MARK WEBBER Q&A
Aussie Grit tackles another tough opponent: the MN readers’ questions
Mark Webber’s Twitter name of Aussie Grit sums him up perfectly. The amiable racer had a 12-year stint in grand prix racing which brought him three third places in the Formula 1 standings, and he conquered the world in sportscar racing.
But for the New South Wales driver, things didn’t come easy. He had to work for all he earned. That was true right from the starting point of his car racing career as he travelled to the other side of the world to take his first major steps.
A dream deal with Mercedes-Benz launched his career – very literally at Le Mans – but it was single-seaters where his heart laid. After a dream debut with Minardi at his home grand prix in 2002, he ended up at Red Bull in 2007 and, just as the Milton Keynes team hit its stride in the top-flight, Sebastian Vettel arrived on the scene.
When his F1 career was over, Webber went on to become a mainstay of the Porsche LMP1 crew and claimed a world title of his own with the
FIA World Endurance crown in 2015.
Now Webber has swapped the steering wheel for a Channel 4 microphone as a key member of the F1 broadcasting crew. His straight talking has made him a huge hit with the viewers.
Webber took time out of his busy schedule to tackle the Motorsport News readers’ questions. His answers are, in true Webber fashion, typically forthright.
Question: What persuaded you into motorsport? Were you looking at Australian Supercars?
John Charles
Via email
Mark Webber: “It was from my father really, because he was a huge fan of watching Sir Jack Brabham and Jimmy Clark, and even Stirling Moss before that. He would hang on the results of the races, but it would be two weeks before we got any news about what had happened in the races because it took a while to reach Australia.
“He loved the Tasman series and the drivers coming down to Warwick Farm and Longford: he would hitchhike to some of the races to see them. He wasn’t a touring car man, he was always into open-wheelers.
“That had a great knock-on effect for me when I was a young teenager. I used to watch a lot of grands prix and I remember the first one I watched was the Monaco Grand Prix in 1984, the wet one. That was the Ayrton Senna race where he shone in the Toleman and Nigel Mansell crashed up the hill when he was leading. That’s vivid in my memory, Mansell dropping it up the hill to Beau Rivage.
“Coupled with that, dad had a motorbike dealership selling Yamahas, so I started on that. Not competing on them, but just flying around on them. Dad sponsored
other kids on dirt bikes but I never raced because dad knew that would probably end up in a divorce in the house.”
MN: So when was the first time you went to a car racing event: can you remember?
MW: “I went to Adelaide in 1991, so that was the first time I attended F1. I would have been so some domestic racing before that, but nothing quite grabbed me like a F1 race in the 1990s. Even getting there was something like a 14-hour journey for us. I just remember hanging out in the trees – I would climb as high as I could – and being so excited and watching Senna and all those guys.”
MN: So if dad was not going to sponsor you on bikes, how did the car racing thing come about?
MW: “We had a family friend called Matthew Hinton. His dad raced sprint cars, and Matthew had a kart. They invited me to the track and said ‘go for your life, have a run out’. The go-kart track was five kilometres from dad’s workshop, so that was a huge help. None of this would have happened otherwise. It was easy to go out and drive around. I didn’t drive during the week – there was no testing like they do today – but I would compete locally and it went from there. I started at 13, which was pretty late.”
Question: How tough was it to come and race in the UK in 1995 in Formula Ford? Did it focus the mind on your racing career?
James Hilton
Via email
MW: “I came back with Ann [Mark’s now wife, who had gone to Australia for work at the time]. She wanted to give the UK another crack, so we came over. But the question is right: I wanted to give it a red-hot go. It is a long way to go back to Australia with your tail between your legs if it doesn’t work out.
“A lot of people who come from that part of the world talk about sacrifices and what they’ve given up, but I don’t subscribe to that. It wasn’t a sacrifice at all: it was all upside, particularly if you managed to pull it off. It worked for me.
“Some guys might go home and look to a future in touring cars to give themselves a security blanket – they seemed to almost have a return flight booked. I never had a return flight booked. It was a message for myself that I had to make it work for me.
“It was tough at times and yes, I would love the Formula 1 World championship to be in my home town, but that wasn’t going to happen.
“When you come over and you want to make it, you have to stamp your authority on it when you can. There are people who have achieved a lot more than me in the sport, but I had to take my chances. There were ‘experts’at home in Australia who thought I would be back home within a couple of weeks, but that was just fuel on the fire for me.”
