Aussie Grit (9 page)

Mercedes weren’t just going to sign me without seeing what I could do: they knew I was doing solidly in F3, but naturally they wanted to make sure I could hold my own in a very different racing environment to anything I was used to. In situations like that you draw confidence from the people around you, and especially from the people who have been there before you. When I was in Formula Ford and Formula 3 I often thought of Jack Brabham and Alan Jones, and even my two-wheeled heroes, Mick Doohan and Wayne Gardner. They were a constant reminder to me: ‘It is possible, Mark. Apply yourself, mate, this will be fine.’ Of course there were
lots of little demons on my shoulders saying this was going to be tough, but I ignored them and listened to the voice that was telling me to back myself instead.

So, a completely different environment for me: sports car, a windscreen, left-hand drive, not in the middle of the car but a little bit off-centre. I knew I was a reasonable racing driver but this was another challenge entirely. I remember slamming the door shut and firing the thing up – this was a V12 7.2-litre engine, an absolute rocket capable of doing 330 kilometres per hour.

My first reaction was sheer disbelief. I could not get my head around how much power the car had and how hard it would pull in fourth, fifth and sixth gears – the acceleration was something I’d never experienced in my life. The braking was similar to a Formula 3 car but obviously you’re arriving so much faster at the corners. The car was absolutely beautiful to drive, and I knew that I had to put it on the limit.

I had one early spin and thought I’d blown it, but they were fine with that. They weren’t telling me much at that stage, but I figured they felt the odd spin was normal for a young charger like me, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and ready to go. It was a day of so many firsts for me, and I was absolutely on my own. Ann had said, ‘They don’t want anyone else there, Mark, they’re interested in you, so get your backside over there and do it.’ So as usual I took her advice!

After 10 or 15 laps I started getting used to the power and the brutal nature of the car. I remembered Dad talking about a racing car’s power-to-weight ratio (he meant how light F1 cars were but how much power they had relative
to that weight), and telling me this thing would also have plenty, but until you actually experience it you just can’t imagine what it feels like.

As usual the hardest part was getting it off the corner, accelerating away when you’re trying to feed that amount of power progressively onto the racetrack. A typical Formula 3 car is underpowered and overgripped; this car was overpowered and undergripped. And the track – we were using the shorter one – was a bit undulating, with a couple of blind corners on it, so that was more information to process and file away. It was challenging, but I can think of worse venues to go to for an initiation like the one they were putting me through. It was an averagely difficult venue for my first time, if not one of the more forgiving ones, and they probably did that deliberately. Of course I didn’t think of that at the time, but they didn’t take me somewhere like Jarama in Spain, where the run-off areas are very limited, meaning you have a high chance of having a big shunt there. So they did look after me to start with, but not for long – soon afterward they took me to other, less forgiving tracks, Jarama included.

Understandably enough I’ve had fond memories of the A1-Ring ever since. It was a defining day for me. There was a lot riding on those eight hours, not only for Ann and me. Alan Docking wanted me to land the Mercedes drive as well. While I was driving from the test back to the airport Docko rang me and said, ‘How do you think you went, mate?’ He was as anxious as we were: the funds from Campo had run out, and Alan wanted his money.

I said yeah, I thought it had gone all right. I didn’t say much, just told him I hoped I had done enough.

As it turned out, I had.

Pushing me into Norbert Haug’s path was another fantastic decision of Ann’s. After my Austrian test, Norbert offered me a contract to race with the AMG Mercedes team in the FIA GT Championship in 1998. This would mean a major deviation from the course plotted in Ann’s original career-path plan. The options she had drawn up were all based on a progression through single-seater racing categories. But there was nothing left in the fighting fund; if we didn’t take this, we’d be going home. So you can imagine what Mercedes-Benz’s offer meant to me at that stage: to have a manufacturer like that behind me was an incredible stroke of luck.

I asked Norbert if he would also take care of my F3 budget for the rest of the season, so that I could keep my racing edge, and he agreed. So AMG Mercedes paid for me to complete the British season, to the tune of £145,000. Negotiations began in earnest in June and the contract was in place by the end of September.

