Aussie Grit (38 page)

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It didn’t all start with ‘Multi 21’, but that’s probably as good a place as any to finish on the subject of my differences with Red Bull Racing.

Sebastian arrived in Malaysia in 2013 after a podium in Melbourne, but in Sepang we were very concerned about our pace. Our Friday race preparation was slow, so we decided to use Saturday’s free practice session to do long runs, which is unusual for us. Pirelli were very pessimistic about the length of the stints we could do: we were very hard on tyres. So we did those long runs on Saturday morning, and tried some highly unusual set-ups while we were about it.

Sunday’s track temperature was six or seven degrees cooler. A shower just before the start meant we began the 56-lap race on Pirelli’s intermediate tyres. Thanks to a good call from Simon I got my cross-over, switching to the right tyres at the right time, spot-on. Seb, who had started from pole, changed too early and soon we were running 1–2, with my car in the lead. I stayed there through the second round of stops but that’s when the trouble started. As the third round of pit stops neared, I had backed off to take care of my tyres; I didn’t know this at the time, but Sebastian was making a fuss over the radio and had issued an order of his own: ‘Get Mark out of the way, he’s too slow.’

The team asked if I could lift my pace before the final stop which is a normal request, and I obliged. This is where
it got tricky for the team as they were trying to keep Seb ahead of the Mercedes, so they pitted him first. Normally the lead car, in this case me, would have priority over the pit stop sequence. Once the stops were done, Seb had not only gained time on the Merc but the powerful strategy of pitting earlier meant that he was straight into DRS range of me.

The team were happy that their strategy had protected him against the Mercs and so we got the infamous ‘Multi 21’ message to turn the engines down and bring the cars home. It wasn’t always beneficial to us to race hard against each other because that was too hard on the tyres and in Malaysia we had had that very discussion beforehand. I knew within two laps that Seb was going to take matters into his own hands despite the reassurance over the radio that the race was mine.

I started defending, but as a result of our respective qualifying runs he had new tyres and I didn’t. My attempt in Q2 was too conservative so I did an extra lap: that meant I was on a three-lap-old set while Seb’s were brand-new. Maybe he felt he should be able to use those tyres to the best effect rather than be told to back off? Whatever his thinking was, when he overtook me I wasn’t so much angry as very sad that the team had reached this sorry state.

With Seb’s victory done and dusted, Adrian Newey came up to me saying, ‘We told him, we told him.’ Seb himself was very keen to talk to me before we went up to the podium but I didn’t want to listen. When we got there the interviewer, Martin Brundle, found himself in a very awkward position. That was when I made my remark about Sebastian making his own decision to disobey orders
and race and then being given protection, as usual, by the senior management at Red Bull Racing.

After the podium ceremony Sebastian said he wanted to give the win back to me: he said it had been a complete f#*k-up. We knew by then that the official FIA press conference was going to be very awkward for all concerned. The team PR people couldn’t get to us before we went in there. Sitting next to Seb was very uncomfortable. He had executed the whole thing and now he had to deal with it. He said he would call me in Australia, where I was going after that race. But it was no surprise when I got a call from Dietrich Mateschitz instead.

He was furious about what had happened and what it had done to Red Bull’s image. He asked me to give him both a verbal and a written account of what had happened, which I did. He also asked me to tell him what had gone wrong in Melbourne: he was very curious about the technical issues I had faced before the start of the race. It was clear he wasn’t very happy about it, as Melbourne was a race he would have liked me to have won.

The next time I saw Sebastian was on the Thursday of the race weekend in China, and I said we needed to talk. The ensuing conversation was the most disappointing moment of our entire relationship. He said he was pissed off by what I had said on the podium in Malaysia, that while he respected me as a driver he had no respect for me as a person.

That was a heavy line for me. I simply said, ‘Then our relationship is in trouble. That’s it.’

I had clung to the belief that we might sort things out between us but I couldn’t help thinking someone must have got in his ear to cause such an about-face. Christian
later insisted it was all of Sebastian’s own doing, his justification being that it was payback for Silverstone 2011 and Brazil 2012. I could have gone back a lot further than that!

