Aussie Grit (33 page)

I left the next race in Valencia battle-scarred and with no points after the biggest accident of my Formula 1 career. I had endured not one but two terrifying moments at Le Mans eleven years earlier; I’d also had a fairly major moment in the wet in Brazil in 2003. But what happened in Valencia was in a different league to any previous F1 shunt I’d been through.

My first lap was poor, so I had embarked on a comeback drive and pitted early. When I came out I was told I had to clear Heikki Kovalainen in the Caterham as quickly as possible. I cruised up into his slipstream – and Heikki started to defend his position. Clearly I was a lot quicker, so for every corner I found myself still behind him I was losing time to the guys who were now starting their own round of pit stops. I thought he had started to open up the line for me, but there is such a tunnel effect between those concrete walls in Valencia that it’s easy for a driver to lose his reference points on the track and there was slight confusion about the braking-points for the next corner. His car became a launching-ramp – and my RB6 was the missile being flung into the sky.

Shades of those trees at Le Mans: as the car went up I had it in my mind that there was a bridge over the track somewhere nearby. ‘Jesus,’ I thought, ‘if I hit something up here …’ But the car came down, landed on its roll-hoop and thankfully righted itself. There was no deceleration process – the grip was non-existent. By this time, like Interlagos 2003, I’m no longer in a racing car, I’m on a bobsleigh: no steering, careering towards the wall.

As the car strikes the track, instantaneously you hear it starting to break up. However, the violence of carbon fibre disintegrating quickly becomes a second thought as you try to hold your body in the right position: the hits will inevitably come, but you don’t know when they will happen. At this point you want speed and inertia removed but you can do little about that as you’re only a passenger. When the car comes to rest, the initial feeling is relief that you’re okay. Of course the adrenaline is high, as is the shock, but very quickly you’re thinking that it’s a lost result. It’s amazing how the mind works.

It certainly must have looked dramatic – ‘fourteen seconds of hell’, my dad called it – but the car was strong and my belts did their job. Just as bloody well because I moved the concrete barrier several metres back, snapping the brake pedal in the process, which meant the pressure had been up around 250 kilograms! In an accident of that force your body stretches a lot, but ironically all I suffered was a fair bit of toe-bashing. Still, in the scheme of things a sore toe is nothing. I had always made a point, if I was involved in any kind of accident, to move as quickly as I could in order to reassure my girls, Mum, my sister and Ann, that, as Dad puts it, I’ve ‘still got two arms and two legs and my head is together’. But the first thing on my mind this time was that some championship points had gone begging. This time, unlike Brazil seven years earlier, I was taken to the medical centre and quickly given the all-clear.

One of my mechanics wrote on the wreckage,
Thanks for taking care of my mate.
By the way, I wasn’t thinking about it at the time of the accident but I was in the car which had
carried me to those race wins in Barcelona and Monaco and it was supposed to be mine at the end of the year!

After Monaco my third victory of 2010 came at my adopted home track, and the British Grand Prix pretty much summed up my entire 2010 season. It was a bittersweet weekend, one that started with a very angry Australian and finished with another victory at the home of the World Championship, a circuit that had been very kind to me over the years. I had already won there in Formula Ford, in F3000, in the FIA GT Championship. I only had the big one to add to that list. But in F1 in 2010 Silverstone would be where I learned that despite the company motto, Red Bull Racing didn’t give us wings – at least not both of us.

My team, I felt, made the task of adding a British Grand Prix victory to my Silverstone record unnecessarily hard for me. They discovered after practice that they had been left with only one example of a crucial new component – the front wing. The one they had was already on my car at that point. Sebastian’s had been damaged and was no longer usable. So they decided to take the new wing off my car and give it to my teammate for qualifying and the race. I was furious.

The logic the team tried applying to the situation was that Seb had been quicker in the final free practice session, so he should have the sole remaining wing. That was all well and good but I had been forced to concentrate on long-run work rather than focusing on pure performance after my car had problems in Friday’s second free practice. Likewise, their reasoning that Seb was ahead in the championship was flawed: if that was the case, then why, in Turkey, when I was ahead in the standings, did I still have to play second fiddle
and wait for my new rear wing to arrive in time for qualifying? It seemed to me the goalposts were forever shifting.

