Aussie Grit (36 page)

An example was the way in which the PR commitments were loaded in my direction. No driver enjoys having his race weekend preparations and procedures disturbed by PR appearances, but when you have sponsors investing big bucks in your team it just goes with the territory. However, there were times when Seb simply cancelled these appearances and, because no one was willing to confront him, he was able to get away with it. Red Bull Racing knew that they were pushing my patience and I’d get a call to say that because Seb hadn’t shown up for his Paddock Club appearance, they felt it was only fair that I had the opportunity to do the same when it was my turn the next day. On one occasion Seb informed the team that he wouldn’t be going to the annual filming day. It was the only chance for the team to get all its trackside filming and photography done for the year at a private test day. Christian felt that it was only right that I knew and could decide for myself whether I wanted to attend or not. Although I felt bad for the team, I declined too, on grounds of principle. The day went ahead with the Toro Rosso drivers subbing for us and wearing our helmets!

These one-percenters lowered everyone’s morale, and I know Ann had to battle not to allow her feelings to affect me. I’m grateful she did, because I was in the thick of it all and I had to stay focused on the job – the 2011 F1 season.

Not long after Monaco, Red Bull reopened the old Osterreichring/A1-Ring racetrack, the picturesque Styrian circuit that had hosted the Austrian Grand Prix from 1970 to 1987 and again from 1997 to 2003. It was renamed the
Red Bull Ring and both Seb and I were part of the grand opening. It was there that I met Wolfgang Hatz, a member of Porsche AG Board of Management, who told me that the famous manufacturer was returning to motor sport in 2014. He was interested in having me join the test program which was commencing in 2013. I still had a bit going on in F1 but we agreed to keep in contact. I went to see him in November 2012 in Stuttgart; we shook hands and agreed to continue talking about a deal for 2014 and beyond.

Also sniffing around at the same time in 2011 were Ferrari! I’m not really sure how serious they were at this time but knowing how much I loved my motorbike racing, they invited me down to Mugello for the Italian MotoGP in July.

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Even if I wasn’t going to join them, I was certainly enjoying an exhilarating series of tussles with Ferrari on track. It started in Valencia in late June and the first battle only went Fernando’s way in the final stops. The sequence continued at Silverstone, where I overtook Alan Jones with the 25th F1 podium of my career, but not without what seemed to have become the usual British Grand Prix drama and the next clear example of the growing rift between me and Red Bull Racing.

Do you like your F1 cars with cold blow or fired overrun? In the lead-up to the British Grand Prix there was yet another regulation change and the technical gobbledy-gook dominated the team managers’ press conference. Only the engineers and technically minded will understand and that’s certainly not driver talk.

My reaction? ‘Seb and I are just here to drive: let’s get on with racing.’

Trouble was, we weren’t allowed to.

It rained at Silverstone that year. Nothing unusual in that, but it made qualifying a tricky game and I was both lucky and well advised to get a banker run in early in Q3. Pole position was the end result, but I lost all the benefit when I couldn’t find any grip at the start, then ran wide at Brooklands a few laps into the race. Worse was to come: at my second stop, on lap 26, the front left wheel stuck and I was stationary for 10 seconds. A lap later Sebastian was in – and the jack broke, so he was delayed as well. In the meantime a certain Fernando Alonso took full advantage and blazed through from fourth to lead the race.

Sebastian and I were running third and fourth; then we both got past Lewis Hamilton, so we were second and third and we were racing, or at least that’s what I thought. Fat chance: I got the telephone call from the pit wall telling me to maintain position. After everything that had happened in 2010, I wasn’t impressed with the order, so it was a pretty one-sided conversation. They radioed about four times in all, but I kept pushing for a while before ultimately holding station as instructed. On this occasion, to his credit, Seb said we were simply racing and he saw nothing wrong with that.

During that 2011 season we returned to the Nürburgring, but on this occasion the memories would be slightly less glowing than in 2009 and had nothing to do with the race. Instead I need to ’fess up to another ‘Mercedes moment’, something that seems to be a recurring thread in this story! Mercedes are in the habit of hiring out the famous old track,
the Nordschleife, on the Thursday of race week for some private running with friends and guests. Norbert Haug called me – as I said, our relations were always friendly despite the 1999 fiasco – and explained that they were a bit short of drivers to do those duties and would I help?

