Aussie Grit (27 page)

The best thing to happen to me in Brazil was a compliment from DC. His final race was a disaster when he retired on the opening lap but he still had the grace to thank me for making his decision to retire an easy one. ‘I just couldn’t live with you,’ he said. What had helped me through my less successful F1 years was the ability to out-perform my teammates on track, and I had done that with 13-time Grand Prix winner DC as well.

Now I had another teammate to deal with in the form of Sebastian Vettel being tipped not only as the new Michael Schumacher but also as the driver who would finish my career! So said a certain Marko before we had even raced together. I found it an odd statement for him to make, and it sure as hell wasn’t calculated to enhance team spirit. But I didn’t believe for one minute the whole team management thought that way; this must be some personal axe that he was grinding.

*

The date was 22 November 2008. The new Formula 1 season was due to begin on 29 March 2009. Before that we
had a test scheduled at Jerez in southern Spain, starting on 11 February. The experts were all telling me that the arrival of my new teammate, Sebastian Vettel, would present me with the biggest challenge of my career. And I was lying on my back in Tasmania with a broken leg …

The one thing the Mark Webber Challenge was not supposed to do was leave its founder unfit for duty! The accident happened on the fourth day of the Challenge. It had started with a 22-kilometre run near Port Arthur, and I had to obey the call of nature before we set off. I had the mandatory orienteering dongle on my finger, which competitors use to clock in at the various waypoints. By the time I got back to the starting line there was no time for reflection – it was ‘Go!’ About a kilometre into the run I realised I didn’t have my dongle, but I knew exactly where I had left it and had to bolt back for it.

Later in the day sea conditions meant the kayak leg had to be rescheduled. Instead we had been on our mountain bikes for about three-quarters of an hour. We were on a typical Australian bush road, about one-and-a-half lanes wide, on a downhill section with a corner at the bottom. I was out in front; the four-wheel-drive coming towards us was probably on the wrong side of those one-and-a-half lanes when I saw it. I couldn’t see its driver because the forest canopy had turned the windscreen into a mirror. Not being able to see where his eyes were looking or the position of his hands on the wheel, I was lost: no visual cues to work from. And as I got really close to him I knew I was in trouble because it was too late for me to take the avoiding action I had hoped he might take himself.

My partner on the Challenge was Dan Mac – that’s Daniel MacPherson, who will be familiar to many readers from his
early roles in
Neighbours
,
The Bill
and other popular television shows. I was lucky Dan was there, because he dealt with things superbly. We had a satellite phone with us but unhelpfully it was in my backpack, which was underneath me on the road. I didn’t know what sort of condition I was in and so I didn’t dare move to try to retrieve the phone. We decided to wait for the next team to arrive so that we could use theirs. Dan had had a bit of a shunt of his own a few years before, so he stayed pretty calm, apart from getting stuck into the photographers covering the event at one stage in proceedings. He got me warm and helped me make the right decisions, particularly about protecting my spine.

When I hit the front of the car, my right leg bore the brunt of the impact, which sent me spinning down the road. It was Dan Mac who told me how high in the air I went! The driver was unhurt but quite distraught, as you would expect, but when Dad arrived on the scene and came over to me, all I could say was, ‘Mate, I’m suffering …’

All sorts of thoughts were flashing through my mind as the ambulance people set about straightening out my leg so they could get a pulse going in my foot. Never mind the F1 career everybody was talking about. What if I were to lose my leg? What about damage to my pelvis, my spine?

Mercifully the drugs kicked in pretty quickly and my last memory of the immediate aftermath is asking the helicopter pilot to fly faster as we headed for the hospital. The surgeons inserted a rod in the lower part of my right leg. While I was lying out in the bush Dan had cracked the odd joke, but in hospital he was hilarious. I’m lying there off my face with the pain relief medication and Dan’s sitting beside my bed, acting like a loveable rogue. I needed that in the
ward – there was a good spirit in there, and it bonded Dan and me pretty tightly.

