Aussie Grit (22 page)

Ralf said to me, ‘Mark, you should go and talk to Michael about it.’ I said, ‘Bloody hell, why don’t you go? You’re his brother, surely you can make him listen?’ Michael was much closer to the FIA than the rest of us. He attended a lot of their meetings on safety and technology and was much more up to speed with developments. Some of the younger drivers were probably intimidated by him, but I wasn’t. Every now and again he would side with us but if a change wasn’t what Michael wanted, then it didn’t happen. When Michael left I think the atmosphere in the GPDA got a bit warmer. We were keen to feel that if anything ever did go wrong or we needed to take a stance or a position on an issue, we’d try
to make a united front – not always easy when so many different cultures are represented on the grid. We all tick differently. But we tried to take a leaf out of Jackie Stewart’s book, because for him driver unity was paramount: in his day guys were being killed on a pretty regular basis.

Other points of contention were Max Mosley’s plan to have us pay enormous fees for the mandatory super-licences (we would never have won that battle if we hadn’t been unanimous), twilight racing in Melbourne, cockpit safety, a discussion prompted by the death of Henry Surtees, the son of John Surtees, the only man to have been World Champion on two and four wheels, or new venues like Singapore and its night race.

But the GPDA has its lighter side, too. I remember one meeting where Felipe Massa piped up and said, ‘Hey guys, I’ve been thinking …’ and all of us just fell about laughing. ‘Felipe, surely not? Don’t tell us – put it in the minutes! Write it down … Felipe’s been thinking!’

Once we had stopped rolling on the floor we remembered to ask him exactly what he had been thinking.

Back comes the little Brazilian: ‘Aw, shoot, I’ve forgotten what I was going to say!’

*

Hard as it may seem to believe, our 2005 season went downhill from that June low point in the USA. At Magny-Cours the aero ‘improvements’ we put on the car were actually more of a hindrance than a help. More significantly for me, my cockpit overheated when a rubber grommet inserted to block an unused aperture dropped out and the heat from an electronics box outside my cockpit built up to
unbearable levels. I’ve still got the scars on my right hip to this day.

Meanwhile Nick pitted repeatedly in the other car in the second part of the race as his fears about the car’s suspension grew. I opted out of a test session in Jerez to allow my French burns to heal a little more, had a first-lap accident in Germany that damaged a track rod in the suspension … and then the brown stuff
really
hit the fan.

To some extent it was a relief to get to the last race in Hungary at the very end of July before the European summer break. I should have remembered that this would be my 13th race in a Williams. My first dozen had yielded the princely total of 22 points and 10th place in the Drivers’ Championship, 55 points and nine places shy of the man whose Renault teammate I might have been, Fernando Alonso. Nick and I came home sixth and seventh respectively in the Budapest race. I said at the time that seventh place and a couple of points was a nice way to go into the summer break, but that little note of optimism was quickly snuffed out on the first Monday of that otherwise welcome three weeks off.

Frank and Patrick summoned me to Williams HQ in Grove, Oxfordshire, that day to tell me they were ‘massively disappointed’ with my performance in their car. The results hadn’t met their expectations of me. Patrick delivered most of the dressing-down, then asked if I had anything to add.

I felt like telling them where to poke their drive, but all I said was, ‘Actually no, see you later.’

To cap things off Patrick and Frank finished by saying, ‘We’ve got you for another year but if there’s a way we don’t have to have you that would be fine.’

‘Okay,’ I thought, that’s a nice way to start the break.’

From then on I just worked for myself. I didn’t go to the factory as much, my relationship with the team was pretty distant. The boys on my car were good, but it was the first time I had struggled with the management of a racing team, and this was the one where I had expected to feel most at home. I turned up at the next race and just got on with driving the car.

Socially I always got on well with Frank, Patrick and Sam Michael and their respective families. I went to the speedway in Swindon with Sam and Loïc Bigois, too, in fact speedway became a regular feature of our race weekends: we used to settle down in the motor-home to watch it, with a bunch of Williams personnel who were two-wheeled nutters, me supporting the Aussies like Jason Crump and Leigh Adams while they were cheering on the Poms. People from other teams would join in; to me it was a nostalgic snapshot of what life in the paddock must have been like before everyone got caught up in their own little F1 bubble.

