Aussie Grit (23 page)

To most insiders, the punishment failed to fit the crime. Many people were saying Michael should have been excluded from the meeting altogether. Not Jean Todt: the Ferrari team principal was a picture of indignation, saying the stewards had ‘ruled out the possibility of driver error’.

Too bloody right! Michael Schumacher making a beginner’s error like that? As Keke Rosberg, the 1983 Monaco winner for my Williams team, observed: ‘Give me a break …’

There had been other notorious Schumacher incidents. In 1997, at the European Grand Prix in Jerez, his Ferrari collided with Jacques Villeneuve’s Williams and Michael was subsequently stripped of all his points for that season; in Adelaide in 1994 Michael’s Benetton took out Damon Hill’s Williams, leaving Michael as World Champion, though no action was taken over that particular incident. On both occasions Michael was leading the title race by a single point. I wasn’t racing in F1 in those days, but I was with him in Monaco, I was on track that day and I felt I had a right to my own opinion.

This was the occasion when he disappointed me most. Knowing how Michael ticked, I thought: ‘I’m going to
confront him at some stage about this, just on my own, I’m going to go and tell him what I think.’

So I did. I went to see his personal PR manager, Sabine Kehm, at the next race at Silverstone and asked if Michael had some time.

I’d had many discussions with him in the past about lots of things – I was a GPDA director because of him, after all – but this was different. I said, ‘Michael, I just want to talk to you about Monaco. And please let me finish.’ He was very good at interrupting!

I repeated, ‘Let me finish what I have to say. You made a decision when you knew things in qualifying weren’t going quite to plan. What you were thinking was, “How can I do something now to control the rest of the field?” I want to tell you that first of all I thought it was amazing that you had the presence of mind not to crash the car because you were thinking of your mechanics. You were caught in two minds: damage the car, or save your guys a lot of hassle. That’s why it wasn’t executed all that well in the end.’

Then I added: ‘I was disappointed you did it, really disappointed. I’m not expecting you to tell me if it was for real or not, but I wanted to come and tell you on my own, not in front of everyone else at the GPDA – because for sure it’s going to be brought up.’

And he said, ‘Mark, sometimes you go down a road and you can’t turn back.’

It was exactly what I wanted to hear from him. He told it to me straight and it showed me what he was prepared to do in order to win. I was happy he had the respect for me to tell me the truth. Michael was an absolute phenomenon, but the levels he would go to just to keep being successful …
That’s the way he was wired, he was such a ferocious competitor, always on the edge. Would
you
be comfortable in your own skin, looking in the mirror, saying, ‘This is what I did to achieve some of that success?’

At the next GPDA meeting when, sure enough, the Monaco incident did come up, I was very relaxed about it because I’d taken issue with Michael individually. But some of the other drivers were getting ticked off with me because they claimed I wasn’t standing with them. I encouraged some of the other guys to follow my lead and talk to him directly, but obviously they never did.

Back on track, two sixth-place finishes in Bahrain and Imola were the peak of our performance at Williams in 2006. Why? We simply weren’t good enough. With FW28 the switch from Michelin to Bridgestone was a big change because feeling how they perform is a big part of a driver’s skill set. In fact we enjoyed almost zero continuity. We lost BMW engine power as they moved to join Sauber, and Williams used Cosworth’s CA2006 V8 units instead; and in Rosberg I had another new teammate to think about.

The final race of that 2006 season summed it all up. It was in Brazil, as usual in those days, and it was an unmitigated disaster. Both Williams cars were out on the opening lap – because we had tangled with each other. Nico rammed into the back of me; I lost my rear wing, he lost his front. I limped round to the pits to retire; Nico carried on but crashed heavily in the second-last corner and brought out the safety car. My exasperation with Williams came out when someone asked on the radio if Rosberg was on his way back too, and I couldn’t resist a misplaced crack at the blond, self-consciously good-looking
guy in the other Williams cockpit. ‘No, mate,’ I answered, ‘Britney’s in the wall …’

My last race for Williams could hardly have gone worse, and my next comment – ‘What a waste’ – summed up not only that Grand Prix but the whole season. In fact, this could be said of the whole two years I had spent with Sir Frank’s team. My second year at Williams was effectively a long goodbye.