Not long after my accident – I had just returned to the UK – I received news that put my plight in perspective. I enjoyed a friendly relationship with Pierre-Emeric, the Renault engineer who came on the cycling camp with us before Monaco. I used to joke that we got on well because he had a twisted mind-set like mine. He was a real free spirit who loved giving things a go even when they looked pretty daunting – like the time he had a crack at Mount Fuji in Japan and got pinned up there for a while.

Late in 2008 Pierre-Emeric decided to go climbing in the Andes, with Mount Aconcagua in his sights. Aconcagua – the ‘White Sentinel’ – is in the Mendoza province of Argentina. At almost 7000 metres it’s the highest mountain outside the Himalayas. Pierre-Emeric was climbing solo; he never came back and to this day they haven’t found him.

Renault contacted me from Paris to see if there was any help I could offer. Jackie Stewart was the obvious man to call: he knew Nando Parrado, one of the men at the centre of one of the most famous survival stories of recent times. Nando was one of the survivors of a plane crash in the Andes on Friday 13 October 1972; it had been carrying, among others, the Rugby team he played for. After two months trapped up there he and Roberto Canessa set off on an ultimately successful attempt to fetch help. Their story was the subject of a movie,
Alive
, in which Nando was played by Ethan Hawke. Nando wrote his own account of those events,
Miracle in the Andes
, and is now one of the world’s finest public speakers. He has given tremendous support to mountain search and rescue services in South
America. But even he was powerless, in the end, to find Pierre-Emeric. Renault left his desk as it was when he left; during my first few Grand Prix victories he was one of the people uppermost in my thoughts.

As for Tasmania, it wasn’t until four days later, when I tried to get out of my hospital bed for the first time and felt the incredible pressure in my leg, that I realised just how long the road back was going to be. I had survived with ‘only’ a broken leg, an open compound fracture of the fibula and tibia. There was also the small matter of a broken shoulder that wasn’t diagnosed until I got back to Canberra in the early stages of my rehabilitation.

My career was at stake. The only thing on my side was that when I hit that car I can truly say I was the fittest I have ever been in my life, but that’s not what was running through my mind right then. In Formula 1 we hate finding ourselves out of position on the track. Here I was, completely out of position in the world!

I wasn’t able to fly for five weeks. I managed to get back to my UK home in time for Christmas to continue with my rehab program there. Roger Cleary, my personal physio, became pretty much the central figure in my life at that stage: he was as keenly aware as I was that the career was on the line and he organised a careful but very intense schedule of work in the swimming pool and on the static exercise bike as well as other specific exercises.

Much to Ann’s chagrin, the kitchen at home became a makeshift treatment room with the massage couch permanently set up in front of the Aga oven! I spent most days there dressed in shorts and T-shirts in the middle of winter, having regular treatments from Roger or being strapped to or
zipped into various pieces of apparatus all intended to aid my recovery. To speed up the recovery process I also did short, sharp sessions in a cryogenic (low-temperature) chamber.

In January I went to see Dietrich Mateschitz at the extraordinary Hangar 7 at Salzburg Airport. I was still on crutches at that stage so goodness knows what sort of figure I must have cut in the eyes of the team owner! My whole life long I will be grateful for the way he and his team handled me throughout a time which was testing in more ways than anyone had anticipated. Dietrich was the one who led the way. He could have taken quite a different tack, but the way he handled it was awesome. Mind you, I got the basic message loud and clear: ‘Mark, what are you doing?’ he asked me. ‘This is your event! This is not supposed to happen!’ He immediately told me they would wait for me to recover, but it would be ‘good’ if I could be ready for that first Jerez test. He knew me well enough to understand that I would be doing everything I humanly could to get there.

Before mid-January I was able to drive a road car for the first time, although I wasn’t actually walking unaided yet. Roger handled an impatient, wounded F1 driver with immense tact and patience. My attitude wasn’t a self-pitying ‘Why me?’ What was hurting me most was the disruption. It’s tough enough as it is, preparing for an F1 season, making sure you’re happy with the new car, getting to know any new crew members, ensuring you’re involved in decision-making processes about car development and generally showing everyone you’re ready for another year. Normally at this time of the year I’d be at my physical peak; this year things were very different.