If truth be told, neither Sebastian nor I particularly liked the new wing, but our Friday end-of-day briefing had shown that factory data suggested there was a gain to be had from using it, so the team wanted us to persist with it. I was a bit bemused when a story was leaked to the media, allegedly by a senior RBR engineer, saying that I didn’t want the new front wing as I didn’t find it any more effective than the old one and I only asked for it when there was only one of them!

At Silverstone, experts said the new wing was worth around two-tenths of a second on a quick lap; Sebastian beat me to pole by 0.143.

In the post-qualifying press conference it would have been obvious to Blind Freddie that yours truly wasn’t thrilled with what had gone on, and slamming my glass of water down on the desk would certainly have helped to get that message across! A respected F1 scribe called it ‘quite possibly the unhappiest team front row of all time’. Later that evening I headed home to Aston Clinton – one of the joys of the British GP was that I could commute from home – and watched my Aussie mate Crumpy win the British Speedway Grand Prix. Next day Mum and Dad came to the race, but Annie didn’t. She was so incensed she decided to stay well clear of Silverstone. She didn’t even watch the start on TV, but she told me afterwards she knew it must have gone all right because of the flood of text messages she started receiving just a few minutes later!

I was utterly determined to win the start, and I did. Seb bogged down, I got away beautifully and although he tried to squeeze me I was having none of it. The first corner was
mine; so was the race. I beat Seb off the line fair and square and simply stood my ground. Perhaps it was inexperience on his part, perhaps it was something else entirely, but he didn’t back off and inevitably his car ran over the kerb just as he was having to turn his attention to the man behind him. That was Lewis Hamilton; when the two touched it seemed at first the Red Bull – new front wing and all – was unscathed, but it had picked up a right rear puncture and Sebastian had to make an unscheduled call to the pit lane.

From where I sat it was all pretty straightforward. I made a good start, I was pretty keen to make it my corner and it worked out well for me. Monaco had taught me a lot about resuming behind a safety car so I wasn’t unduly worried when it appeared in the aftermath of a shunt between Adrian Sutil’s Force India and the Sauber of Pedro de la Rosa on pit straight. The safety car is always a threat because it means the unexpected has a chance to happen, but on the other hand I had a gap for a reason – I was quick – and although I had to start all over again I was quick enough to build that gap once more. I had a better car than anyone out there, I used it as it was intended to be used and the result was the logical outcome. And by the way, after my own car was destroyed in Valencia, the chassis I used to win at Silverstone was the one discarded by my teammate earlier in the year so there couldn’t have been too much wrong with it!

There have been a few moments throughout my F1 career when radio communications played a significant and highly public part, and Silverstone 2010 was one of them. As my anger abated and the delight of winning my ‘home’ race set in, I made a comment that was meant to sound like typical Aussie irony, a laconic little dig at everything that
had gone on that weekend and my feelings about it all. As the congratulations came over the radio into the cockpit, my response was, ‘Yeah, not bad for a number 2 driver!’ The team was always saying everything was kosher and Seb and I had equal status. But sometimes I had conflicting reports from the troops on the floor and saw evidence myself. At this point I simply didn’t know who to trust. Adrian is a person I really struggle
not
to believe, and as was well documented towards the end of my career, he (and Dietrich) were the reasons I stayed at RBR as long as I did.

I should have fired in a bit of unprintable language and made sure that my comment wouldn’t go to air, but of course it did and the whole world latched onto it as a sign that I was well and truly ticked off. I had been, but the comment wasn’t intended to keep the feud going, it was meant as a wry Aussie slant on the day. In the context of mid-2010 it only drove another wedge between Team Webber and Red Bull Racing.

