Aussie Grit (6 page)

For that second Formula Ford year I ran a new car in full Yellow Pages livery, which looked great. For the small Team Webber, as we began to call ourselves, it
was
great, and the start of a terrific relationship with the company.

When I tell you I scored 158 points and finished fourth overall that year – 128 points better than in 1994 – you can see how much work went into getting there. But while fourth was a fair improvement from my first campaign, it also shows that I simply wasn’t consistent enough. It was the same old story: we had no set-up on the car at all. We had started out working with a bloke who was recommended to Dad by Peewee. But at our first meeting at Sandown in Melbourne in early February 1995, things went wrong from the start. We couldn’t even get out for the warm-up at the first of the two races there because the car was too low! That same afternoon Dad was on the phone to Peewee again.

Despite all the drama I kick-started the year with a pretty good win in the first Sandown race. I took the lead on the opening lap in tricky wet conditions and increased it all the way to beat Jason Bright and Monaghan by a country mile. The second race at that meeting was wet as well, but I was spun round by someone on the second lap; I fought my way back up to second but then had an even worse spin and that was that. Still, Dad was reassured by my efforts. Peewee came back to him with an alternative and the next name to crop up belonged to Harry Galloway.

Harry was one of the first men in Australia to grasp the importance of aerodynamics when it came to racing cars. Like Andy Lawson he was a brilliant fabricator, although he hadn’t worked for a little operation like ours. We enjoyed a terrific relationship with Harry and he was a big help as things started to pick up out on the track.

Phillip Island was another wet race – and I used to love it when it rained! I couldn’t believe the lines other drivers would use, and I’m talking about the big guns. You would cruise up on some of the guys you were fighting with and they just weren’t being creative, they didn’t have the trust in the car in those conditions. The heavier the rain, the less the visibility, the more I enjoyed it. It was so heavy at Phillip Island that they cancelled the Supercars – but they put the Formula Fords out there! We had a misfire in qualifying so I started from eighth and I was leading after the first lap. Mind you, we nearly didn’t make it out in the first place. Someone put the Channel 7 on-board camera and film on the car and it caught fire: Dad had to put it out before it took hold! Then we got out there and I put 20 seconds into the rest of the field in eight laps …

But poor scores in the next couple of rounds cost me dearly. No consistency: I was either winning by 20 seconds or crashing; the Brights and Monaghans were experienced, good Formula Ford drivers who were not only quick, but also knew what they needed to do to win. I didn’t.

There was one particular lesson I still needed to learn, and that was the importance of feedback and setting the car up properly. The direction came mainly from the people in my corner: both Harry and Peewee’s partner, Steve Knott, were experienced and had worked with some good drivers. Steve enjoyed a fine reputation as an engine-builder in Australia and he seemed to take a shine to this young bloke from Queanbeyan.

But I was very shallow at that stage – I was a late developer in that respect and I must have been frustrating to work for. I never pushed for any changes to the car, I just got in and drove it. I thought I could drive fast enough without worrying about all the little details. I had more poles in 1995 than anyone else but found it hard to convert them into wins on race days. Formula Ford was renowned for its rough-and-tumble style of racing and I’d get involved in scraps, lose a few spots, regain them and then knock a corner off the car. The end of the 1995 Australian Formula Ford Championship was a fairly typical Webber weekend, at Oran Park: I was on pole, but I had a big crash and, as they say in the Eurovision Song Contest, it was
nul points
once more.

I once read something by Stirling Moss saying that his first aim was always to win whatever race he was in, and that’s why he never won a championship. I could relate to that: back then I was never concerned about trying to build
up for a championship; I never felt particularly rewarded by playing the percentage game – I always wanted to try to win the race I was in at the time. If it didn’t come off, I would come back and try again next time. But time showed that to be a strategy that didn’t really work in terms of trying to put championships together.

But Ann had a plan …

By the end of 1995 Annie told me, in no uncertain terms, that – and I quote – I had to get my arse out of there. She didn’t just mean Australian Formula Ford, either: she meant Australia. She thought it was time for me to go and have a crack at some of the big guys, and she proposed to help me go about it in a serious, business-like way.

