Aussie Grit (26 page)

And so to Monaco, for the first time without traction control. The week was difficult for a personal reason when a close friend I was cycling with was hurt in a road accident and had to have almost 100 stitches in his wounds. I had organised a cycling camp in France late in the week before Monaco, with Lance Armstrong, his good friends Morris Denton and Mike Scott, Troy Bayliss and my Renault engineer Pierre-Emeric Benteyn. We were out for one last ride on the Wednesday before the Monaco weekend got underway. Out near Menton there were some road-works
in progress, which meant there was a one-way system in place. We tried to pedal up to the front of the queue, with Morris fourth in line. He was too far out in his lane and had a head-on with the car coming away rather too quickly on the other side. I heard the hit and it was a sickening sound. That was my first experience of thinking something terrible might have happened.

We turned and rode back to find Morris was in a shocking state with deep lacerations from the windscreen glass, injuries to his legs and hip and a massive shiner. You could tell how bad it was by the way he was moaning: 90 kilos of Texan muscle in distress. Lance was in a tailspin and didn’t want to go anywhere near the scene, for reasons I have never understood. I tried and failed to get hold of an FIA medical delegate, but eventually we managed to have Morris taken to Monaco rather than going all the way to Nice. He didn’t need surgery but they did put in 100 or so stitches. Troy took him a slab of beer, and to cheer him up even more we told him that if he thought he was in a bad way he should check out the 110-year-old bloke in the bed across from his! Riding with Lance was awesome. I’d watched him so many times in the Tour on TV and it underlined my fascination with that sport. After all he had endured it was doubly disappointing to hear him confess to being a drug cheat. He did a very good job to get the most out of his personal history, he put it right out there: he wasn’t the only guy who’s ever had cancer but he was trying to help other people. If only it had stayed that way.

Perhaps I was fired up by that episode, because I drove to a very hard-earned fourth place in Monaco in what was one of the most mentally draining races I’ve competed in.
When I opened the curtains on Sunday to a wet track I knew it was important to show some patience and keep my nose clean. As the rain came and went and I was fuelled only as far as lap 48 I didn’t really want to come in and bolt on dry-weather tyres, but by that stage I had no option. I lost time by the spadeful until the weather eventually relented, and I got my fourth place back when Kimi hit Adrian Sutil. Take what you can get and look happy about it … But by this stage, six races into the season, we were joint fourth with Williams on 15 points and 37 behind third-placed BMW Sauber.

*

Back to Helmut Marko. My first glimpse of the behaviour people had warned me about came in Montreal. It was around that time that DC began thinking seriously about calling a halt to his long F1 career. In Canada he told Christian in confidence that he might be making an announcement at his upcoming home race in Britain. Next morning Marko joined a gathering of people that included DC and promptly congratulated him, very publicly, on his retirement. Diplomacy is not one of Marko’s strengths.

Meanwhile that weekend gave us a very popular new Grand Prix winner in the shape of Robert Kubica. Just a year after his massive shunt in Montreal he won for BMW, the first Pole ever to do so. But sadly that remains his one and only Grand Prix victory, because in 2011 Robert injured his arm so severely in a rally crash that he has not been able to return to F1 since. It’s the sport’s loss.

DC officially announced his retirement in the week leading up to the next race, the British Grand Prix, and on the eve of race weekend Sebastian Vettel was confirmed as
his replacement and my teammate for the 2009 season as I had re-signed for a further year. I said in the official release that I had realised as early as the middle of the previous year how much I enjoyed working with the team, I felt we had made good progress in recent months and it was an easy decision to make.

The promotion of Sebastian to the senior Red Bull team was to prove a pivotal point in the success of Marko’s Red Bull young driver program. Up until then the results had been patchy, to say the least: three of the casualties included my former Jaguar teammate, Austrian Christian Klien, Italian Vitantonio Liuzzi, the 2004 F3000 champion with Christian Horner’s Arden team, and American Scott Speed. Ultimately all three failed to live up to expectations and fell by the wayside. Seb, on the other hand, had been on Red Bull’s books since 2000 and was making his way very nicely through the junior categories, all the while being effectively groomed by Marko for F1.