In case it all sounds like doom and gloom at Williams, other aspects of life under Frank and Patrick did raise a chuckle, and Jackie Stewart was at the centre of a couple of them. Jackie was still a prominent member of the team through his connections with sponsors the Royal Bank of Scotland. When I first went to the UK one of Australia’s most respected motor-racing people, journalist and former top driver David McKay, had mentioned me to Jackie and asked him to keep an eye out for me. He certainly has: Jackie and Lady Helen, and their sons Mark and Paul, have been kindness itself in the intervening years and have included Ann and me in their lives as if we were family. Those Williams years brought my first close professional dealings with Jackie, and an insight into just how meticulous this legend of motor racing could be.

There seemed to be endless demands on us drivers away from the track in those years, and on one occasion in Hong Kong we were due to attend a couple of public signing sessions. Jackie had decided he would like to sign all of his picture cards in the car en route – and that’s where the problems began. His PA Niall Brennan had been out on the tiles the previous night and he was still at breakfast when JYS issued the instruction that those cards had to come with him in the car. Unfortunately for Niall, in his
less-than-perfect state he took the pile with a few JYS cards on top – and all of mine underneath. You didn’t want to be in the gun with Jackie after committing a
faux pas
like that and wasting his precious time.

Jackie loves being well dressed and could never understand my preference for jeans and sweatshirts. Different generations, I guess. In those years he would insist on trying to get me into more acceptable clothes, which meant multiple visits to Dougie Hayward, the Savile Row tailor who had supplied him with his suits for years. Dougie by this time was well into his eighties and found it hard even to move around the shop. His suits were a bit different, to say the least, but the meticulous side of JYS came through again: one cuff had to be a few centimetres shorter so that it would be easy to shoot the sleeve back and display the timepiece, supplied by Rolex of course, underneath.

One of the bonuses of my career at the top level of motor racing was the chances it brought to see and do some different things. Two other moments from the Williams years took me to opposite ends of the spectrum. One was a visit to Iceland for Hamley’s, the big London toy store, and that was a cool trip, if you’ll pardon the pun. I took Annie with me and we went to the capital, Reykjavik, but I also got the chance to go on a mountain-bike trip out into that unique landscape. So barren, and so remote – so much so that we were all encouraged to hop off the bikes, strip down to the absolute buff and hop into the warm water from the geysers! It was a terrific experience, just one of those little perks that came with the job.

The other end of the spectrum was a trip to Croatia in the recent aftermath of war in that part of the world. One
of our marketing people, Matt Jones, had fought in Serbia; we went over there and our trip included a visit to a school. It was an eye-opener in a completely different way: graffiti, barbed wire, facilities as basic as you could possibly imagine. Talk about getting out of the F1 bubble.

Grove was a tough part of my career: I had to restart after that two-year stall. To be honest, it was worse than simply stalling. I had gone backwards, just when I had been travelling nicely. From Minardi to Jaguar to Williams, that was a normal, in fact a very positive progression for a Grand Prix driver. But it’s amazing how fast a phenomenal corporation or team – the Lakers, an NRL team, a Williams Grand Prix Engineering – can implode when success is not happening any more. I was there for the first phase of that implosion at Williams.

Frank’s one of the most sensational team bosses ever, and that partnership between Patrick and him was deadly for a long period, but when people of their stature fall off by five per cent it’s equivalent to a lot more as it filters down: it translates into 30 per cent among the people in middle management and by the time you get to the factory floor you’re toast. In fact it wasn’t until 2014, with Mercedes power, that Williams really showed signs of becoming a force in F1 again. The dynasty continues with Frank’s daughter Claire doing a splendid, unfussy job as Deputy Team Principal.

Ironically Williams did approach me again after those unhappy two years, but by then I was comfortably installed at Red Bull Racing, in a racing environment that suited me down to the ground.