From then on I knew the end of the season was going to be difficult. Drivers are such beacons within a team: the tensions between us would put stress on all the other areas of Red Bull Racing.

Perhaps Dietrich could have sorted it out, but he had plenty of other things on his radar and in any case he ought to have been able to trust the people he’d put in place to handle the situation. He had told me he would have liked to handle things differently even back in 2010. I trusted Adrian, but Christian was in an awkward position having to keep Marko happy, and it turned out that the protection for the other driver
was
there. It might have been different had we had really strong management. Sebastian and I both tested the system and when your drivers are fighting each other for race wins the pressure on all concerned is that much greater.

When Ann later pressed Christian about why the team had never reprimanded Seb or issued any punishment for the ‘Multi 21’ incident, he admitted that the team had received a two-page letter from Seb’s lawyer a few days after the Malaysian race stating that they were in breach of his contract by giving him ‘an unreasonable instruction/team order’. Red Bull Racing clearly felt they were in a very awkward position because they ended up paying first-place bonus money to both drivers and the figures weren’t small either!

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With the Malaysian mess behind us, saying ‘Au revoir’ to Monaco with my fourth F1 podium there was very pleasing.
It happened on a day when my former teammate Nico Rosberg emulated his famous dad, Keke, one of F1’s greatest street-fighters, who won there in 1983 for Williams. Coincidentally I was behind Nico again when I finished second at Silverstone, my fifth F1 podium at another track which has always been kind to me, and I had one of my more enjoyable moments of the year when I went public with my decision to quit Grand Prix racing.

I had been to Austria two days earlier where I signed my Porsche contract and met with Mr Mateschitz at Hangar 7. I told him that I was going to announce my decision to move to endurance racing at a circuit, Silverstone, that had always felt like home to me. Typically, he had wished me well. In fact he gave me the impression he was disappointed, though maybe he felt that was the right thing to do, but he said he always felt sad when the gladiators dropped out of the sport. He liked having real men racing his cars.

Prior to making the announcement, Ann had checked my RBR contract with my lawyer, who confirmed that I was under no obligation to inform the team; I only had to notify them in the event of my switching to another F1 team. So on the Thursday morning, 10 minutes before Porsche issued their press release, I phoned Christian Horner and told him my F1 days were over. It was another crack in my relationship with Red Bull Racing but I was happy to wear that. I didn’t want this to be done on anyone’s terms but mine.

Another track that has been kind to me, the Nürburgring, had a nasty surprise in store this time. I felt, over the weekend, that this was a place where I could challenge for that elusive 10th Grand Prix victory – until lap 9 and my first pit stop. As I tried to accelerate away from the box,
the right rear wheel came off my car. It bounced high and hit one of the FOM (Formula One Management) television cameramen on duty in pit lane. In comparison to what had happened to the poor man (who was not too seriously injured, as it turned out), the two-and-a-half minutes I lost in pit lane didn’t matter. In the context of a race, though, they were terminal.

I made eight podium appearances in 2013 but unfortunately none of them came at another favourite place of mine, Spa-Francorchamps. Two practice starts on my way to the grid proved alarming and sure enough, the clutch bite point was all over the place and I bogged down at the start. I’d have loved to finish higher than fifth: driving a Formula 1 car round that great circuit is one of the things I miss about Grand Prix racing. The same applies, to a certain extent, to Monza, where I at last got on the podium for the first time in F1 alongside Vettel and Alonso. You see the fans hanging out of the trees in the royal park, you see full grandstands, you see kids with their grandparents – to me that’s just wonderful.

