Aussie Grit (3 page)

Queanbeyan had been the stamping ground for the Webber family for a couple of generations by the time I arrived. My paternal grandfather, Clive, was born in Balmain in Sydney and my grandmother on that side, Tryphosa – Dad tells me it’s a Biblical name but he’s never come across it in his reading – was from Cessnock in the Hunter region of New South Wales. Both of them moved to the Queanbeyan area early in life, before they knew each other. They married in Queanbeyan in 1941. My dad, Alan, came along in 1947 and he has one sister, Gwen.

Clive was originally a wood merchant, back in the days when there was good business to be done delivering firewood. He delivered wood to Hotel Currajong, where then Prime Minister Ben Chifley spent a lot of time, and also supplied wood to Parliament House. When war broke out Clive went down to Sydney to enlist but was sent home when they realised they needed to hang on to the bloke who delivered wood to such important addresses. He continued as a wood carter until 1955, when he bought what became the family business, Bridge Motors, a Leyland dealership with two petrol bowsers on the footpath on the main street of Queanbeyan.

My dad and mum met in the early sixties. My mum, Diane, was from a well-known local family, the Blewitts. Her dad, David George Blewitt – ‘DG’ for short – and her mum, Marie, were married in 1947, but Marie died of cancer at the age of 48 so my sister Leanne and I never knew her. Dad tells me Marie was a wonderful lady: they got along famously and she worked for him at one stage. DG had 2000 acres which my mother’s sister Pam still owns and runs. Mum was at school with Dad’s sister and often used to spend time at their home. Mum likes to say she couldn’t stand Dad at first, but he insists that was only because he used to like watching the ABC, all the old English comedy shows he still enjoys, and she thought he was being a bit of a smartie-bum, as he puts it. She must have got over that because they started going out in 1968 and were married in 1971, on Dad’s 24th birthday. As he likes to say, he ‘Blewitt’ when he married her! My sister, Leanne, came along in 1974 and in 1976 I followed. I share the same birthday with cricketer Sir Donald Bradman and, coincidentally, with two Grand Prix drivers from the not-so-distant past, Derek Warwick and Gerhard Berger.

Dad built our family home in Irene Avenue, an awesome place that for me was filled with good memories. I went to Isabella Street Primary and then Karabar High, both close to home. I represented the school in athletics and Rugby League, I played Aussie Rules and I was quite keen on cricket and swimming. I was a jack of all trades and legend of none! Perhaps surprisingly it was my mum who encouraged me to get involved in as many different sports as I could. ‘Having a go’ was how she put it, and I was only too happy to take her advice.

Beyond the normal schoolboy activities, Dad was all over motor sport. As a youngster he used to hitchhike to Warwick Farm, which was then a popular Sydney motor-racing venue. Naturally, with Clive running a mechanical repairs business, there were always motorbikes around so it’s no surprise that I grew up with an interest in motor sport myself.

I often think of my grandfather Clive. He was a really special person – incredibly popular, always had a smile on his face, a hell of a man for a practical joke. He was unique and definitely important to what I’ve stood for, the legacy left to his own son and to me. Dad’s pretty similar. He likes to say every day is a birthday for him, he doesn’t want to have any enemies, just wants to have a good time. Clivey was a legend and many of Dad’s traits – and some of mine as well – have come from him.

Mum’s dad, DG, loved us to bits, but he was a farmer and always busy. I remember him worrying incessantly about me either injuring myself on the motorbike at the farm or starting bushfires. Over the years I did both, so perhaps he had every reason to be worried! It’s fair to say, too, that I was never going to be a farmer. I was always at the workshop tinkering away with Clive. The business grew, so they moved it out of town, and Dad took it on from there.

It wasn’t the showiest joint around but it was always a popular spot – the same guys were always around the place. Opposite our house in Irene Avenue in Mark Place lived a family called the Zardos. Both their lads used to work at Dad’s petrol station and Gino Zardo went on to become one of the best photographers in New York. He calls me ‘Sparky’ whenever I see him, and that’s all down to Clive. When
I was born Clive said, ‘He’s a little Champion spark plug!’ and the name just stuck.