MN: Did you find the racing in the UK tough when you first came over?
A lot of overseas drivers say that it really opens their eyes…
MW: “Absolutely. It was about the depth of the competition. Normally, if you were one or two tenths off the pace in a domestic championship – in Australia or anywhere in the world – you might still be on the front row. But when you come to something like the Formula Ford Festival or the European Formula Ford championship, which I did in 1996, and you are going to be on the third or fourth row if you are not right on it.
“I remember my first Formula Ford Festival in 1995. I think it was in practice, and there was a yellow flag out at Druids. I backed off, double-waved yellow, I was looking for where the car was off the track and all of a sudden, there was a Brazilian lunatic smashing me in the gearbox trying to get ahead! That sort of thing would never have happened in Australia. It was certainly a different experience…It was very intense and the standard was very high”
Question: Coming up through the ranks is hard for any young driver. Was there ever a stage of your early career where you thought it was all over?
Russell Scobbie
Via email
MW: “I was struggling after I won the Formula Ford Festival in 1996 to get the budget to go to Formula 3. That was really hard – the Christmas and new year period. I had good career momentum and I thought we could get some good funding out of Australia to keep the racing going. It was tough because we had to take that big step up to Formula 3, which was quite a leap.
“From an age perspective and from a finance perspective, we didn’t have time to go off and do Formula Renault or Formula Vauxhall Lotus at that stage, like a lot of drivers were doing. We had to crack on, and there weren’t many people around in that era who went straight up to Formula 3 like I did. People would go to another wings-and-slicks path first, so I wasn’t in the normal groove.
“I managed to win the fourth race of the season at Brands Hatch and then Mercedes stepped in and saved my arse, really.”
MN: That brings us on to another question...
Question: How did the Mercedes link come about in 1997?
Jack Crowther
Via email
MW: “I actually got invited to the Grand Prix Ball in Melbourne in 1997. I had been asked there as the winner of the Formula Ford Festival. For me, it was like a networking night to see as many people as I could and say hello.
“Norbert Haug [then boss of Mercedes Motorsport] was there, and I didn’t know him from Adam. I gave him my card and I told him I was racing in British Formula 3 that season. I introduced myself and that was literally it.
“Then, in the middle of 1997, something weird happened. I think Gerhard Berger’s father had passed away and Gerhard missed a couple of grands prix. That meant that Benetton’s reserve driver
Alex Wurz would step up and replace him but the knock-on was that it meant there was a seat with the
Mercedes sportscar team.
“AMG and its boss Gerhard Unger got in touch and they said they had had a great run with drivers from British F3 – people like Dario Franchitti and Jan Magnussen – and they said they would love to give me a run. I remember where I was when
I took the phone call. I was in Aylesbury sitting on the stairs. I was looking at Ann while I was on the phone and I wondered if was a wind-up. Five months before, I had been a Formula Ford driver…
“I said no to the deal originally. Before that, the longest race I had done was a 40-minute British Formula 3 race. There they were, and they wanted me to do three hours in a sportscar, or at least 90-minute stints. My whole head was going towards the fact that it was probably a bit early in my career for that sort of chance.
“I said no, but asked if I could do a test. I clearly wanted to be involved. [British Formula 3 team boss and fellow Aussie] Alan Docking was good on the advice there. I told him I was knocking them back and I felt like I was undercooked. I wanted to drive the car, but there had to be a time and a place for it.
“Mercedes, bless them, they still put a test on for me. It was myself and Roberto Moreno. I couldn’t believe it – I used to watch Moreno in Formula 1, and there was me who’d just won the Formula
Ford Festival. They took Moreno for that first race in the Nurburgring. I tested again at the Red Bull Ring. I remember landing at some random airport and
I had my Austrian schillings and my Deutsch marks – it was all new to me and a bit overwhelming.
“Alex Wurz was brilliant and told me all the tricks with the car, all the things that might catch me out. There were a lot of traps with that Mercedes, and that was before they started taking off…
“They were tricky. It was an extraordinary experience with the brakes and the downforce and Alex was such a help. After that test, they paid for the rest
of my Formula 3 season including Macau and then I went on to have a two-year contract for 1998 and 1999. So that’s how it came about, it was really down to Berger’s situation.”
Question: Did you think you were going to be badly hurt at Le Mans when the car flipped over (twice) in 1999?
