Authors: Mark Webber
‘What the f#*k have I just been through?’ was the question racing through my brain. It was an unbelievable moment – the emotion you go through, trusting that car like your bloody mother 90 seconds beforehand, then you think you’re going to cop it, then the car does look after you in the end. Get your head around that!
What happens after that is bizarre. The racer in you automatically starts thinking, ‘Shit, we’ve lost track time, we don’t have another car, what are we going to do?’
There was some concern about my neck, so I went to the medical centre for a check-up. (They later charged me for the bloody X-rays!) Actually the ambulance couldn’t have deposited me in a more public position if it had tried; just about the only people I couldn’t see were the only ones I really wanted
to talk to. I wanted to tell Ann and my dad, who had come over for the race with Spencer Martin, that I was okay – fine, but pretty rattled, because by this time it was all starting to sink in. Dad was struggling. He will tell you now that Le Mans ’99 was the lowest point in all his travels around the world to watch me race. ‘When Mark’s Mercedes took off, it happened out the back of the track, which is very long, and it was difficult to find out what had happened to him. The worst thing of all was that nobody,
nobody
in the Mercedes camp could look me in the eye for an hour and a half. They were the longest, most agonising 90 minutes of my whole life. And when they finally called me down to the medical centre I didn’t really know what I was going to find. When I got in there and Mark was OK, he was able to drive again, the relief was enormous. Nobody wanted to know me that day and it was the loneliest time I ever had to endure.’
In the medical centre they gave me a sugar cube loaded up with lots of alcohol. The nurse also came at me with some pretty mean-looking scissors to cut my suit off – another slight problem as I was wearing only a vest underneath, no other underwear at all. Thankfully I had no major injuries, but I was pretty stiff in the upper body, through my neck, back and shoulders because I’d suffered whiplash. I knew how lucky I had been.
I went straight back to the hotel, which meant I didn’t see any of the engineers until the following day. The real injury came when I realised the team didn’t believe my version of what had happened. Their response? ‘No, that couldn’t happen, the car couldn’t possibly flip end over end.’
How could they dismiss my explanation of events so lightly? We looked at the data and they knew the car had
taken off, but there was no evidence in the form of footage or even still photographs. There was just a bent car and what I said – although Biela confirmed he had seen the bottom of my car as I went up. I took part in a question and answer session with the press and said yes, maybe the two cars did get a little bit close, but because no one from the team saw anything – no photos, no TV – it just hadn’t registered, which meant it was easily swept under the carpet. Even by me, to a lesser degree. A new car was built, I went through some intensive treatment with the team physio and got ready to tackle Le Mans again.
Warm-up on Saturday morning is the last chance to check the car before the 24-hour ordeal. I was ready to go. The plan was that I would get out there, do a short run, and then let the other guys do their stuff. So I jumped in the new girl, and I was going out there to show her who’s boss. In my eyes I was still on target to win this bloody race. Everything in my car was brand-new, so it would be a question of nursing everything – pads, discs and so on – in readiness for the race itself.
I followed Bernd out of the pits, and in the queue was Brundle in the Toyota. In fact there were a few big guns cruising around, a couple of Mercs, a couple of Toyotas, and we were filtering our way through a few of the GT2 cars as I settled in, my first time back out on the track since the shunt on Thursday. We were getting up to speed on the long Mulsanne Straight for the first time, short-shifting in fifth and sixth as we warmed everything up. On the approach to the hump, I was cruising at around 290 kilometres per hour as Olivier Beretta in the Oreca was going over the crest. Even in the warm-up you’re not taking it easy, you’re
going pretty quick, because you’ve got to get everything up to temperature so the guys in the pit crew can check it after the installation lap, especially when you’re in a virtually new car. I’d driven over 100 laps if you take pre-qualifying and practice together, and that part of the track had never been an issue. This time was different.
We’d had a little vent put in the side window for cooling, and with my right hand I went across to close it because it was a bit cold in the cockpit. When I put my hand back, I started taking off again. This time I got to the top of the crest probably doing 280 kilometres per hour … and the car didn’t come down the other side. Once again the front of the CLR got light and it took off.