From that point on I pretty much turned professional.

As that realisation began to sink in, I went back to the UK and almost immediately pulled out what I thought was a reasonably good performance to finish second in the F3 race at the British Grand Prix meeting. It’s funny what that little bit of reassurance can do for your confidence. After that I accumulated mainly top-four finishes and ended the season in fourth place overall behind Paul Stewart Racing’s Jonny Kane, Frenchman Nicolas Minassian (who might have won the title but for a bizarre suspension when he took out his temper on a back-marker who had baulked him) and Peter Dumbreck.

I often wondered why Norbert picked me, an Australian. Eventually I found out. There was a man at AMG, the specialist race preparation arm of Mercedes-Benz, called Gerhard Ungar, and he was the one who took a liking to me. Gerhard, who had been in the Mercedes fold since 1987, was quite a powerful player at AMG; he had been watching my career from a distance, and he liked what he saw. I think he could understand the sheer tenacity behind what I was trying to achieve. I wasn’t the only guy trying hard to make it, of course, but there was something in me that Gerhard saw and liked, and he was the one who put pressure on Norbert.

The end of 1997 was bizarre in a way: sports-car racing was not exactly the category we wanted to be competing in for 1998, but it was a very good alternative. Most of all, it took away the massive pressure of constantly needing to find the next dollar, having to explain to people that young drivers had to bring money to the team, not the other way round. It was a significant turning point for me: I was now being paid to drive a car. But very, very quickly I learned that responsibilities came with the money. It was by no means the first time I had felt a responsibility to other people – my parents, Ann, the Bob Copps and David Campeses of this world – but I now realised that, as my employers, Mercedes-Benz were at liberty to tell me exactly what they thought and expected of me. I was learning what the word ‘professional’ is all about. They’re employing you to do a job and you have to demonstrate the right attitude, the right commitment: you’re going to develop this car for them, you’re racing this machine for them and on top of all that it just happens to be one of the most famous racing marques in the world.

I
WENT INTO
1998
WITH ONE OF THE MOST SOUGHT-AFTER
contracts a driver could have in his pocket outside of F1, but I knew there were hard yards ahead. Alan Docking had made a telling comment at the tail-end of 1997 when he explained why he had taken me on board for that F3 season.

‘The young fellow’s pointing a rocket at the moon,’ Docko said, ‘and the chances of hitting it are real slim.’

Alan was a seasoned motor-sport professional and he wasn’t wrong. But at the start of 1998 I was already beginning to figure out ways of making the target easier to hit – and the target was success in sports-car racing, then a move to F1. There were two areas I needed to address: my knowledge of my car’s behaviour and how my own decisions could affect it, and my personal fitness.

The key player in the first part of that learning process was the man who would be my 1998 teammate. Bernd
Schneider was 12 years older than me. As a kid he was a karting star, winning the world junior title before moving up to single-seaters in the German F3 series. He took that title as well in his second year, 1987, and that earned him the big call-up to Formula 1 with Germany’s Zakspeed team. It was a difficult period for him, trying to qualify in a car that was always going to be at the back of the field – especially when they made the disastrous switch to Yamaha engines. After two seasons with Zakspeed he took part in the opening round of the 1990 World Championship for Arrows and did well to bring that car home in 12th place.

Bernd then found his niche in touring cars and sports cars. He raced with the well-known Joest team in a Porsche but by 1992 he was a Mercedes man, with several seasons in the DTM (the German Touring Car series) before he moved into the GT arena. By the time we got together in ’98 Bernd Schneider was the reigning GT World Champion so he knew a thing or two about handling racing cars.

Why did they partner me with Bernd? Norbert Haug explained later that there had been some other options, like putting two young guys up against a pairing of the regular Mercedes drivers, but they were always in favour of putting young blood and experience together. That had already happened when Bernd and Dario Franchitti raced together, and Norbert had confidence in Bernd because he was very open, a great team player and one who would do what he could to help the inexperienced drivers.