Besides, I often say you do a lot of learning when you get your arse kicked. When you win a race by 30 seconds you
don’t learn much, not only about that day, but about how to handle yourself and deal with getting beaten. And if you’ve been beaten fair and square, if you’ve done everything you can, they’re the days when you learn that you’ve got to come back and work harder. That’s what happened to me at Williams. At the end of 2006 my stock was at its lowest since I arrived in F1. My record now read five seasons, 86 Grands Prix, one podium finish, 25 races in the points, of which three had come in 2006, and a career tally of 69 World Championship points. While I had taken some enjoyment from my time at Jaguar, my last two years with Williams had been a period in the F1 desert. Some expert witnesses were ready to come to my defence: the annual review of the F1 year in
Autosport
magazine said, ‘Here was a classic gritty Williams driver. The tragedy was, this was no longer the classic Williams team.’

There was only one question in my mind: where to next?

I
T
’
S STRANGE, BUT THE YEARS THAT DEFINED MY
F
1
CAREER
and gave me my greatest successes are the ones I’ve struggled to find the motivation to write about. I don’t think it’s because I’m disappointed how it panned out for me personally because I’ve never forgotten where I came from, or what I managed to achieve. When I left Australia to follow my dream, I was determined to stay in Europe for as long as possible. That could have easily been no more than six months but as it turned out, I’m still racing 20 years later and remain a paid professional, and we’re becoming few and far between these days.

The real problem stems from the fact I fell out of love with Formula 1. I was disappointed to discover a darker side of the sport which I was unaware of when I was racing for lower-ranked teams. But when there are race wins and championships at stake and the big money that goes with them, you
enter a world where you simply become a pawn in someone else’s game, where politics and hidden agendas are the order of the day. I remember Sir Frank Williams saying when I signed for his team that I was the most apolitical person he had ever met in F1. I knew what the word meant all right but I couldn’t understand why he would use it; after all I was just a racing driver so what did politics matter …

Disillusionment with life on the inside, as it were, was increasingly matched by disappointment with how the sport was evolving. I’m old-fashioned; as a Grand Prix driver I loved to race and liked those races to be sprints from start to finish. In recent years, that component has been diluted almost to the point where the drivers are either vastly over-qualified for the job they have to do or the job has become so easy that anyone with half an idea could graduate to F1 with relative ease. Where once being granted an F1 super-licence was a privilege and something you aspired to – you could only get one if you had finished in the top three of an FIA-affiliated championship – in more recent years it seems you can apply for one on the back of a cornflakes box!

I also became frustrated with the sanitising of the sport and how attempts were made to quash any kind of individuality, which is why larger-than-life characters are sadly missing from the sport these days. I found it insulting to be told what my response should be to certain questions, sometimes about subjects that carried us outside the safe (or blinkered) confines of the paddock – like going to race in Bahrain, where the escalating civil unrest had resulted in the 2011 race being cancelled. I was carefully drilled by Red Bull Racing’s PR machine about what to say – or not to say – to the media so it didn’t go down well with RBR’s
powers-that-be when I said to the press, ‘So, Bahrain?’ and tried to answer their questions as honestly as possible. I was a grown-up, a man in his mid-30s at that time, and funnily enough, I was capable of forming an opinion and was interested in what was happening in the wider world beyond F1.

This is such a sad feature of F1 nowadays; at one stage at the height of the Max Mosley sex scandal I was asked my opinion, and Red Bull Racing’s Dr Helmut Marko actually said to Ann that we should try not to buck the system, just play the F1 game whenever we found ourselves in the paddock. Maybe it was his way of warning us about how to behave to get ahead, but he didn’t like it when Ann politely asked if that meant checking our brains in at the turnstiles on the way in!

Funnily enough even the publication of this book has been affected by my final few years. After I published
Up Front
, my honest assessment of the 2010 season, my later RBR contracts always included a clause that prevented me from writing about or being involved with any publication that might be deemed critical of the team for 12 months after leaving. The irony is that they actually did me a favour because it afforded me the luxury to put my hindsight goggles on, take into account what happened at Red Bull Racing and at other teams in 2014 and write about my time with the team in a more reflective manner now that I can see the bigger picture much more clearly.