Emma Facey
Via email
MW: “It has been well documented, and they were famous crashes unfortunately. When you leave the ground in any car, it can go either way. You are in the lap of the Gods. I stayed inside the circuit, which was a good thing and that is clear in my mind although I had no control over that. I was seeing sky, track, sky because I was flipping… I remember thinking how thin the windscreen was. I was petrified, and that was in the forefront of my mind. I was thinking how thin that was because if I were to end in the trees, there would be very little protection. They would have come straight through.
“In the first crash in practice, I ended up on all four wheels, but I had broken suspension and I had lost the steering, everything – there were corners missing. Because I had gone off around a little corner on the way down to Indianapolis, I ended up in front of a marshal who was directing me to park up in a little gap in the barriers! He just thought I had a little problem because he hadn’t seen what had happened up the road…
“Then we had the second one on the installation lap in warm up on Saturday. They were horrendous accidents and the cars where very dangerous then. BMW flipped, Porsche flipped, they all did it. The cars were inherently badly designed, but we just had the most high-profile crashes because we had no power. We had a very, very poor engine and when you have a poor engine, you strip the aerodynamics out of the car.”
MN: Were the drivers involved in the decision process to withdraw from the race, or was it just the Merc bosses?
MW: “The chat started after my first one, but the problem with that one was that there was no footage of it. There were no still photos even, just a destroyed car. It was hard for people to get their head around what had happened, although clearly it did. You could see the marks on the track and the telemetry. Something curly definitely had happened.
“But after the second one, the penny started to drop a bit. The warm-up one was on TV and there was a photo. The photographer was probably just getting himself ready for the weekend and turned around and took probably the most important photo of his life…
“That is when it all started to come through and we were asking what we do. I was putting a lot of pressure on [teammate and de facto Mercedes lead driver] Bernd Schneider. We got on very well, we are like brothers, and I was begging him that we shouldn’t start the race. I had been through it twice and no-one else had.
“There was a thought that we shouldn’t go to close to other cars. But I hadn’t been close to others when I had flipped. Maybe a bit in the first one, but certainly not in the second one. They knew it would be a hard to win at that point, but they decided just to chuck a load more downforce on it and see. They’d lose face, but they would lose some performance but the car would be safe.
“Then Peter Dumbreck had his crash in the race. I think Franck Lagorce was in the other car and, whatever the radio call was, Franck had made the decision that he was going to stop and drove straight into the garage.”
MN sets the scene: After a spell in Formula 3000, Webber jumped into Formula 1 at the beginning of 2002 with the lowly Minardi team. He finished in the points on his very first race in a fairy tale for the driver and for the team. Question: Did you think F1 was easy when you came fifth in your opening race?
Damien Doherty
Via email
MW: “Definitely not! I knew it was a massive fluke and most of the field wasn’t in the race by the time the chequered flag flew.
“There was a lot attrition. There was lots going on – so many firsts. It was a long race, I didn’t fit properly in the car. I was suffering with the contact points of knees, hips and elbows. It was torture, but I wanted to finish. Getting to the end was a ginormous relief. It was a packed house, there were more than 100,000 there and the atmosphere was great. But I certainly wasn’t complacent at all.
“Despite finishing fifth, Michael Schumacher had still lapped me three times [actually twice] so I knew I still had a bit of work to do!”
Question: You seemed to excel on street circuits – are they your favourite and why?
Malcolm Munt
Via email
MW: “It is funny that, because I was never intimidated with the barriers. There was a lot of chat at the Monaco Grand
Prix this year about it. I was reminiscing with David Coulthard. I actually had one shunt in Monaco in Formula 1 – well I had one in F3000 too but I did a Charles Leclerc: I crashed in qualifying but kept pole.
“In 2002, Eddie Irvine had dropped some oil at the Swimming Pool section and I hit that and crashed the Minardi. It wasn’t too bad, but then from 2003 until 2013, I never shunted another car at Monaco.
“There probably weren’t enough street circuits on the calendar for me. I just felt that, for some reason, I was rewarded with my temperament and I just felt comfortable with the barriers all around me. It is about building yourself up to gun for those big qualifying laps.
“It is ironic, because I was not actually that good a low-speed corners. At a normal track, high-speed corners are where I would do most of my damage when
I was driving well. Low-speed corners I was either neutral or I would lose time, so it is a bit of an oxymoron to be fast on street tracks because, by nature, they are slow in terms of the corners. It is slightly bizarre.