‘How the f#*k are
you
going to get to Formula 1 coming from Queanbeyan?’ Anyone who wants to trace my journey should start with a piece of paper that Ann drew up on 6 July 1995. According to ‘Mark Webber Career Path Options’, I would be in Formula 1 within seven years. What was she on? She had it all mapped out: a move to the UK, graduation through the racing classes, and the ultimate target, a seat in a Benetton Grand Prix car at the turn of the century. It was all there in black and white: whether I started in Europe, Asia or the United States, all roads led to a Formula 1 cockpit.

Looking back, we were pretty naïve. We weren’t short of people telling us we were crazy even to entertain the idea of making it to F1. In fact if we’d known back then what we know now I doubt we would even have contemplated it. But now Ann and I had a plan and our assumption was that if we worked hard and refused to take no for an answer we would succeed. It never occurred to us that things beyond our control might stand in our way, but then perhaps our
naïveté worked in our favour. And anyone who expressed doubts was doing us a favour as well: they simply made us all the more determined to show them what we could do.

We were thinking along the same lines in one way: I was quite keen to go to England and check out the racing over there. Formula Ford enjoyed a worldwide reputation as the stepping-stone from karts to single-seater, open-wheeler racing, and it had been the bridge to racing success for some very famous names over the years. As Ann well knew, the Formula Ford Festival, staged each year at Brands Hatch, was the unofficial World Championship of the category: do well in that and you would attract the attention of some very important people on the European motor-racing scene.

The original idea for ’95 was just to go over and see this festival for myself. Ann arranged a meeting with Ralph Firman, the founder and boss of Van Diemen race cars, perhaps the biggest name in Formula Ford. Ann, Luke and I went over and stayed with Ann’s mum, Bettine. Here was I, thinking, ‘Wow, Van Diemen, this is going to be awesome, stuff of legends, Ayrton Senna drove for these guys …’ I was a little taken aback by the look and feel of the place when I actually went there in early October 1995.

But what I quickly realised was that Van Diemen epitomised the British motor-sport industry as it had developed over the years since the Second World War. The history of it all is very special, moving from one-man bands in lock-up garages – which some of my future F1 employers had been! – through to the internationally significant industry that thrives in the UK today. Look beyond the gleaming, state-of-the-art premises we see today: the British motor-racing
industry’s beginnings were far more humble, in fact it all began very much as a cottage industry. Once I got my head round that, I still knew I was in a special place.

That impression was reinforced by the photographs on the walls, by seeing more brand-new Formula Ford cars together in one place than I had ever seen before, and especially by seeing one of Ayrton Senna’s Van Diemens sitting under wraps in the workshop. When he came to the UK from Brazil at the start of the 1980s he won Formula Ford 1600 and 2000 titles in Van Diemens; in those days the Brazilian superstar lived just up the road in a humble bungalow in Norwich.

Annie had already pulled off a coup of sorts by organising that first meeting, because it meant my sights could be set higher than just going to the festival as a spectator. My goals were still so modest then: I just wanted to try to race in the UK to see how I would go. The category had been founded on Ford’s famous 1600cc Kent engine in the sixties; by the early nineties Ford had made its 1800cc Zetec power units available, so there was something of a two-tier system in operation, although in Australia we were all still in the less powerful cars. When we started to think about taking part in the Formula Ford Festival in October 1995 I had a ‘second-tier’ 1600 car in mind. The 1800 was the plant to have, as all the big names were in that division.

Ralph was very straight with me about my prospects on track, especially as he knew I would be ring-rusty after the early end to our own national series back in Australia.

‘Look, mate,’ he said, ‘you’re actually going to get creamed, you haven’t raced for four months, these guys are festival specialists.’

