Aussie Grit (30 page)

The celebrations started in earnest when I caught up with DC and a few of the others in the bar at the hotel post-race. Somehow, we managed to screw up logistics with too many people going to the airport, which resulted in four on the back seat and DC sitting on the centre console between the driver and front seat passenger. Brazilian roads aren’t the smoothest so I think DC spent most of the trip head-butting the roof. He probably never felt a thing! We carried on drinking in the airport lounge and when we had boarded and levelled out, we were at it again. Two hours later we couldn’t work out why our fellow first-class passengers were pissed off with us so we decided to take ourselves off to business class and wake up as many passengers as possible. I seem to remember we played a little game with the non-F1 personnel on the flight who were asleep and fell victim to a few of our shenanigans!

One race to go. It took us to another spectacular new venue for the F1 calendar, the Yas Marina Circuit in Abu Dhabi. It turned out to be, slightly disappointingly, a track of two halves: a nice first sector with some high-speed stuff, but a lot of corners packed into a tight space in the second half of the layout. Lewis took pole for McLaren, with Sebastian alongside him and me in third spot. Lewis’s race finished early with brake problems on the McLaren and with Sebastian proving just a little bit quicker on the day – or night, as we raced into the darkness – I was left to fend off a late challenge from the new World Champion, JB himself. I admit to struggling to have any real feel for the option tyres in the closing stages as Jenson closed in,
and I knew it was going to be pretty tight by the end of the race.

Isn’t it funny what pops into your head at the strangest times? As JB was reeling me in, it came back to me that after Tasmania he was probably the only bloke among the drivers that I have a good relationship with (and still do) who didn’t get in touch with me, and that had left me feeling a little disappointed. Looking back, in late 2008 he was under a bit of stress himself, unsure about his own destination for 2009 after Honda’s withdrawal from F1, so I shouldn’t be too hard on him. But I confess that right then I was thinking, ‘Righto mate, this is going to be interesting …’

The aim was to be totally accurate with my braking-points and leave no room for error when he attacked. That long straight was definitely a window for him to create some pressure and we knew the Brawn – or the Mercedes engine – had a little more top speed. Sebastian had it won, this was down to a race for second between the two of us now, so I had to make sure I caused as much havoc as I could getting onto the straights. On the last two laps it got very tight: he attacked, I defended, it was a lot of fun. I was pretty pleased with my defensive drive, especially when it secured Red Bull’s fourth 1–2 finish of the season.

What a roller-coaster ride 2009 was. High anxiety through the European winter of 2008–09 after my accident in Tasmania … Low morale for a while as I felt the pain of driving the car again … High expectations dashed at Silverstone … The penalty in Germany followed by the incredible high of my first Grand Prix win … The dip from Hungary onwards offset by another taste of success in Brazil … 18 points out of 20 in the final two rounds.

In the end I got from the year what I believed I deserved. I was fourth in the drivers’ standings on 69.5 points, the odd half coming, of course, from our abbreviated race in Malaysia early in the season. From a team perspective too, 2009 was special, a unique season when Red Bull Racing ticked a great many boxes.

It was nothing compared to what 2010 had in store.

M
Y EARLY
F
1
YEARS TOOK ME TO BASE CAMP AT
E
VEREST
. I
N
2010 I would learn what it was like to attempt K2, which most serious climbers agree is the toughest mountain of them all.

In his autobiography
In High Places
the great climber Dougal Haston said that the climber has to control self-doubt and fear; that climbing happens as much in the mind as in the battle of body against mountain, and sometimes the challenge seems unreasonable. But then Haston asked a pertinent question: what could be more reasonable than finding out about yourself?’

Switch ‘mountain’ and ‘F1’ and you have a pretty fair summing-up of where I was now in my career: in high places. The year ahead would bring incredible highs like Monaco, moments of fear when my life seemed to have been taken out of my hands, and moments of self-doubt.
Could I go higher still? Climbers start out quite often as a large group; they build camps at key positions on their route up the mountain; as they go higher the group gets smaller; in the end only the climbers capable of making the final push for the summit remain. And to make that push they need all the help they can get from the people behind them. That’s how it was in the 2010 Formula 1 World Championship. By the end of the season we were down to four title contenders, two of us from the same team. The summit was within reach.

