Aussie Grit (35 page)

In the car it felt like a normal weekend, but there was so much more at stake. Lewis and Fernando had been in that fraught but happy position before; neither Sebastian nor I had. No need to dwell on it: Seb did the best job. He put his car on pole and drove it to victory. For some reason I couldn’t get to the lap time I needed in Q3; in fact I qualified fifth, my worst effort since that first race in Bahrain, and was therefore out of position from the word go.

The consequence: eighth place, only four points, my worst result, DNFs apart, since China back in April, just when I needed my very best. This time the safety car didn’t come to my rescue. It did come, as early as the first lap, when Tonio Liuzzi was left with nowhere to go as he came round and found Michael’s Mercedes ahead of him and pointing straight at him.

Some drivers pitted under the safety car; I waited till lap 11 then made the switch to different rubber so I could go looking for the speed I needed. Jaime Alguersuari had other thoughts: I got stuck behind his Toro Rosso, found myself behind Fernando when he pitted four laps later, then both of us got bogged down again behind Vitaly Petrov. The Renault was quick in a straight line, we couldn’t pass and so that’s where we stayed. Ferrari, trying to cover me, had forgotten about Sebastian. The only time my teammate led
the World Championship was when it mattered most: after the final race.

Despite my disappointment, I went to see Seb after the race and spent 20 minutes with him in his room, which he seemed to appreciate. I was hurting badly but I had always been brought up by Mum and Dad to play hard yet fair and display sportsmanship even when you had been beaten. So I had to go and shake his hand. But I was in a bad way, as Dad will tell you: ‘I’ve known quite a few top-line sportsmen, played with a few and been around many others, but I’ve never seen a man so gutted in all my life. There was nowhere to hide: media people came into the room, Jackie Stewart came into the room, Sebastian came into the room and he wasn’t even smiling. He was probably ecstatic but it was difficult to show that in the room with Mark. It was as gutted as I’ve ever seen anybody without that person being physically hurt.’

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the team asked me to attend a celebratory function back in Austria and I felt I just had to be man enough to do that as well. Going there was tough; it was painful to watch the celebrations when it was all still so raw, coming to terms with not winning the title and seeing how much it meant to my teammate. It was difficult to man up, especially when there had been so many undercurrents throughout that season. But the one positive was the reaction from the Red Bull staff: they gave me a standing ovation, a nice touch that helped soothe the wounds.

It’s very important for me to get one message across very clearly. At the end of 2010 I was
not
pissed off with Sebastian Vettel. It was hard to swallow the fact that my teammate had come through on the line and won a photo-finish for the biggest prize in our sport, but I could handle that.

If I was unhappy with anyone, it was with the Red Bull Racing management. When the kitchen got hot they didn’t handle it very well, and that’s what got to me. I felt there were constant attempts to devalue what I had done, even when I was winning races for the team and leading the championship, and the job’s hard enough without having bricks put in your backpack and feeling that you are being constantly undermined. Unfortunately that feeling would only intensify through my final three years with Red Bull Racing. To many people, I know, it must seem as if the infamous ‘Multi 21’ message in Malaysia in 2013 was the beginning of the end for me as a Red Bull Racing driver, but our relationship had started to disintegrate long before that unhappy day.

Despite their protests to the contrary in 2010, I think recent history has proved that Red Bull were driven by a desire to produce the youngest-ever World Champion from the ranks of their Junior Driver Program. It would have been a failure for Helmut Marko otherwise.

Every picture tells a story, as they say. Just how much this all meant to Marko was laid bare in one rather poignant shot of him, sitting on the top step of the podium in Abu Dhabi after going up to collect the team’s race-winning trophy and to share the podium with Seb. If you look closely at the apparent tears on Marko’s face you have to wonder why he is crying. Is he remembering his friend Jochen Rindt, the sport’s only posthumous World Champion? Is his commitment to Vettel some kind of throwback to his own career, which was cut short? Had he been living vicariously through the young German driver all this time? Or was it none of these reasons, but just the sheer relief at finally turning one of his Red Bull protégés into a World Champion?