Clive died of cancer at 78 when I was 15. The day he died, I was staying with one of my best mates, Peter Woods, and his mum came down and said, ‘Your granddad passed away.’ I was a mess. Seeing what he’d had to go through for the past three years of his illness had been extremely painful for our family. Clive hadn’t even seen me go-karting, which I started when I was 13. I would love for all my grandparents to have seen what I’ve achieved, for Mum and Dad’s sake. You always want those sorts of relationships to go on forever, but of course they can’t. Dad’s a big, solid man, as you would expect an ex-Rugby player to be, whereas Clive was like me, lean and tall. Mum often says in some of the photos when he was young he’s just a dead ringer for me when I was that age. Tryphosa died around the time of the first Melbourne Grand Prix in 1996. I remember Dad getting the phone call just as we were leaving the hotel and being totally blown away by how strong he was. I think of them often and when I’ve raced, although they never saw me turn a wheel, they’ve always been with me. Cancer and its impact on so many lives means something specific and very painful to me.

Queanbeyan wasn’t a big town by any stretch of the imagination, but Leanne and I quickly built our own separate group of friends as we were growing up. My earliest memories of Leanne are of being on the farm on our motorbikes and tailing lambs. She was always into animals and had a far more natural instinct for the farm than I ever did. We had massive family times together on the farm in the evenings, my grandfather DG, Aunty Pam, Uncle Nigel and
their two boys, Adam and Johnny, Mum, Dad, Leanne and me. There were lots of summer holidays to Mollymook on the New South Wales south coast where Dad’s sister Gwen had a holiday home. Leanne and I would both take a couple of friends so there were always lots of kids running amok or hitting the surf.

In school term Leanne and I were always on a different program. I was always late to bed and late to school, she was the complete opposite. Mum used to take us both to the Queanbeyan swimming club on Wednesday nights and I remember how freezing cold it was. Leanne and I did a bit of recreational stuff together but that stopped when racing took over.

Dad had played Rugby Union through school and on weekends until he was in his thirties. He was pretty good, too: he represented New South Wales as a junior, played first grade in the local competition and he likes to boast that he played for Queanbeyan alongside Australian great David Campese in 1981.

Thanks to Mum and Dad, sport certainly played a large part in my own upbringing. Dad still remembers very fondly the day I was picked above my age group for a Rugby League final: I scored two intercepted tries and helped us win the local shield. I played full-forward in Aussie Rules and kicked quite a few goals, and I had a crack at tennis as well. I wasn’t a gun at any of it, but the mentality in the Webber household was to have a crack.

Queanbeyan was a small enough town with plenty of competitive families of people who loved sport. There was always that natural sort of comparison going on. ‘Were you in the newspaper?’ was a frequent question among the
people I grew up with. But it was always very friendly: it wasn’t a contest between parents as to whose son had done what, it was always just a question of wanting to do well, because that’s what we were encouraged to do.

I did enjoy sport, and I’m pretty sure that’s where my competitive nature grew. Whether it was a football match or a computer game, I always liked to win. My only problem was that I wouldn’t put in the practice and the discipline to improve. It wasn’t till I was much older that my focus sharpened and I could see the benefits of applying myself.

I got a privileged insight into the need for discipline and dedication in sport at a pretty early age. When I was 13 I ‘worked’ for a year as a ball-boy for the Canberra Raiders, a little job that came about because Dad knew the Raiders’ Under-21 coach, Mick Doyle. Ball-boy for Mal Meninga and those blokes for a year – what an opportunity! Ten dollars a game was big bucks in those days, and I even travelled to all the away games, which meant hotel rooms in places as far afield as Brisbane. Phenomenal experience for a kid in his early teens!

To see those guys play, to hear the legendary coach Tim Sheens firing them up – I didn’t fully realise how lucky I was to have that experience. At that stage I simply didn’t understand how important motivation was. Those players did whatever it took to get them out on the paddock week in, week out, because that’s what competing and winning is all about: turning up and having a real go.

Sport apart, school and I didn’t really connect. Depending on which of my teachers you asked, they would tell you: ‘Mark Webber? He was loud … he was popular …
he was articulate … he was a bit arrogant … he was lazy and unmotivated … he drove his car like a maniac!’