I just could not believe what was happening. It simply had not crossed my mind that it could happen again. I hadn’t let it: I was still the Mark Webber from before the crash, whether that was naïveté or stupidity on my part, I don’t know. But within half a lap of the first accident I was in exactly the same position again – and this time the mentality was different. These were no longer uncharted waters. I’d been here before.
Two thoughts went through my head. The first was for the team: what the f#*k were those guys doing, giving me a car like this? And then: ‘There’s no way I can be that jammy again; I don’t want any pain, I want it to be over quick.’ These were no ordinary crashes I was going through, they were massive.
Here we go again: sky-ground-sky, but a bit quicker because I was even higher this time, and this one seemed a bit more violent, it wasn’t as smooth. There were more trees on my left but once again, the car didn’t go into the
scenery, it landed back on the track. I think the car touched the barrier a few times and so it was spinning, and this time it stayed on its roof, it didn’t right itself. Now, when you’re doing over 200 kilometres an hour on the roof it’s bloody noisy and violent, that’s the first thing. Then you start to worry where the car’s going to end up: how long is the escape road, what are you going to hit next? I started to panic a bit because in those cars there was always the risk of fire. I was paranoid about getting trapped in there, and at the same time I was so fired up with the team because I knew I was doing nothing wrong, I
knew
it wasn’t me. I was being ripped off here.
Halfway through the slide I thought, ‘When’s this going to stop? I want to go home now, I’ve had enough of this. I’ve already made my decision, this is it.’
I took my seatbelts off because I wanted to be ready to get out. Surprise, surprise, that dropped me out of my seat so all of a sudden I was trying to hold myself up in the car. I had thought I was about to stop but the car was still travelling at around 140 kilometres per hour on its roof. I was very lucky I didn’t hit anything hard because, looking back, getting out of my belts was probably the most stupid thing I ever did. Had I gone into a tyre barrier I would have been very seriously hurt. Every now and again I could hear my helmet touching the ground, sliding along upside down, thinking, ‘I don’t particularly want it to wear through because my head’s next!’
When the car finally came to rest, a touch of panic set in. There was some smoke around and fluid coming into the cockpit, but it was lubricant as a result of all the hits the car had taken. Next I started feeling very frustrated
with the other drivers: why was no one stopping to help me? I didn’t realise it at the time, but the whole scene was totally under control. The marshals were there pretty quickly, it only seemed like an eternity. I was trying to lift this bloody car off me but there was no chance. In the end they were there within six or seven seconds and just scooped me up. I got out and sat on the banking outside the track. My hands were bleeding, and I was shaken up, but by the time I stepped over the Armco, I had made my decision: I wasn’t going to do this bloody 24-hour race, I was never getting in that car again, I was never racing a sports car again.
I just could not commit myself to it.
I rang Jürgen, the team manager, and he said: ‘Mark, what are you doing to our cars?’ He was fuming with me, that was his gut reaction, and for me, that was another big kick in the balls. It was a very, very long trip back to the pits – I never wanted to see that car again, but ironically the car that took me back followed the truck with the wreckage on it.
The next 24 hours, as it turned out, were massive in terms of where my career might go. My first thoughts were for my teammates in the other two Mercedes entries, but the team had called them in and put the cars in the garage. We had those little aerodynamic flicks I mentioned on the front of the cars, which would kill our top speed but would be good for grip, so they put some of those on and the other guys finished the warm-up. It was clear to me that there was a strong chance the same thing would happen in the race. How can you do a 24-hour car race, especially with the performance differential through the Le Mans field, and not come up against a bit of lapped traffic here and there? I tried my best to convince them all we were playing
with fire, and I could see there were a few boys in the team who were really worried. They knew I wasn’t making this up – something here wasn’t right. The front floor tray was fitted incorrectly on the car that I was driving but they were clutching at straws: there was no clear evidence that this had caused the flip.