“I suppose street tracks put a different emphasis on your accuracy. You need that. There are a lot of drivers who hate street circuits because maybe they are worried about that precision. When I was at my best, I could put the barrier to the back of my mind and just drive within the white lines.”
Question: What was wrong with Jaguar when you raced with the team in 2003 and 2004? Why wasn’t it more successful – it seemed to have the right money?
Jonathan Astbury
Via email
MW: “It was probably the aerodynamics. We had a good budget, but it was mainly about the car. It is the same today: if the car is not at one with the regulations in terms of the aero then you are going to struggle. That car was extraordinary over one lap, but it just destroyed the tyres. It gave you a lot of confidence as you started out on fresh tyres, but as the stint when on, the grip levels were just awful. The Jag was great in a straight line but it would take a lot of energy out of the tyres.”
MN: What is it like when you sign for a team and get to drive the new car for the first time and realise it is a bad car? Your heart must sink...
MW: “The worst moment I had with that was when I signed for Williams for 2005. I drove Juan Pablo Montoya’s Brazilian GP-winning car, the FW26, from the year before at the end of 2004 at Barcelona and I just thought ‘this is going to be easy’. That car was just so easy to drive. It had no tyre degradation: it was just a peach. It had a missile of an engine and it was one of the best F1 cars I ever drove.
“Then we had a slight change of regulations with the diffuser and the aero rules, and the team brought out the FW27, which was horrendous.
“We knew. I remember ringing my dad from the back of the garage after that first test and telling him that we were in the shit with that car…”
Question: Who was the worst team-mate you ever had? And was there a driver you would like to have been partnered with but weren’t?
Danny Roberts
Via email
MW: “I had a lot of good ones. I didn’t actually hate any of them, to be honest. The ones that I probably had the least in common with was Nico Rosberg and Nick Heidfeld, both my team-mates at Williams. There was no real chemistry towards each other.”
MN: Who would you like to have driven with?
MW: “Probably Rubens Barrichello. We get on great, we still do. But also Lewis Hamilton. He probably would have killed me. I have spoken to so many people who have worked with him. I think I know a lot of the answers so I wouldn’t need to do a full season to see how good he is. We did several races together and that was super-rewarding.
“So in terms of the fun component of going racing, I would have loved to have raced with Rubens, but in terms of the learning, it would have been Lewis.”
MN sets the scene: Webber spent five seasons alongside German Sebastian Vettel as Red Bull reached its peak with four straight drivers’titles. It was sometimes a fractious relationship between the pair…
Question: What weaknesses did you find in Sebastian Vettel?
Barry May
Via email
MW: “I think Seb really didn’t like a disrupted weekend. So, for example, if it was raining on Friday that could knock him off course. It would unsettle him. Sometimes he didn’t like multiple laps in qualifying. If we were struggling for tyre temperature and had to do more than one lap, he wouldn’t like that. He would sometimes overanalyse that and not know quite when the tyres were ready to go.
“And fascinatingly, given the amount of mind-management he could do and his capacity, he always seemed to struggle with safety cars and it is amazing how much Rocky [engineer Guillaume ‘Rocky’ Rocquelin] had to help him through that situation. He was always on the radio to him, telling him the gaps and what’s going on. Under the safety car, I think he has hit the DRS board once, he has hit me, he has hit Lewis Hamilton too. He has hit quite a lot behind the safety car – I think he struggles to drive slowly.
“I think in Budapest in 2010, I got the race win because he fell asleep at the restart. He got a penalty because he didn’t stay close enough to the safety car. But he also wasn’t good on the pit entry.
“I had a lot more weaknesses than he did though and so don’t think I am having a go and don’t just mention the shit stuff. He had a lot of amazing qualities and he could kick my arse in so many other areas.”
Question: What would you have done differently? Are there any regrets in your career?
Nancy Mather
Via email
MW: “The Pirelli tyres [which came in as the single tyre supplier in 2011] were really a challenge for me and the team were brilliant and tried really hard to help me understand them even more. But in the early days there was a huge pacing element.
“I generated my lap time in the high-speed corners, that made it really challenging because I didn’t have enough strings in my bow like Fernando Alonso or Lewis Hamilton to adapt. I needed to be able to take high-speed corners flat out every lap to earn the lap time. That was a positive for me, but when Pirelli arrived, we were having to take it easy in the highrace
“I’m usually strong on the high-speed corners” Mark Webber
speed stuff to look after the tyre. That pigeonholed me in the slow-speed stuff, because I had to work out where to find my lap time back.