Most of those descriptions were true, I suppose, but the negative stuff didn’t come about because I didn’t like being at school in the first place. Far from it: I loved school, I rarely missed a day. But I was mischievous and disruptive in the classroom, no question about it. It used to frustrate Mum quite a lot and she threatened me with boarding school on a number of occasions. Dad didn’t help matters because if the school hauled him and Mum in when I was in trouble he’d laugh when he heard what I’d been getting up to. He even went so far as to tell them that he wished he had thought up some of my pranks when he was at school. Actually he had: one of them was stuffing potatoes up the exhaust pipes of the teachers’ cars and he confessed he had done that in his own youth. On another memorable occasion I was in an agriculture class and I buried all the shovels. Next day the teacher couldn’t find them; I got a telephone call and told them they were right there beneath their feet!

My last year at school was when I had the biggest fun I’ve had in my life, because I got my driving licence. I was never one for studying but when there was something I was interested in, like getting my licence, it seemed to come more easily. I got the book you needed to study to go for your licence one day and passed it the next! I had just one lesson from a friend of Dad’s who ran a driving school, but Dad had let me sit on his lap when I was eight or so on the way out to the farm, and I’d had plenty of chances to drive tractors and other farm vehicles before I was 10, so the licence was never a problem. My first car was a 1969
Toyota Corona, two on the tree, $500, and you can imagine the stuff we got up to.

At school lunchtimes I would load up the car with mates and head for the nearby rally stages or fire trails. Sometimes I’d go and recce them on my own then put the wind up my passengers later by spearing off the tarmac road straight onto dirt tracks, safe in the knowledge that I knew exactly what I was doing. They weren’t massively impressed! Nor was the teacher who hopped in with me one day to go and buy some ice. He said later I had two speeds, Fast and Stop, and swore he would never get in a car with me again.

On our muck-up day – the final day of Year 12 when the students virtually take over the school – the boys filmed an on-board lap of me driving around Queanbeyan which involved several near-misses with parked cars and plenty of handbrake turns. My trademark move was to stop at pedestrian crossings with the handbrake; somehow I never managed to convince Dad that the square rear tyres with wire hanging out were a standard tyre defect!

Speaking of tyres, all four of mine were let down one day – by one of my teachers. Mr Walker taught science and I was never in any of his classes, but he clearly took exception to the fact that I used to park in the staff car park. Well, it was convenient – much closer to roll-call. Once we got to the bottom of it, some mates and I went round to his house one night about a week later to get a bit of our own back. Nothing serious: just some flour and eggs, or maybe a couple of those potatoes stuffed up the exhaust pipe. That plan had to be abandoned – Mr Walker was sitting in his car even though it was 10.30 at night!

I also used my Toyota to deliver pizzas around the Queanbeyan and Canberra area. I soon found out there was a skill to learning house names and numbers and finding flats and units, after countless episodes of knocking on doors with a pizza in hand only to be told, ‘Nah mate, you’ve got the wrong house.’ Delivering to parties was always the worst: I’d always get the piss taken out of me in my horrendous uniform with a little leather pouch which I would rifle through trying to give back the right change.

Dad says now that he was worried I might turn out a bit of a devil, but every now and again I would knuckle down to school work. The most important thing for me was to have a relationship with the teacher. If there was a bit of friction between us, that meant I never had the motivation to pay attention. But a few teachers along the way worked out how I ticked, things clicked and I made a half-decent stab at their subjects. A lot of the people I knew did well at Karabar High, but I used it mainly for socialising, playing sport and having meals at the canteen!

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When my love of Formula 1 emerged Dad was as happy as a sand-boy. Australia had started getting television coverage of Grand Prix racing in the aftermath of Alan Jones’s World Championship year in 1980, although races weren’t always shown as they happened because of the time difference, and I think Dad was delighted that I had caught the bug. He was particularly impressed by Jack Brabham, long before ‘Black Jack’, as he was later known, became the first knight of motor racing. Jack had made a name for himself on speedway circuits that weren’t all that far from where
we lived. His was certainly the biggest name in the Webber household, and my story as a racing driver really begins with how inspirational Jack was both to Dad and then to me.