich Mateschitz. Let’s just say he didn’t command unquestioning respect around the junior categories because of the ruthless manner in which he dealt with young drivers. Although I was never on his radar or he on mine as our paths never crossed before Red Bull Racing, everyone knew someone he had upset along the way. In fact, I later made a point of asking people from across the generations, including those he used to race against in the 1970s, whether I had simply got it wrong about him and they assured me I hadn’t!

Annie and I asked Red Bull Racing Sporting Director Christian Horner about him and he said, ‘Just humour him and you’ll be fine. He’s only involved with the young driver program and you’re not a part of that.’ Mateschitz–Marko–Horner: how could I have anticipated the influence that this unlikely Anglo-Austrian triumvirate would be exerting over my life for the next seven years?

There was another plus to joining Red Bull Racing: ‘DC’ was going to be my teammate. David Coulthard had added his own chapter to Scotland’s fine record in F1, claiming 13 Grand Prix victories while with Williams in 1994–95
(he picked the right time to be there!) and McLaren, to whom he gave yeoman service from 1996 to the end of 2004. He had been a founding member of the Red Bull team back in 2005 and he deserves enormous credit for his contribution in those early years, particularly in helping persuade them to bring Adrian Newey on board. I knew David and that we could enjoy a really good relationship racing alongside each other.

And so it turned out: the biggest thing I learned from David was how strong and purposeful you have to be in your directions to the team. It’s not about building cosy friendships, it’s about saying what needs to be said to get the job done. It was good for me to see how direct he was on the professional front, because that side of my driving life had taken such a battering at Williams. DC is also a product of the Jackie Stewart school of charm and grooming! His whole life from a very young age has evolved around motor sport; he doesn’t take much interest in other sports. He was surprised, I remember, when I got involved in my Tasmanian adventure race while still active in F1. At the back end of his racing career he launched himself into media work and became a seasoned pro at it. He’s just a bloody good bloke to be around. He’s a straight shooter and we have a lot of respect for each other.

It was also very refreshing for me to come out of Williams when I did. The initial feeling in my new surroundings was one of relief. Being part of the Red Bull family, I was going to have the opportunity to do lots of fun stuff away from the track, although of course Christian had insisted that the Red Bull Racing focus was firmly on the circuits, where the important work was taking place. Christian had the knack
of giving you a bit of a Chinese burn, knowing what you needed to work on without getting carried away with it. He knew the little trigger-points you needed to touch to improve as a driver, but he knew I was pretty self-analytical as well. It was such a different flavour, and it brought renewed drive and motivation.

But when all is said and done, there was one overriding consideration in my decision to go to Red Bull: I didn’t really have any other option. F1 treads a fine line between success and failure, and I was teetering on that tightrope as my sixth season as a Grand Prix driver approached. Within a short space of time I got on good terms with the boys at the team, both the factory-based staff and those travelling to the tests and races, many of whom had been there in my Jaguar days. I was living 25 minutes away from the factory and spent a lot of time there. I used to encourage the guys to get into their fitness, organising some mountain-biking as we had done at Jaguar and competing in a few events together. There were occasional excursions to soccer matches, or to Cardiff to watch my fellow Australian Jason Crump in the major speedway events. It wasn’t just ‘my’ boys, either – quite often some of the guys who worked on the other car would join us. If you haven’t lived in the UK, it’s hard to imagine how long the winter nights can be. They’re even longer if you are working late or on the night-shift, so I used to stop in, if I was on the way back from a function, say, and have a chat, or arrange for some pizzas to be delivered.

The smile was back on the dial. But there were a few frowns around the Red Bull camp as pre-season testing unfolded, with Christian confessing in the first week of March that we were about four weeks behind in
our preparations. This was largely due to a defect in our wind-tunnel work that Adrian had picked up on and begun to correct, but that four-week time lag complicated our lives because the first race was only two weeks away.

The team’s stated aim was to be the leaders of the midfield pack behind the usual big guns, which in 2007 were Ferrari, McLaren and BMW. We would be in the race-within-a-race, the second tier, if you like, which would pit us against Renault, Toyota and Williams. But four races into the season Christian’s tone changed: he was fired up about the reliability issues affecting the RB3’s early performances that had the media talking about our quality control systems.

My home race weekend in Australia – always something of a test of endurance, both for me and my car – began well enough but a good start was compromised by a poor pit stop when the fuel flap wouldn’t open, then wouldn’t close. In our high-tech F1 world the boys had to resort to a screwdriver to pry the bloody thing open! It may sound like a trivial problem, but so sensitive are these F1 beasts that the flap staying open meant a 7 per cent loss in down-force at the rear of my car, which pretty much killed my rear wing, and I finished 13th. But at least I made it to the end, which is more than could be said for DC, who chose to demonstrate the inherent strength of a Formula 1 car by taking off across Alex Wurz’s Williams in spectacular style at Turn 3 on the opening lap, happily with no harm to either driver.

I reached the heady heights of P10 in Malaysia, then the fuel-flap fiasco hit me again in Bahrain in the third round, where I posted my first Red Bull DNF with gearbox problems to boot. In the circumstances David’s fifth-place
finish in Spain was a bit of a breakthrough, but it came despite the car rather than because of it as he lost third gear at a crucial stage and had to nurse it to the line. A second DNF in Monaco was another disappointment for me following an engine sensor glitch, an early spin in Canada cost me several places, but then came a breakthrough of my own in the United States. At Indianapolis I enjoyed a race-long duel with Jarno Trulli’s Toyota and emerged with seventh place, my first points for my new team at last.

Although I didn’t realise its significance at the time, that race was also a landmark for another reason. In Canada Robert Kubica had survived a stunningly fast shunt in his BMW Sauber, which was great testimony to the work we had been doing through the GPDA and the FIA to improve safety, but medical advice saw him sidelined for the next race as a precautionary measure. Into his seat came a young German who had come through the Red Bull ranks and had competed in Formula BMW. His name was Sebastian Vettel. Born in Heppenheim in south-western Germany, he began go-karting at the age of seven, and with Red Bull funding he had impressed in the junior categories. He made his F1 debut at the ripe old age of 19 years and 349 days and scored a World Championship point by finishing one place behind me in eighth at Indianapolis. In doing so, he became the youngest driver ever to score World Championship points until another Red Bull junior driver, Daniil Kvyat, superseded him in 2014 – one of many record-breaking firsts that Red Bull have made a conscious habit of collecting. In the 2015 Malaysian Grand Prix, 17-year old Max Verstappen lowered the record again when he finished seventh for Toro Rosso!

Indianapolis wasn’t the first time Seb and I had crossed paths. I first met him when he did his initial F1 test for Williams at Jerez in 2006. He struck me then as being very young and not yet physically strong enough to hang on to these cars. They were what I call real cars at that time, with massive power on tap, and very tricky to hold in that performance envelope of within a tenth or two on every lap. During that test session, when I asked Sebastian his first impressions, his answer was: ‘This is not for me – it’s just way too quick!’ Jerez is a tricky little circuit with some quick corners, and he was a little bit of a rabbit in the headlights. But a 20-second time differential per lap is a big shift, mentally, for anyone and that’s what he was finding out that day.