I put the car on the front row at Silverstone but blew it with a spin at Becketts on the very first lap and another one at Luffield much later in the race, but DC was out on the opening lap and stayed out, which was a bitter disappointment in his final home Grand Prix. Low finishes at Hockenheim and Budapest meant Red Bull Racing had gone three races without adding to our points tally.

By the time we finished the next race on the new Valencia street circuit in Spain we were scratching our heads and wondering where all that early-season pace had gone. That European Grand Prix was one of the worst of the 215 in my career, a totally pedestrian affair after our worst qualifying session of the year apart from the accident in Australia.
I spent the better part of the race trundling along, thinking about getting back home and taking the dogs out for a walk. And yes, I do mean dogs plural as Annie and I had bought a new teammate for Shadow, another Rhodesian ridgeback named Simba who has featured prominently in our lives ever since.

We had now slipped to sixth overall. To make matters worse, our sister and supposedly ‘junior’ team, Toro Rosso, was now on a surprise roll with Sebastian Vettel in sixth spot and Sébastien Bourdais in 10th. Twelfth for me and 17th for David suggested Red Bull Racing was a holed ship …

We started patching her up in Belgium, thanks to a bit of good fortune on race day. From seventh on the grid I ended up ninth but was promoted into the points when Timo Glock was given a time penalty for passing me under yellow flags on the final lap. It’s something every one of us out there has suffered at some stage, so I was happy to take the point and run, especially as I had made a personal promise to Dietrich Mateschitz that I would get myself off the 18-point mark where I had been stuck for what seemed like forever.

The Spa-Francorchamps race was interesting for another decision by the stewards, but this one came two hours after the finish and was, I felt, a bit harsh. Kimi and Lewis were in a terrific scrap for the win and the closing stages illustrated the decisions we have to make in the cockpit in a split second. Lewis tried to force his McLaren past the Ferrari at the chicane before the pit-lane entry, then did the right thing by handing back the position he had gained by cutting the corner. But he got enough momentum off the last corner to pass Kimi at the first, La Source, and went on to win – until the stewards in
their wisdom decided to take it away from him two hours later for allegedly gaining an unfair advantage. The whole incident caused a media uproar, with most of the ‘real’ racers – men like Niki Lauda, for example – insisting that Hamilton had done absolutely nothing wrong. He could have made the move on Räikkönen at a number of places, but he felt he had the opening and decided to do it where he did. Split-second timing …

I had a moment of my own in Lewis’s company at Monza when I had to take to the escape road at Turn 1, but my eighth place was small consolation as we contemplated another historic moment in the sport: the first and only victory thus far for Toro Rosso – once ‘my’ team when it was known as Minardi. It was also the maiden Grand Prix win for one S. Vettel of Germany. At the tender age of 21 years and 73 days he became the youngest winner in World Championship history and put another record in the bag for Red Bull. I am happy to acknowledge that it was an incredible drive from pole position. I said at the time that Red Bull was one big family and I was pleased for both teams, but in all honesty it was not one of the allegedly ‘senior’ team’s better days. And now we were seventh, a point behind the ‘other’ Red Bull outfit.

Next stop: the Lion City, Singapore, for another new street circuit, but this was no Valencia. Not only was the Marina Bay street circuit a brand-new venue, it was also a brand-new concept: the first night race in F1 history. Something like 1500 lights on gantries all around a 5-kilometre layout with 23 corners: this was going to be different, to say the least! I made a point of getting down there early, and I ran the track with Roger. Before we got out there for real I had done
100 laps of the place in my head and I wasn’t too unhappy with what I had seen. Sadly that didn’t stop me having a Friday ‘off’ when I nosed the car into the wall at the 90-degree Turn 18, trying to wrestle it round when I should have realised the corner was gone and used the escape road instead. Still, although I could only qualify 13th after hitting traffic – always worse on street circuits – during my last throw of the dice in Q2, the race was promising for a while.

Renault’s Nelson Piquet had a strange crash, I dived in for fuel and was going to be able to run longer than Piquet’s teammate Fernando Alonso, so a podium was looking good until the halfway point, when my car somehow contrived to engage fifth and seventh gears simultaneously, a bizarre occurrence which was later put down to the surge of electricity from a tramline under the track! It proved terminal, if you will pardon the pun, and when DC broke one of the pit crew’s ankles during a pit stop another below-par weekend was complete.