Meanwhile Vettel was settling into the team in my absence; the press were saying this was a turning point as
Red Bull would now put their car development work in his hands rather than the more experienced pair that belonged to me. The psychological games were on for young and old, you might say, and for the time being it was the ‘young’ who had the upper hand. To tell the truth, all the 32-year-old ‘old hand’ could focus on was the second week of February and being able to get into the new RB5 for that test session in Jerez. If I couldn’t do that, my season might well be shot before it even started. Confidence would be undermined – not only among the people around me, but perhaps even in my own mind.

The 11th of February duly rolled around, and I was not in good shape at all. By now the doctors had removed the top screw from the main pin inserted in my leg and I was in considerable discomfort. Essentially the leg was still broken; the bones weren’t knitting because the screws were sitting proud and keeping them apart. There was no way I was going to let anyone else see that, though, so I gritted my teeth and tried to walk as normally as I could towards the car, surrounded by key people like Adrian and Christian. The crucial moment had arrived.

Eleven weeks and four days after my Tasmanian mishap I was back in the cockpit of a Formula 1 car. On the installation lap my first concern was to test my ankle: with so much of the strength in my lower leg gone, could I modulate the throttle satisfactorily? Answer to question 1: yes. Next up: could I cope with the bumps and the kerbs without too much discomfort? It was a little bumpy heading into Turn 1 under braking, and I felt it, but the answer to question 2 was: yes. Next, the bigger picture: was my general level of fitness up to the job in hand – the neck and
the G-forces, the aerobic condition? Answer to question 3: yes. Last but not least, the big question: could I do the job I was being paid to do, go flat out and put a Grand Prix car on the limit? Answer to question 4: yes. On my second run I was not only very quick, but I also completed 83 laps. That’s more than any Grand Prix we compete in.

Normally we drivers enjoy the adrenaline rush that goes with what we do. This time it was pure, unadulterated relief that swept through me as I climbed out of the RB5, grinning like the Cheshire Cat. With the help of Roger and many other people I had kept my focus and got myself into the condition I needed to be in to pass the first test since my accident. I knew now that I would be on the starting grid for the first race of 2009 back in my home country. Tasmania had left me with a personal challenge to overcome; now another one lay ahead. It would be with me for the remainder of my career in Formula 1 …

I
HIT
2009
DETERMINED TO PROVE THAT
I
COULD PICK UP MY
racing life where I’d left off. Before the season got underway, however, I had the chance to see exactly what having to start all over again meant. Australia has a great deal to offer, but our country has one permanent and dangerous enemy: nature. Every now and again she issues a devastating reminder of what she can do. On 7 February 2009 bushfires swept through the State of Victoria on a day that has gone down in history as ‘Black Saturday’. On that date 173 people perished, as well as countless birds and animals; 5000 more people were injured; more than 2000 homes were lost; 4500 square kilometres were burnt out. While I had been trying to rebuild a sporting life, people in places like St Andrews and Kinglake were trying to rebuild their entire lives, literally from the ground up.

Once we got back to the relatively insignificant business of Grand Prix racing at Albert Park we quickly saw evidence
of some pretty impressive rebuilding of a quite different kind. Brawn GP arrived on the scene and dominated the Australian Grand Prix with a 1–2 finish courtesy of Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello. Brawn GP was not a new team but a rebranded Honda, which had pulled out of F1 at the end of 2008. Ross Brawn, the mastermind behind Michael Schumacher’s successes at Benetton and Ferrari, was the main man and the team ran under his name. Their dominance that weekend was a clear signal to the rest of us that the fight was well and truly on.

When I say ‘fight’ I can’t exactly include Red Bull Racing in the battle. Once again Melbourne was a bit of a graveyard for the only Aussie in the field. Things were already looking shaky on Friday morning when a driveshaft issue kept me in the pits far longer than I would have liked. Then in qualifying I got a bit greedy under braking at Turn 9 in Q3 and threw away a few grid positions, starting 10th while Sebastian was on the second row.