Going into 2010 the Webber stocks were higher than they had ever been. I was an F1 race-winner now, in a front-running team, and I felt I belonged there. But the bar had been raised higher again: could I go on and win more races and, if so, what else might come my way? Could we – the whole Red Bull Racing team – continue on this steep climb and put ourselves in World Championship contention?

In 2009 we had a quick car in the shape of the RB5, but it was found wanting on a number of tracks. Adrian Newey’s priority for 2010 was to come up with a successor, the RB6, that would be quick on every track – and that meant 19 of them, because 2010 was scheduled to match 2005 as the longest seasons in F1 history to that point. While the team considered a switch to either Mercedes engines (vetoed by their other partner, McLaren) or Cosworth (ultimately short on development), we stuck with the Renault units that Adrian thought were somewhere around 4 per cent down on the German engines’ power. As the season loomed I was pretty optimistic. The key performance ingredients that make these things go fast were not really changing much for the new year, Sebastian and I had finished first and second
in the last race of 2009 so we clearly had a great base to design the RB6 on, and we had developed the RB5 quite well in-season, so looking at a 24-month cycle there was nothing to suggest that progress shouldn’t continue. As a unit we were one of the most stable teams over the break, and that continuity was only going to help our cause.

Most crucially of all, I believed Adrian had the hunger back again. We flew down together to Valencia for the MotoGP race at the end of their 2009 season along with two of my bike racing mates, Jason Crump and John McGuinness, and you could tell that he was excited by the potential of his latest design.

For 2010, quite simply Adrian had designed the best car. He had come up with a system at the rear of the RB6 where the engine’s exhaust gases were channelled through a slot in the car’s bodywork into the central section of the diffuser. That would boost the down-force and increase cornering speed: it would prove a valuable aid in the early part of the year.

The one regulation change of note was that refuelling had been banned, meaning we would have to run the cars heavy from race start. My feeling was that 2010 would be all about tyres because the additional weight in the car would affect their reliability. That meant there was room for a bit of tactics on the fuel burn – how to do a Grand Prix with the minimum amount possible.

Setting off with around 160 kilograms of fuel on board, the cars would get quicker through the whole race to the tune of about four seconds per lap as the fuel load burned off (each litre weighs around three-quarters of a kilogram). But the driver’s job wouldn’t change massively: every corner
is on the limit, to a point. People think that when the cars are heavier they’re at their worst but I think they’re easier because the lap time’s slower so the G-forces are lower, and the car’s less nervous, more docile in the driver’s hands.

As for this driver, I was in pretty good shape too, although not without a minor alarm. I had been hoping to have all the remaining metalwork in my leg removed in one hit but the recovery period from that would be too long. The screw inserted in my leg had a small cap in the top and this had been giving me quite a bit of discomfort since the original surgery 12 months earlier. It had been cross-threaded and was sitting proud, and that’s why it was causing me pain. The start of December 2009 was the only window I had to allow my new case surgeon Dave Hahn to put things right. It required a full incision at the front of my knee and Dave couldn’t guarantee the recovery period.

It was a relief to get the work done but I infuriated Dave when I resumed training way too soon. I thought the knee might have become infected; I remember being at the Red Bull Racing Christmas party a week later in excruciating pain and on crutches. I panicked and drove up to Nottingham to see Dave the next morning. He said, ‘You stupid bastard, you’ve been doing too much on it and not enough on the crutches. When I say rest, I mean rest.’ He got a syringe out and withdrew a lot of fluid, knowing full well it wasn’t infected. I did what I was told this time and the leg was happier and better. I was back in light training again just four weeks post-op.