When I got back there was a big curtain between me and the people running the team. I was totally blown away by what had just happened, and now I was also starting to feel isolated. I spoke to Norbert and Gerhard and the other Mercedes guys, and this time things were a bit different, because now there was footage, there were photos and they could see that it had really happened as I said, and how disappointed I was. The guys who were siding with me most were Franck Lagorce and Jean-Marc Gounon, and Pedro Lamy was clearly quite worried too. At that stage I was so paranoid that I thought
anyone
could go up, not just the Mercedes cars. What sort of Russian roulette were we playing out there?
I was petrified for Bernd, my best mate, and I begged him to rethink his decision to race. ‘Bernd, mate, you can’t race this car, there’s no way. After all we’ve been through together, this is too dangerous, it’s just too close to the edge.’
But he had been with the team for years and by now he was convinced he would be OK, they’d put those flicks on the car and they would be fine.
Fine? We’re in total f#*king chaos, we’ve got the biggest hole in the bottom of our boat, it’s a disaster. Mercedes had turned their backs on Le Mans in the wake of the 1955 tragedy; this new situation was not calculated to reassure
people about modern Mercedes cars being quick but safe. Safe? We had cars taking off!
We batted the issue around for a while and I was so upset that I made the decision to leave before the race even started. I’d had my guts ripped out, put back in, ripped out again – and the team had not stuck with me. I was on my own. Norbert’s response was, ‘Do one thing for me, do the drivers’ parade, see the fans, say hello,’ and I agreed.
On the one hand, it was phenomenally brave for them to go through with racing – on the other, it was quite insulting. I felt a sense that it was ‘only’ Webber it had happened to both times, but if it had been Bernd they wouldn’t have raced. After the parade I went back to our motor-home to pack up. I was shattered; I took it very personally.
Ann said, ‘Things happen for a reason, we’ll move on from here,’ and in fact I was already starting to draw a number of positives out of what I’d just been through.
I knew I was still a quick driver, I knew what I was doing, and most of all I knew I was right. By now the race was underway, but we had no television in the motor-home and no way of knowing what was going on.
Then the telephone rang.
Dumbreck’s Mercedes had flipped and he had gone into the trees.
I lost it then. I burst into tears, and then I ran flat out to the pits, about a kilometre and a half away. I was ropeable. When was this nightmare going to end?
I was thinking, ‘If he’s gone, I’m going to kill these bastards, I’m going to kill them. I know exactly what he’s gone through, and it’s everything I feared: he’s in the trees, he’s gone in there … He’s going to be injured for sure.’
I went straight to Joschi, the engineer, and asked him, ‘Is it true?’
You could see it was, by the panic that had set in at the garage. Everyone, all the people in the team, looked horrified. Now it wasn’t only me it had happened to. Maybe it
was
their car. Immediately they pulled the other car out. Franck was in Bernd’s car at the time and he told me he had already made his decision to come in because he had actually seen Peter take off.
At that point I didn’t care about Mercedes, I was only interested in Peter. Amazingly, he was all right, although it took 20 minutes for that information to filter through. Bernd, Pedro, Franck and I sat in one of the drivers’ rooms for 40 minutes and didn’t say a word to each other. Grown men blown to pieces: we couldn’t speak, we didn’t know where to start. I went to see Gerhard, the technical brain behind the car, who had convinced the team to give me a chance in the first place. We’d been through a lot together, he was a passionate guy and so committed to his work, but this time Mercedes had got it wrong. He was sitting across the table from me, and his eyes were full. He was a super bloke, but he was sitting there all by himself as it all fell apart around him – no communication, no organisation. I slept in that drivers’ room that night and when I woke up next day this bloody race was still going on …
We started the long drive home in the motor-home we had used as our Le Mans base and every time it swayed I got nervous, that’s how bad a state I was in. Bob Copp navigated us back to Paris. He told us later that people in the team had been pointing the finger at me, saying within his earshot that the driver was at fault, not the Mercedes car.
Bob thought I was suffering some kind of delayed reaction to what I had been through as he found me dull and distressed on that journey. He was convinced the Mercedes people had not spent nearly enough time talking to me or Peter Dumbreck. My dad agreed: ‘Mercedes didn’t in my opinion handle the situation terribly well at all. It was pretty clear to me that they weren’t interested in Mark’s welfare.’