That strange accident of Piquet’s eventually turned into ‘Crashgate’, the scandal over the alleged fixing of the Singapore race result that cost Flavio Briatore and Renault Technical Director Pat Symonds their place in the F1 paddock soon afterwards. Although the full story took a while to emerge, we all knew it looked pretty suss that Piquet’s Renault had crashed where it did, and when. The team did all the homework on the best corners to crash, there’s no question about it: there was a plan and it included an accident at a place that would guarantee the emergence of the safety car.

Why? Fernando had qualified down in 15th in the other Renault; normally that would prompt the driver to take on a heavy load of fuel and make just one stop if he could.
Renault’s strategy was to start him on a light fuel load to try to recover track position. The ideal time for Fernando to have the safety car deployed on that strategy was within those 60 or 90 seconds when his teammate crashed. Staging a crash is not a good idea, although by selecting the ‘best’ place to have it happen you can eliminate many of the inherent risks and get the result you’re after. But for someone to put the idea forward, then go out and execute it? That’s an entirely different matter.

Alonso was first to pit after 12 laps; on lap 14 Piquet spun coming out of Turn 17 and hit the concrete wall at a point which was extremely awkward for car recovery and triggered the safety car. At that time its emergence meant pit lane was closed; I was one of three drivers to dive into the pits before that happened. As the subsequent pit stops played out, Fernando moved through the field. The plan to recover track position had worked: he won the race! If he had finished fourth or fifth as the team probably had envisaged, perhaps they would have got away with it. But when the race started coming towards Fernando, he was like a dog with a bone. Give him a sniff and he’ll win, because all of a sudden he goes to that next level. He might have thought … ‘I’m going from 15th to fifth or maybe fourth … I’ll feel a bit rough if I get on the podium … Bloody hell, I’ve won!’

Many months later the upshot would be swingeing suspensions for both Pat and Flavio but it’s equally important to remember that in 2010 the Paris courts rejected the lifetime ban that had been imposed on Flavio by the sport’s governing body. He had always maintained his innocence but accepted moral responsibility because he was the man heading up the team at the time of ‘Crashgate’. And Pat has
now also been restored to the F1 paddock as the man in charge of matters technical at Williams.

For me the whole Crashgate saga was another eye-opener: was there really so much at stake that a respected team would risk losing its hard-earned reputation to secure a result? My thoughts flashed back to Adelaide, a kid climbing trees to catch a glimpse of the passing cars, and his own crazy dream to do what they were doing one day. Another example of Australian naïveté: clearly it’s not just about jumping in a fast car and going racing. Especially when you graduate from a small team like Minardi, whose owner was happy to share all the difficulties with you, to a race-winning and potentially title-winning outfit that feels it can stop at nothing to achieve its targets. Not for the first time I felt the guys in the cockpit were simply pawns in a bigger game.

How do you deal with that? The immediate answer was: with difficulty. As the political infighting provoked by the Singapore race developed, there were threats of drivers having their vital super-licences revoked if they opted to stay in the Briatore management camp. Some of the younger, less experienced guys caved in; Fernando and I stayed loyal to the man who had already done so much to shape our respective careers. But the question – how to deal with all the behind-the-scenes stuff – would recur throughout the remainder of my F1 career.

Red Bull Racing’s own form dipped for the remainder of the season, largely due to the team switching focus to 2009 and a new car for new regulations. A point for eighth place in Japan was my last visit to the scoreboard for my second year at Red Bull. Brazil, as is so often the case, brought a dramatic conclusion to the season. You had to feel for Felipe
Massa: for just over 38 seconds he and his family thought he was the World Champion. He had just won his home race in front of those passionate Brazilian fans, and his chief rival Lewis Hamilton was seemingly too far adrift to score the points he needed to spoil Felipe’s day. That all changed in the last few corners when Lewis clawed his way past Timo Glock’s Toyota, which was all at sea on dry-weather tyres on a wet track, to finish sixth, 38 seconds behind Felipe – but now one point ahead and the new champion. Felipe let all his Brazilian emotions show through but he handled what must have been a heart-breaking disappointment very well.