The German Grand Prix was race 11, the pivotal point on the calendar on our 19-race 2010 journey. From here on in, the climb would become steadily steeper. In such a strong year, Germany was not one of our better races. The race went to Alonso but only after Ferrari gave a very public display of team orders by radioing Felipe Massa: ‘Felipe, Fernando is faster than you.’ Everyone knew what it really meant and sure enough, the Brazilian slowed to let Fernando through. It was a season in which team orders were illegal so Red Bull Racing was quick to use the media to slate the Italian team, adding that RBR’s drivers were free to race one another.

Really?

Still, the second half of the racing year began well. You couldn’t get a much more blatant contrast than Silverstone and the Hungaroring, but the second race after the British Grand Prix the tight, challenging circuit outside Budapest brought my fourth victory of that remarkable season – and in a fairly remarkable way. Once again the safety car played a crucial part in the proceedings. The Hungaroring is a notoriously difficult circuit for overtaking: just ask Thierry Boutsen, the surprise winner back in 1990 when his Williams kept Ayrton Senna’s faster McLaren bottled up for virtually the whole race. Knowing that history, it was disappointing to me when Sebastian claimed pole by the fairly large margin of 0.411 seconds, partly because I couldn’t get a clean run and partly because he put in a bloody good lap. The car actually surprised us. We couldn’t believe how phenomenal it was round there. It was a bit like Barcelona: we knew the other guys weren’t going to get a crack at us so whichever of the two of us did the job would most likely be on pole.

Being out-started by Fernando’s Ferrari, however, was not part of the plan and when he got between me and Sebastian off the line I thought, ‘Here we go, bloody Budapest again …’ We were happy to see Fernando pulling away from his teammate because that meant I could take him on one-on-one in the stops and not have Felipe trying to undercut me in turn. I was just looking after my car and tyres, waiting for a round of pit stops to try to do something different from Fernando.

But then along came a nice little safety car to turn the race on its head.

Tonio Liuzzi’s front wing parted company with his Force India out at Turn 11, so the race was neutralised while they
cleared the debris away. While most of the other drivers dived for pit lane, Seb included, Ciaron was yelling, ‘Stay out! Stay out!’, so I kept going.

I saw Fernando go into the pits and thought, ‘Fantastic! Righto, now we can do something different because Seb’s going to be in second position and I need to do 40 laps from hell – really quick ones.’

But would my tyres get me there? Nine seconds, 12 seconds, 15 seconds: that didn’t help me at all: the magic number we needed was 18 seconds and a bit. Once we got the gap out to there or thereabouts we could win the race.

That thinking too went out the window when the safety car went in after 17 laps. Sebastian seemed somehow to have lost concentration briefly. Instead of observing the mandatory 10 car lengths maximum distance behind me he had fallen further back. At first I thought he must have a gearbox problem, then for a fleeting moment I thought he was trying to screw Fernando, backing him up massively and giving me a flying start to try and help with the pit stop. Then I thought, ‘Shit, he’d never do that!’

In any case the stewards take a dim view of teams using one driver to shield the teammate ahead of him from attack. Sebastian’s mistake was compounded when they handed him a drive-through, which he completed with his arms waving out of the cockpit in indignation. My race had changed dramatically. Now Fernando was the enemy and we had the luxury of going a few extra laps longer so the boys weren’t panicking about my final pit stop. Imagine if I had done all that work for 30–40 minutes to help my pit crew, come in with the win in sight, then one of them fumbled a wheel-nut … He’d have gone and hanged himself.

The plan now was to pull off a delicate balancing act: find the limit of driving the car flat out but without falling off the edge, either of the circuit or of the option Bridgestones on my car. In the end I did 43 laps on a set of tyres the engineers thought were good for a maximum of 30, and half of those were like qualifying laps. I needed a gap of around 20 seconds to be able to contain Fernando when I stopped, but I wanted to try to give the crew that buffer if I could. I got the margin out to 23.7 seconds, pitted and cruised home. A bit of a gift, I had to acknowledge, but who was I to look a gift horse in the mouth?

The good thing about that day is that I did something different to the rest of the field. Everyone else had pitted and I had to come up with something else to win it. It was a new scenario for me but I had been optimistic about taking it on. It was Red Bull Racing’s 100th Grand Prix, but it was also my own 150th, and what better way to celebrate that landmark?