I went to Grove expecting that sort of togetherness. Williams should have suited me down to the ground. From the outside they looked as if they were doers, racers, they wanted to get on with the job. You learn the truth quite quickly.

I don’t need an arm around me, but I do need to be among people who enjoy their work, and the majority of the people at Williams clearly weren’t in that category. In fact they looked as if it was the last place they wanted to be. To walk into that factory after being at Jaguar was like walking into a morgue. They’d hardly lift their chin away from their computer and I thought, ‘This can’t be right.’

And I’ve been proved right. It was never like that at Red Bull and we enjoyed tremendous success as a team.

I don’t know why Frank and Patrick bothered to ask me if there was anything I wanted to add, because they would never listen to anything I said in the first place. They didn’t need help, they were still living off their past successes. I haven’t met many, in fact I haven’t met
any
drivers who loved their time at Williams. I’ve never heard anyone, be it an engineer or whoever, describe Williams as a brilliant working environment.

Frank is an inspirational person: the guts and determination he’s shown for so many years is phenomenal. He is clearly one of life’s special individuals. To give you an insight into his competitive streak, he used to ask me how long it took me to get from home to the Grove factory and I found myself trying to set personal best times to see how I stacked up! But as a race team? Williams wasn’t for me.

I could see that Sam Michael was massively overloaded, working 70–80 hours a week, and Loïc Bigois looked like a man who simply never saw daylight. I tried to tell Frank: key personnel need to be motivated and happy, they’ve got homes to go to, they’ve got partners and children, surely he could at least find a PA for Sam to take some of that load off his shoulders. It cut no ice with Frank.

At Jaguar I used to compile my own reports every two to three weeks, suggesting areas where I felt we could work together to improve the car – which is the object of the bloody exercise – and it went down well. Not at Grove: they wouldn’t have any of that. It took me six or seven months to work out that I was banging my head against a concrete wall, so I just had to go out and drive the car, however bad it was.

What I hadn’t understood before putting pen to paper was that the Williams–BMW partnership was a vessel heading for the rocks, and I was part of the shipwreck. First their engine-supplier, then key sponsor Budweiser: Williams were losing support right, left and centre. By season’s end it was also announced that Hewlett-Packard would no longer be the team’s naming rights sponsor.

For me the timing simply couldn’t have been worse. I should have gone to Renault, which Dad was very keen for me to do. In 2005 Fernando won seven races and became, at that time, the youngest World Champion F1 had ever seen. If only …

But to go to Renault with Flavio’s company managing both Fernando and me was going to feel strange. For business reasons it would have been risky to have both their drivers in the same team – there could only be one winner and the other would lose value. Renault hadn’t done anything prior to that either. No one could have predicted what they achieved in 2005 and again in 2006.

In the early stages I was still trying to be as positive as I could. This was Williams. It would turn around. It wasn’t until the middle of the year that I thought, ‘You’re dreaming, it’s not going to happen.’

The first race after my visit to the headmaster’s study took us to another new F1 venue, Turkey’s spectacular if slightly remote Istanbul Park. I had two rear punctures, which was because of the diffuser hitting them, but apparently that was my fault too. Eventually I tried to pass Michael and he wasn’t too keen on that idea so we crashed. I was fourth at Spa, which should have been a podium: I couldn’t believe the team put me on new intermediate tyres at a time when
we needed scrubbed ones on a drying track. In Brazil we saw Fernando win the World Championship for the first time. I was genuinely happy for him. As I wrote in my BBC column at the time, I liked his way of going about the job: turn up, get in the car, no fuss or drama, just get it done. I was miles away from being where Fernando was, but at the end of 2005, at Suzuka, a little carrot was dangled in front of me when I finished fourth again, battling with McLarens and Renaults, after what felt like the fastest race I had ever driven in F1: flat-chat from the first corner and 53 qualifying laps to follow!