Being on the podium again at Suzuka was brilliant, too – especially after the build-up! It began on the Sunday night post-race in Korea and ended with six Formula 1 drivers doing mock pit stops on taxis on the main streets of downtown Tokyo. Our bender involved me, Fernando, Lewis, Felipe, Jenson and Nico Rosberg. At some stage, as I recall, we also roped in DC and Martin Brundle. We’d started hooking into it on a private flight between the two venues. I confess that I’ve forgotten now exactly what it was we ended up drinking, but by the end we were stacking up the shot glasses and trying our damnedest to out-do each
other. Alonso entered the fray late so we acted like stewards, deemed him to be two laps down and ordered him to neck a few to get himself back on the lead lap! The racing similarities got a bit out of hand – for example, I’ve no idea why Fernando told me at one point that he was coming in for a set of supersofts – but Webber was adjudged to have put it on pole. If you drank 15 of whatever we were drinking you got your name up on the wall so it’s not hard to imagine six competitive guys getting right into it. I was up for another crack on the Tuesday and roped Nico and a few others into it with me! The photographs of us walking into the Suzuka paddock don’t suggest that we’re ready for the gunfight at the OK Corral …

But when we got back to real racing life I was on pole and the lap that put me there was one of my best ever. So much so that I did wonder if I should have taken off the pressure valve a bit more during my career, allowed myself the chance to let my hair down, but I was always thinking too much about the next day’s fitness training session. I had to give best at the start to Romain Grosjean as he rocketed into the lead and it took a late switch from two to three stops to bring me back to second behind eventual winner Seb. I couldn’t help feeling it was a chance gone begging and that in the end a 2.5-stop strategy might have done the job.

The next race was India, where we retained the Constructors’ Championship but I retired from the race with an alternator failure, just as I did the year before when the team won the Constructors’ title in Austin. Christian had shared with Ann and me that in a perfect world, Marko only really wanted a one-car team but the regulations prevented that. Judging by all the technical gremlins that had plagued my
car for the last couple of years, it was hard to resist thinking that they’d effectively got their one-car team anyway. Ironically, Seb might have felt much the same after his 2014 season – in fact at one point I quipped, ‘They’ve given him my car!’

With just three of my 215 Grands Prix remaining I was determined to finish as strongly as I could. So three straight podiums in Abu Dhabi, Austin and Brazil allowed me to feel that I was leaving at the right time: still driving well enough to keep company with the front-runners, still capable of putting the car on pole as I did in Abu Dhabi to equal Sir Jack’s personal tally of 13, still quick enough to post fastest laps as I did on the 51st lap of my final race at Interlagos, matching Ayrton Senna in at least one stat department with my 19th fastest lap of my career!

Despite my differences with team management, a 1–2 finish in Brazil was a brilliant way to complete my seven-year stay at Red Bull Racing. I had said my personal goodbyes, in a sense, in Austin, a friendly, fun place, by inviting a group of people who had been with me throughout my single-seater racing career. People like Geoff Donohue, Spencer Martin and his son Matt, Jason Crump and his wife, Mel, Mum and Dad and the great friends I’d made in Austin, all of whom had been with us through thick and thin. We all had a sensational week, culminating in a post-race dinner at which even Dad got a bit teary. For me it was a nice closure, emotionally, on my career.

When we got to Brazil I was especially thrilled, looking back on it all, because the men beside me on the podium were Vettel and Alonso. I will always be proud to have raced alongside those two, arguably the fastest drivers of this
generation, and being up there with them on my last day in F1 was another in a long list of very special moments. Sebastian said in our post-race debrief that we had had some very tough times but a huge percentage of the time we pushed each other very hard, and that he generally thrived having me in the other car. I thought his comments at that last race were pretty genuine.

I wouldn’t say I’m a sentimental sort of bloke, but I will admit to being close to tears when I climbed into that car for my last race start. Before the race Dietrich sent me a text message:

It’s on my and Red Bull’s part to thank you for all the years, your commitment and input! There will be nobody in F1 who won’t miss you – and most we do. This is “your” race today, enjoy it! There are not many men and athletes like you in general – and not in F1 in particular. :) See you soon. Dietrich.

Dietrich is someone I continue to learn from and for whom I have the utmost respect. I’m absolutely honoured to have been able to continue with Red Bull in my own right, and proud to have the brand associated with me, considering what we went through, in my new life in sports-car racing with Porsche. I would have loved to have Adrian there with me too – I tried very hard to get him to join me at Porsche but instead he chose to go the route of America’s Cup, which is understandable as it presents a whole new and fresh challenge for him.