“That was something I could have worked more on. I tried hard but, in the end, sometimes I would go back to my default and that would end up hurting my race pace. Getting on top of those and cracking that code would have helped me.”
MN: And is there anything in your career which you regret – and I guess this is looking back over all of it?
MW: “Look, I think any driver would be full of regrets for all the microdecisions you make in the cockpit. There are so may ifs and buts and they all have consequences. You can’t reinvent every grand prix you have ever done and if you did, we would all be five-time World champions. There are lots of little things, but at the time you do your best.
“Generally, there are no regrets. I think the decision between Williams and Renault in 2005 was a tough one.
If I had gone to Renault, would I ever have got in at Red Bull? Probably not, who knows. But things happen for a reason. And any mistakes you have to put down to something to help you in your future.”
Question: Who is the hardest driver to interview? Do you still get an inside track into what’s going on at Red Bull?
Adam Harrison
Via email
MW: “Probably Kimi Raikkonen is still the hardest. I am not a big journalist: I am there to talk about the emotion and the passion of what you are seeing on the TV. I enjoy interviewing people after a race or after a scenario has happened. For me to go down and do a one-on-one interview with someone like Franz Tost, for example, isn’t me. They should send someone else for that.
“I am not that journalist with that bone in my body. I am more interested in what the emotions are and try to pull that out for the fans. Often, naturally, you will know the answers that you are going to get but you still ask them to pull the answers out.
“As for getting the inside track – I have a good relationship with a few teams.
Red Bull is probably the best because of all the characters that I have known there for so many years but naturally, there is an element of rules of engagement and professionalism. There are boundaries that you don’t want to cross and sometimes there are things that you know you don’t want to advertise about the team.
“Sometimes, people give you things and you realise when you have to keep things to yourself and when people have given you something in confidence. We do find out quite a bit but sometimes, it is not going to bring too much to the show. You can have information, but it is not really needed on a wider scale. But it is also good sometimes to have a bit of guesswork in the coverage.
“Sometimes we will throw something out there and if we’re wrong, then it makes us look silly which is all part of it – the punters like that too!”
Question: What is your opinion on the F1 sprint races? What one rule would you introduce if you could to improve F1?
Alan Cochrane
Via email
MW: “With the sprint race, we need to make sure that the consumer understands what they are watching and what F1 is trying to achieve, and that is not always easy because you have new customers to F1 and you have the existing customers. As long as we can control what they are watching and explain the reasons why it is happening, then we should be OK.
“Not everyone is on a website reading about F1 every day. Sometimes, they just want to switch on and watch.
“I’m there to unlock emotion from F1” Mark Webber
“I have a thing about shortening events though. When you turn on tennis and look at the smaller tournaments, they play three sets and they are not as difficult to win. Five-set Grand Slams are the hardest to win. Even though the longer events might be more boring every now and again, all the top players want to win the Grand Slams and the bigger tournaments. The best of the best will find a way to win in five sets. Over time, focus and concentration is exposed over a longer event that you don’t get with a shorter event. The best and the greatest will often look better in a longer event.
“So we have to be careful with the sprint races in F1 that we don’t flatter the people who aren’t as skilful. I know it is positioning [for branding] and a bit of a lottery to have the talking points that we need but we can’t have the points and the prestige around a shorter event which might end up helping people who simply aren’t as good as the top drivers.”
MN: Any rule changes you would like? MW: “It is a big topic, but refuelling is something. That was quite quirky in the middle of the races, not knowing after a flat-out qualifying and a mid-race top up. It often brought some jeopardy.
“Lewis Hamilton has just touched on this recently too, but there needs to be a way to make sure the most skilful drivers get onto the F1 grid. As a sport, we must represent ourselves in the best way that we can from a talent perspective. People want to watch the best of the best in any situation. That’s the same in Moto GP, tennis, football, golf….
“I think we are at our limit on that and we can’t have any more examples like we have. Look at the Lando Norrises, the Geroge Russells, the Max Verstappens, the Charles Leclercs – even the old
Lewis Hamiltons or Fernando Alonsos. These are the stories the sport will want, and we need more of those. That is just so good for motorsport.”