There were times when Patrick acknowledged that the FW27 wasn’t what it should have been. There was a big problem with the Williams wind-tunnels, which were inaccurately calibrated. It was as if they had two watches and they didn’t know which one was telling the right time. But I was under contract and in the end no one else wanted to drive for Williams, so I stayed!

All the same, we were already looking for an escape route. After all, my stock had taken a big hit. The team that was supposed to turn me into Australia’s next World Champion had taken me to the dizzy heights of 10th place overall. Right now I had to keep things sensible or else my career was finished. As the midsummer break had shown, I wasn’t greatly valued within the Williams set-up, so I started thinking only about myself.

In 2005 Williams had scored 66 points. In 2006, when Fernando won seven races and claimed the title for the second year in a row, we managed just 11, of which I was responsible for seven. If you compiled a highlights reel of our on-track efforts it would be very short: there weren’t any!
I wasn’t the only one feeling the pinch. Midway through 2006 Keke Rosberg, my teammate Nico’s dad and the 1982 World Champion, told me Nico had been relieved to get to the mid-season pause to enjoy a break from the Williams environment.

Ironically one of my main memories of that second Williams season revolves around Michael Schumacher, evoking memories of Indianapolis the previous season. But this time the focus was entirely on the man himself.

What if a famous F1 driver deliberately did something on-track on Saturday to spoil his main rival’s chances in the following day’s race? What if the rival in question was so incensed by this behaviour that he threatened to lie down in front of the famous driver’s car on the starting-grid on Sunday?

In 2006 the battle for the World Championship raged between Renault and Ferrari all season long. Monaco was race seven; only one-third of the season had gone. Not quite time for desperate measures, you might think. By that stage, though, Renault’s Fernando led Ferrari’s Michael by 15 points (in those days it was still 10 points for a win) and Renault were 19 points to the good in the Constructors’ standings. As qualifying in Monaco unfolded, Michael had provisional pole – but he knew Fernando still had one run up his sleeve. Coming round on what looked like being his own final run, Michael was quick in sector 1 but slower in sector 2.

And then it happened.

‘It’ was what looked like an amateurish mistake, except that an amateurish mistake is the last thing you would expect from a man who at that stage had already won all
seven of his world titles and the small matter of 86 Grands Prix. Coming into Turn 18, which television viewers will know as La Rascasse after the restaurant that sits inside the hairpin there, Michael seemed to be approaching at something like his usual speed, but he braked so hard for the tight right-hander that the car locked up and he had to regain control. He duly did so, without letting the car touch any of those menacingly close Monaco barriers. No damage to the car, then. There was just one problem: his engine had stalled, leaving the #5 Ferrari inconveniently – or conveniently, depending on where you were sitting – parked in the middle of the track.

Fernando was already well into his own final crack at pole position. At the second sector split the Renault was three-tenths of a second up on Michael’s own best time. Pole position was in Alonso’s grasp. Except that there was a red obstacle in his way as he tried to get round on to the final sprint to the line.

Fernando wasn’t the only one who still had a chance to go quicker: Kimi Räikkönen’s McLaren and my own Williams were both still on target to improve. So we came round to find Michael’s Ferrari parked up there … We didn’t read a huge amount into it straightaway, but then the alarm bells started ringing. Michael had provisional pole after his first set of fresh tyres; on the second set of fresh tyres he made a mistake and he thought he was going to be vulnerable; other people were a real chance of taking pole away from him. So he was making sure no one could improve.

The stewards of the meeting thought long and hard about what they had seen and no doubt watched it all again many times over behind closed doors. After several hours the
sensational news broke: Michael had been found to have ‘deliberately stopped’ in the middle of the track, preventing the #1 Renault from setting its final qualifying time. Fernando had said to me at dinner that night in Monaco, ‘If he doesn’t get a penalty I’m going to finish the formation lap and get out and lie in front of his car!’

Schumacher was relegated to the back of the grid. Alonso was on pole, and my Williams would start from the front row for only the second time since I joined the team and the third in my F1 career to that date.