The 2010 season marked the return of one Michael Schumacher. He had been tempted out of his three-year retirement by the prospect of teaming up again with Ross
Brawn, who was now in charge of the born-again Silver Arrows. The Mercedes F1 team were coming back into the sport in their own right, rather than as engine suppliers to other teams, for the first time since 1955. For Michael it was a case of ‘full circle’, as it was Mercedes who had really launched his career in their sports-car program in the late ’80s and early ’90s. His teammate would be compatriot Nico Rosberg.

I was all for it: we all knew only too well what Michael had already achieved, but comebacks are something else. You don’t hear of many absolutely phenomenal comebacks. You hear a lot more about the ones that haven’t gone to plan – think Björn Borg, for example – because generally the people under scrutiny have had phenomenal careers first time around. They left on a slightly higher level than everyone else in their chosen sport; they think they can come back, have a crack and be right back where they were.

Personally I didn’t think Michael would be the same driver he once was. Still bloody awesome, but the hunger, the willingness to go the extra mile and then some, all those things he used to take in his stride … Would he still have it? I reckoned he would be half a yard short in a few areas here and there: like a footballer short of match fitness or a boxer who’s been out of the ring too long. But hats off to him for coming back and having a crack, because the young guys still knew where their right foot was and he wasn’t about to be given any preferential treatment. He wouldn’t want it anyway.

His return meant we would have seven German drivers on the grid, a mark of how powerful their nation had become in our sport. And one of them was in the car right next to mine.

I totally agreed with some of the tweaks that had been made to the 2010 regulations, such as the ban on in-season testing: I was all for that because I hated driving round and round doing 15 Grand Prix distances on top of all the racing. I wasn’t so happy with the decision that had been taken on World Championship points though, with the introduction of an inflated 25 points for a Grand Prix win and a sliding scale of 25–18–15–12–10–8–6–4–2–1 for the top 10 finishers in each race.

Why? As a sports fan I can relate to however many runs Bradman made, or his batting average, or how many goals Eric Cantona scored. To my mind it showed scant respect for the tradition of our sport. Compare my points to Jack Brabham’s now and the picture is skewed. I’m a traditionalist and I like the way tennis, cricket or golf have stayed consistent. It’s a shame that the powers that be in F1 keep tweaking the small things instead of looking at the big issues.

*

For Team Webber, four Grand Prix victories in 2010 were like those camps mountaineers set up at various altitudes. Each win took us higher, each meant our focus had to be adjusted upwards again. But as we kept climbing higher, other incidents cast ever-lengthening shadows across our path.

My third F1 win and my first of 2010 came in Barcelona in round five and it was one of those weekends where the car was quick throughout. It’s hard for people outside a Formula 1 team to appreciate the amount of work that goes into putting two cars on the starting grid, but the Barcelona performance level was testament to what the people at
Milton Keynes had achieved in the three weeks since the preceding race in China.

Before qualifying in Spain Christian told me to go out there and enjoy myself because I probably wouldn’t get too many chances to drive a car like ours around that track. He was dead right: he had driven there himself and he knew that for Barcelona – a track we all know so well – you have to be confident in your car because it has so many fast corners. In Friday’s practice we were already looking pretty strong.

During our briefing that night we knew qualifying in this car in Barcelona would be something else. Being flat out in sixth gear through Turn 9 at Barcelona is quite a feeling, I can tell you. It’s a spot where you usually had to lift off a little, maybe brake slightly or perhaps even downshift. Not in this car. It was so good I could go through Turn 9 at full throttle. Christian was right to warn me not to take it for granted, but he also knew there weren’t many better men than me when it came to fast corners. I still remember it to this day. The boffins in the garage see the telemetry, they know your foot didn’t come off the throttle and that’s a hugely rewarding moment for them as well. It certainly helped me put the car on pole.

Translating that into a race win meant getting off the line cleanly, being as precise as I could into Turn 1 after the long, long run down there and then settling into a rhythm of my own. The option tyres had to be cycled through as quickly as we could, but in the end everything fell my way. It’s not often the serious journalists in the racing magazines write about ‘the perfect drive in the perfect car’ so it was very gratifying to see such comments alongside my name.
I could have done a thousand laps that day and I was still going to win.