I had some friends over from Australia and I was happy to oblige. I split my invited passengers up over separate rides in the car, which was a C63 AMG. Soon enough I was beginning to grow a tad frustrated with the performance of this Merc and at one corner I just went in a bit too deep and ran out of room. To minimise the risk of injury I had to invent the softest possible way of making contact with the wall, which was to go in backwards, and in we went! I knew it was pretty bad, but I grabbed first gear and started driving again. After two kilometres I had to face it: the rear differential was gone, and this Mercedes was on its way to one place only – the scrapheap. Another car had gone in after a monumental tyre failure: not our finest five minutes on the famous Nordschleife … In the end I went to Norbert and asked him just to send me the bill this time. Once again he said, ‘Look, we’ve been through plenty together, don’t worry about it.’

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The series of on-track battles with Fernando continued when we went back to Spa-Francorchamps for the Belgian Grand Prix. Before the race Red Bull Racing announced that I had re-signed for a further year. The decision was harder in mid-2011 because I was struggling with my qualifying performance on the new Pirelli tyres, but I was still racing well and it was fairly clear that Adrian’s cars would
still be the ones to beat. In fact before that Belgian race there was also some fairly juicy debate over tyre safety – shades of Indianapolis in 2005, only this time it was an Italian company rather than a French one at the eye of the storm. Pirelli’s soft tyres had blistered both on Seb’s car and on mine in the closing stages of qualifying, but Pirelli were claiming we had been running outside their recommended camber settings on the front wheels. We stuck to our guns, and that meant we had to think hard about our race strategy, the timing of stops and so on. In my case the ‘so on’ included an atrocious start when the car’s anti-stall mechanism kicked in and I trundled rather than rocketed off the line from the second row.

Within three laps I came in to switch to Pirelli’s medium compound. When the safety car came out following a shunt between Hamilton and Kobayashi my teammate pitted; meanwhile, à la Monaco, my radio jammed and I missed the call to come in. At that stage Fernando stayed out and his Ferrari took the lead. When the restart was given after 16 laps Seb was quickly back in P1 ahead of Fernando and me. I came in for the last time after 31 laps and was soon on Fernando’s gearbox in the fight for second place.

Now unless you have been to Spa-Francorchamps, stood on the outside of the track at the bottom of the old pit straight and seen it with your own eyes, you cannot believe how steep the run down to Eau Rouge is. You swoop down the hill and then the car just smashes into the bottom of the corner, which is in essence a left-right-left flick as the track heads uphill again through the Raidillon towards Les Combes. Going downhill with Fernando in my gun-sights, I had the momentum with me. ‘I can make this work,’ was
the thought flashing through my mind. I was prepared to try because it was Fernando Alonso in the other car. I had the slightly better line as I pulled to the left; one of us had to lift, and in this case it was the Ferrari man who backed off. He is quite simply a world-class driver and he knew it was time to call it off, but it was one of those moments where I admit I held my breath just for a moment.

And what a moment it was! I knew instinctively that it was one for the scrapbook. I thought to myself quietly afterwards, ‘One day you’ll look back in years to come and think that’s when you were at your peak, performing well, driving against the best and sometimes beating them.’

Ironically, what happened immediately after that moment with Fernando reminded me that there were things I didn’t really like about modern F1 racing. One of them was the DRS, which the powers-that-be had come up with to allow drivers to open their rear wing, reduce the aerodynamic drag on the car and temporarily increase top speed. Fernando’s Ferrari, with its wing duly open, blasted past me on the long uphill straight we call Kemmel before we got to Les Combes at the top. All that hard work for nothing!

As the last word on the subject of Spa 2011, I should add that Adrian Newey, who had been so concerned about seeing us start on blistered tyres, showed more emotion than I can ever remember from him when Seb and I met up on the podium after our 1–2 finish. ‘Boy, am I happy to see you two!’ were his exact words. He was actually in tears.