Whatever the reason, it was clearly an emotional moment for him and I have no problem with that. Ann understood too: she had been close to someone who had all the talent but never got the chance to fulfil it, Paul Warwick, who died at just 22. I never met Paul, of course, but I knew what happened to him was part of Ann’s reason for moving to Australia, and the foundation of her motivation to drive my career so passionately. After everything she and I had been through we’d been beaten to the winning-post by a power structure that influenced the final decision, and nothing was ever going to change at Red Bull Racing.

Still, none of this should detract from the job Seb did. I can say with absolute honesty that he is a better all-round F1 driver than I ever was. He has some sensational qualities. There were things he did and you just had to take your hat off to him. He has a computer-like approach to executing race weekends, and he was a Red Bull driver through and through, whereas the hardest thing for me at Red Bull Racing was to get some momentum going on my side. I always suspected Seb was just as much a pawn in the game as I had been and the pressure on him to deliver must have been immense. I’d just like to have had a crack at him 10 years earlier.

One of the greatest challenges in Formula 1 is to have two drivers at the top of their game going for the same prize within the same team, especially when they aren’t the only ones in the title race. This wasn’t like 2014, when Mercedes had zero opposition in the championship, so once they had wrapped up the Constructors’ Championship they allowed their two drivers, Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg, to slog it out for the Drivers’ Championship. In 2010 Seb and I were battling hard with Fernando, Lewis and Jenson for
the ultimate prize, so I think everyone was a bit surprised that Red Bull Racing elected not to follow accepted F1 practice and throw their weight behind the man in the lead at the appropriate stage of the season.

The well-respected F1 journalist Mark Hughes summed it up succinctly in his
Autosport
column immediately after Abu Dhabi 2010. Reflecting on my position, and the position Felipe Massa found himself in at Ferrari, he wrote:

Red Bull, the Austrian soft drinks company, now has the perfect world champion for its marketing aims. Sebastian Vettel is nonetheless a sensationally good racing driver who has been caught in the middle of the conflict between those aims and those of the racing team that represents it. In both situations, Ferrari’s and Red Bull’s, it has left only a small space for the other driver. Not in terms of racing hardware or available resource, but in psychological terms. Neither can feel as wanted as the guy on the other side of the same garage … With Mark Webber it’s as if feeling he’s the underdog has brought out some of his greatest performances.

To end on a wry note, as soon as Seb took the chequered flag in Abu Dhabi to win the title, the team handed out
Sebastian Vettel, 2010 World Champion
T-shirts. A couple of days later, assuming they would have produced similar T-shirts with my name on them, my office phoned the team to ask if it was possible to obtain a couple of the
Mark Webber, 2010 World Champion
shirts. After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, the answer came back that they had already been thrown away! Maybe they could have saved on such wastage by producing a generic T-shirt that either driver could have worn – as Mercedes did in 2014.

O
NE OF THE TOUGHEST THINGS ABOUT CLIMBING MOUNTAINS
is that you have to come down again, whether or not you made it to the summit. And when you have come so close to the top of K2, it’s a long way down, as I found out in the aftermath of Abu Dhabi 2010.

At the start of 2009, after my accident in Tasmania, I had been in no real physical shape to take on the start of a new season. As the start of the 2011 campaign loomed, I wasn’t mentally ready. My work-rate, my attention to detail just weren’t what they should have been. I had geared myself to win the title in the previous season and then retire, partly to put an end to all of the negativity in my racing life, but also because there would have been a sense of having reached my ultimate destination. I would have been ready to come off the mountain. When that didn’t happen, I’m willing to admit it knocked the stuffing out of me. Ayrton
Senna knew a thing or two about winning titles – and losing them. He once said something that summed my feelings up pretty well: ‘Anyone who prevents an athlete from going to the highest place strikes a major blow to his mind and motivation. In that situation everything goes against you in your heart.’