Bernd Schneider was the first man to drive home to me how important car set-up was. Until I worked with him I had been pretty arrogant when it came to finding ways to improve the car. I’d always thought it was an excuse or
a weakness if you couldn’t drive around a problem or if you had to look at the telemetry, compare your teammate’s lap times with your own and work out how he was achieving them. I always wanted to learn for myself and not show any weaknesses – and suggesting that I needed things changed on the car seemed like a weakness to me. I felt that I should be able to get the job done with whatever equipment I had been given. I was so bloody pig-headed.

That attitude didn’t last long at Mercedes. They taught me that learning how to set the car up, how to make it go round a particular circuit in the most effective way, was a fundamental part of my profession. I had begun to realise how important it was, but Mercedes put a big emphasis on it and what they were telling me was spot-on: I didn’t realise how much easier I could make my life simply by focusing on details.

As well as helping me with the fine-tuning of the car, Bernd also taught me how to use it to better effect on my way round a track. Again it was a lesson that initially went against the Webber grain. Bernd was asking me to use the kerbs: jumping the different types of kerbs and chicanes a circuit might present me with and using them to keep the car on the trajectory I needed.

I thought that looked bad: it was scrappy, it was hard on the cars and at times it could even give the impression that the driver was desperate, otherwise why would he resort to handling the car that way? Bernd cut through all that from the word go. He listened to me, then said simply: ‘But your job is to get this thing round the track as quickly as possible.’ And he was right.

You work hard to keep mistakes to a minimum, and making none at all is the aim, but Bernd was the past master
at executing all the techniques that help you go faster. He left no stone unturned and that’s why he was phenomenal in touring cars and in sports cars. He was one of the fastest guys I ever drove with or raced against. Looking back, he probably went up that steep learning-curve in the early part of his career; he arrived at Formula 1 before he had completed the curve and learned a lot of those techniques too late. Thanks largely to him, I was fortunate enough to learn them in time.

It would have been helpful to pick up that knowledge sooner, but I absorbed a lot from Bernd in that first year with him. In that crucial period of my career he was a real brother to me, my first real friend outside the UK. We both liked playing squash, we went running together, we obviously drove together in the same car and we would win many races.

We had a very good relationship – but that didn’t mean he was a pushover. Schneider was one of the most ferocious competitors I’ve ever seen. It would be nothing for him to destroy a squash racquet when things weren’t going his way on court. He was on a very short wick and he hated being beaten. So I learned a lot from him about many aspects of driving and controlling both the car and myself. He wasn’t a politician – maybe that’s why he didn’t do as well as he should have in Formula 1 – but as a driving talent, he was phenomenal.

Speaking of car control and self-control, Bernd acted like a brother on one particular occasion I will never forget. It was all part of a very significant learning process going on in 1998. When we returned to the UK Ann and I rented a terraced house in Aylesbury. I used to drive
from Aylesbury across to Mercedes headquarters in Stuttgart regularly; AMG were very good with their drivers, they gave us a car each, which again for me was just a phenomenal thing, going from the B-reg Fiesta to a Merc! That’s how they wanted us to turn up at the events, it was all part of the professionalism. On one particular day, though, I got myself into a scrape that looked anything but professional.

It happened on the French–German border at Saarbrücken. I was going to a Mercedes truck function, where Bernd was meeting me from Cologne. I used to do this trip in the early hours of the morning to get it over as quickly as possible, timing myself from door to door (I made it in seven hours on one occasion), and I used to hook in pretty hard. On this occasion I became confused at the tollbooth at Saarbrücken and when I blasted out of there I got myself into the wrong lane. I was furious at myself for losing a whole 40 seconds, so I did a U-turn at the service station and headed back down onto the main motorway. The fact is I was going way too fast. Uncharted waters again, this particular motorway entry: down the bottom it really tightened up and it was a lot greasier than I expected. It was wet, and it got a lot wetter, and I couldn’t use the merging lane, I had to go straight out into the lanes with other vehicles. I was thinking, ‘Please don’t let there be any traffic’, but as it turned out there was a huge truck in the allegedly slow lane. He was doing 120 or so, I was going too fast, I couldn’t brake and get in behind him, I couldn’t accelerate to get in front of him, I was just going straight into the side of his truck.