The podiums kept coming in Singapore and in Korea where Red Bull Racing and Seb retained both titles. The next two races, our first foray to India at a new track south
of New Delhi, and Abu Dhabi, yielded little for me, but it all came together again – at last – in Brazil. It’s another wonderful place to go racing: you feel as if you’re a gladiator in an amphitheatre. The Brazilians love their F1, and why wouldn’t they with names like Fittipaldi and Piquet, Senna and Barrichello in their history? They are always very vocal in their support and it gives the race a carnival feeling that you can’t help but respond to.

I missed pole by the proverbial bee’s dick again as Sebastian broke Nigel Mansell’s long-standing record of 14 in a season, but in the race I felt comfortable towards the end of each of my stints, which had been far from the case in the rest of the year, and even though they said there was a gearbox issue on Seb’s car I felt as if the day and the win belonged to me. In fact I posted the fastest lap on each of the last two just to prove a point.

Perhaps it wasn’t my greatest season but then again I had three poles, seven fastest laps and 10 podiums including my second win at one of my favourite places. And while there weren’t enough highs on-track, away from the circuits there was one I will never forget.

I took on one of the toughest stages of the Tour de France, L’Alpe d’Huez. Even better, I was in the company of one of the all-time sporting greats. His name was Alain Prost, my boyhood hero. I’ve never forgotten how bitterly disappointed I was not to see him race in Adelaide in 1991 because he had fallen out with Ferrari and had been dropped from the team. I was able to tell him about that let-down when he and I had dinner together the night before taking on the climb, which is more than 15 kilometres long and boasts an average gradient of around 10 per cent.

I have always enjoyed ascents on the bike, not least of all because it’s so rewarding to look back and see how far you’ve come when you get to the top. I was curious to see how I would go against both the mountain and Alain. He was 56 by then, but to me he looked fitter than he had ever been. If age was against him, size wasn’t!

A familiar problem from my four-wheeled racing career cropped up again on two wheels because Alain weighed only around 58 kilos, which gave him about 18 in hand on me. He took up cycling seriously after his F1 career finished in 1993 and by the time we got together he was riding five days a week and apparently had no fewer than 10 bikes to choose from! We set ourselves an initial and quite challenging target of an hour to make it up there and while I went well in the early stages, ‘The Professor’, as Alain was always known in F1, had got it right again and was ahead of me by the time we got to the top. He was gentlemanly enough to wait a few seconds so that we could cross the line together, the time being around 61 minutes and 55 seconds – just outside our target, but nonetheless respectable and rewarding enough on a day I will remember very fondly indeed.

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A good break in Noosa and plenty of fitness training over the Australian summer had put me in a very good frame of mind as the 2012 season approached. Unlike the start of 2011, I felt refreshed, motivated and keen for it all to kick off again. Once again, it was all about me: I had no control over reliability issues with my car or bad decisions by the team, so I simply had to tick all the boxes in my own preparation. That was the mind-set that carried me through the
back end of my F1 career and drove me to rise above the obstacles put in my way, either by the team or by certain individuals. It’s all about digging deep and never letting yourself be ground down. So four fourth-place finishes and a DNF in the opening five rounds were misleading: I was quietly optimistic about the year ahead and again I was utterly focused on getting the best out of myself.

In fact the season began with a sequence of seven different winners in the seven opening rounds from Australia to Canada – and I was one of them. At first the same themes emerged as Red Bull Racing had seen in 2011: no KERS in Melbourne, aggravated by another start-line clutch issue, very testing conditions in Malaysia making it hard to have confidence in the wet-weather tyres, a worrying little moment when the front of the car lifted as I got on the grass in China, and defective KERS in Bahrain. Barcelona was a bit of a disaster: we chose not to do a second run in Q2 and failed to make it into Q3. An early stop for a damaged wing didn’t help and 11th place signalled the first time I had completed a race distance without finishing in the points since back in 2009.

To me the whole thing underlined once again the frustrating nature of F1 racing at that time: if you started at the front you were free to drive your own race, but starting towards the back meant you would inevitably finish pretty much in the same place. You would find yourself stuck in traffic, take too much out of the Pirellis, and end up having to drive as slowly as you could to get to the end of the race. I’m not a big fan of racing like that.