It was a bit of a struggle early on in the year, and that was a combination of the team’s reaction to 2010 and my own. The team were pretty good with me but the shift was obvious: it was as if I had lost the championship in 2010 by 400 points rather than losing it by a handful of points at the final round. As for me, the new season came too quickly and it was hard for me to find the motivation from within. I was finding it harder to keep the fire alight, and it was very tempting to stay at home and walk the dogs. But once I was back in the car the competitive juices started to flow again. It was all about me now: dig deep, show what I was made of off-track as well as in the cockpit. My target for 2011 was to get the absolute maximum out of myself. The plan was to do what every athlete says you must: break it down into its component parts, go and get the best out of every single Grand Prix. The thought of stopping had already crossed my mind, so the idea was to treat every race like a footballer’s last match. It was important to keep going back to the whole journey and see things in perspective.

Adrian’s latest brainchild, RB7, was launched in Valencia early in February of that year. It was the first Red Bull Racing car to incorporate KERS, which was reintroduced for that season; we had a new gizmo called the Drag Reduction System (DRS), supposedly to help drivers overtake on designated sections of each circuit; and, most importantly
in my view, the sport had switched to Pirelli as sole suppliers of tyres.

In the final years of my F1 career the Pirelli tyres posed the biggest challenge as far as I was concerned – and at the same time they helped take Grand Prix racing in a direction I didn’t particularly like. Throughout the season we were troubled by intermittent KERS failures, but it was the speed with which the Pirelli tyres degraded that plagued my car most. ‘In years gone by,’ I said somewhat ruefully, ‘you could race hard when you were behind people, but that’s not the case in 2011 due to the tyres.’ They ‘went off’, as we put it, losing their performance edge quite dramatically as soon as you found yourself in the dirty air behind another car. It would be a theme song throughout the year. On top of my disillusionment with things at the heart of Red Bull Racing, I was growing a little disenchanted with the sport itself and the departure from what I suppose you would call good, old-fashioned racing. There was a kind of long goodbye taking place.

Mind you, someone clearly would have preferred it to be a short and snappy goodbye. In Melbourne, ahead of the opening race, Marko came up to me and said it would be good if I could let them know as soon as possible what I planned to be doing in the future. Obviously he just wanted to make me feel even more at home than I already was!

Ironically, despite not being in the right state of mind to start with, I demonstrated exceptional consistency throughout 2011. I racked up the most World Championship points in my whole career: 258 to be precise, or 16 more than in the ‘nearly’ year of 2010. As in 2010, I was on the podium 10 times but unfortunately there was just one visit to the
top step, not four, and it had to wait until the final race of the season in Brazil.

By the time we came back to Europe for the Spanish Grand Prix I had posted fastest race laps in Malaysia, China and Turkey. I was fourth at Sepang, then third in Shanghai despite qualifying 18th after electrical and up-shift problems. Despite being KERS-less I finished second in a Red Bull 1–2 in Istanbul. For Catalunya I put the car on pole for the first time since Spa-Francorchamps in 2010. But I was caught on the long run into Turn 1 by both Vettel and Alonso and spent over 30 laps behind the Ferrari.

In Monaco I qualified third, was beaten off the line by Fernando and struggled with the rear tyres again. I seemed to be searching for sheer pace in the early part of each Grand Prix when the cars were bloated with fuel, although in the streets of Monte Carlo I was also hamstrung by a radio failure that caused a fiasco in the Red Bull pits in the first wave of stops. Confusion over Sebastian’s choice of tyres meant his own stop took longer than expected. I came in – and there were no tyres waiting for me at all! It cost more than 15 seconds and dropped me to 14th. It took a good pass on Kamui Kobayashi at the chicane to finally seal a top-four result. Curiously enough, it was only after that Monaco race, and its disappointing performance levels, that one of the guys told me I had been driving a different chassis from the one I was accustomed to. Why? And why wasn’t I told before I got in it? Christian Horner’s response: he didn’t think it was important.

Ann and I began to call incidents like these the one-percenters. They were the sorts of issues that, in the main, shouldn’t have mattered, but they started to occur more and
more frequently and each time they added a little more to our frustration.