Annie and I spoke about it and felt we couldn’t go home without having done anything. The whole idea was at least to get out on track among these so-called big guns of the Formula Ford world and see where I stacked up. What was the point in trailing back to Australia without doing that? Ralph had left the door ajar by offering me a test in a Formula Ford 1600 over at Snetterton in Norfolk. On the day, though, the test was actually in an 1800cc car; I matched the number-one driver, the guy they planned to try to win the festival with, on the first day. I was a dog with two dicks! I thought I was World Champion already and all I’d done was a little test at Snetterton. But I was thinking, ‘I can go home happy, it’s good, these guys have got two legs, two arms, I can race them.’

It was just as well I did feel that way, because Ralph rang up a week later and said, ‘Do you want to do the festival in the 1800?’ As the offer began to sink in the doubts started creeping in, too. Ralph was right – I hadn’t raced for four months, and now I had to do the festival for the first time, and in the main category.

I needed to fork out five grand – pounds, not dollars – for the week, and Yellow Pages again stepped up. All week I tried to focus on keeping it straight and learning as I went; when I reached the semi-finals and finished fifth in mine, that meant I was in the top 10 overall and through to the final itself.

In the end the only two drivers who beat me were the front-runners from the main Formula Ford series, Kevin McGarrity of Ireland and Brazilian Mario Haberfeld, and it was only when Haberfeld got a tow near the end that he managed to pip me for second place. In point of fact he and
I were third and fourth on the road but the guy between us and McGarrity, Giorgio Vinella, was disqualified.

Unbeknown to Ann and me there were two interested spectators in the grandstand that cold winter afternoon. When we returned to the paddock we found Dad and his old mate Bruce Greentree had made a split-second decision to fly over from Australia. They were on the ground in the UK for 46 hours, and in the air for 49, but they had a ball! As Dad says, ‘It was marvellous to see Mark thrown in at the deep end again, this time by someone other than his father, and coming out with third place. There had been a fair chance that he wouldn’t even make the final but he did, and it was a great job on his part.’

My introduction to the famous festival was good enough for Ralph Firman to say, ‘Come back next year, you’ve got a works drive,’ and that was how my international racing career really started.

There was only the small matter of the finance to put in place: it may have been a works drive with Van Diemen but we still had to find the money to pay for and run a car. Back we went to Australia to have our second crack at the support race at the Australian Grand Prix in Adelaide in November – the last Formula 1 weekend to be staged in the South Australian capital, as it turned out. My car was entirely yellow for the Yellow Pages sponsorship but it was like a red rag to a bull: I could imagine the other Aussie guys thinking, ‘Webber’s been over there to the festival, he thinks he’s pretty special, we’re going to kick his arse.’

I qualified on pole by a big chunk; in the first race a front roll-bar broke and I was getting chucked around a lot through the corners, then I got punted out of the lead and had to
retire. But I won the second race, my final outing in Australia in Formula Ford, and I was happy with that. People used to say all the decision-makers in the F1 teams were watching you, but they were forgetting one small thing: we were on the track at 7.30 at night! So you believed in your own mind it was a big deal, but you might as well have been racing in front of five people for all the difference it made.

Still, it meant enough for me to be introduced to Gordon Message, who was then team manager at Benetton, and I had my photograph taken with a driver by the name of Michael Schumacher.

Before Ann and I left Australia again to head over to England for the 1996 Formula Ford season with Van Diemen, on the weekend of 8–10 March I had the chance to race again, this time in a Formula Holden, on the supporting program at the Australian Grand Prix. It was only four months since my Adelaide win because a man by the name of Ron Walker, a former lord mayor of Melbourne, had pulled off something of a coup by snatching the jewel in the Australian motor-racing calendar away from its 11-year home in Adelaide and bringing it back to the picturesque setting of Albert Park, where there had been Australian Grand Prix meetings in 1953 and 1956. The race would be the first one on the 1996 F1 calendar.

I wasn’t aware at the time how important Ron’s influence would become in my own developing career. I just wanted to show what I could do in Formula Holden, a class introduced in Australia in 1989 to emulate the F3000 category that was taking hold in Europe as the feeder formula to F1. Unlike Formula Fords, these cars were brutal: they weighed in at 675 kilograms, their V6 engines pushed
out 300 horsepower, and with stiff suspension and a low ride height they were very physical cars for the drivers to handle.