Authors: Mark Webber
I was so badly shaken that it took me a week to get comfortable even in road cars. I remember Thierry Boutsen saying through a friend of a friend that Webber would never be the same again after what had happened, but again I quickly resolved to prove him and any other doubters wrong.
There was the sheer disappointment, as a racing driver, of never getting to turn a wheel in anger at one of the most legendary tracks in the world. I knew it was going to be tough, and I was ready for that, but in the end the 1999 experience was tougher than anything I could have imagined. There was no official contact from the race organisers; nor was there any debrief within the team, no crisis management plan to work from, no PR strategy in place. I was just a driver in the scheme of things, and I was very much on my own.
But what is it they say? ‘What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger’ – so I must have come away from Le Mans twice as strong because it had tried to kill me twice! By July 1999 I could not have been any further away from the Formula 1 dream if I had tried. My career was supposed to take off with Mercedes. I had come back down to earth with two of the almightiest bumps you ever saw.
T
HE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH OF
L
E
M
ANS WAS HARD
. I
WAS
still in a bit of a daze for the first few days. Worse still was the apparent lack of concern from my team. A whole week went past and we didn’t get a single phone call from Mercedes. They had a lot on, but one of their main soldiers was in pieces and I would have been glad of a little more interest.
On the other hand I can fairly say that Le Mans was, paradoxically, the best thing that ever happened to me. Brutal, shocking, frightening, horrible – it could have been the end of me. Instead I was able to look at it differently and turn it into superb medicine for motivation, the best I could have had.
At first, though, it looked as though my journey had gone horribly wrong. I had told Mercedes-Benz that I couldn’t drive those cars again properly, or at least not as I used to,
so I’d be no use to them. There was talk, briefly, of trying to keep the relationship between me and them alive: Norbert Haug offered to help me in single-seater racing in the USA, but I just didn’t want to go that way – I hadn’t moved to Europe as a stepping-stone to the United States.
There was talk later in the year of my going into IndyCar racing with the Forsythe team but 1999 was also the year in which the popular Canadian IndyCar driver Greg Moore was killed in a Forsythe-Mercedes at Fontana, in California, at the end of October. I had met Greg when Gerhard, Bernd and I made a boys’ trip to watch some American racing and he was an amazing guy. His time ran out so early, and it was another blow that gave me pause for thought: ‘I’ve got to really focus and get the single-seaters in Europe going again.’
But there was still the small matter of my contractual arrangement with Mercedes-Benz. When nothing was forthcoming from them, Ann and I took the initiative and went over to Germany to meet Jürgen Mattheis, the team manager. He knew where we were coming from, and he agreed that sometimes marriage ends in divorce, but then he said, ‘Now we have to go and see Norbert.’ Between our meeting and our arrival at Norbert’s office the whole tone had changed. How dare we want to try to distance ourselves from this? We didn’t know what we were talking about! Ann was a nice little girl from Australia but she knew nothing, and I thought, ‘Right, I get the picture here!’ They were extremely patronising, and while I can’t remember exactly how the meeting ended, I know it didn’t end well.
We weren’t prepared to be patient. Annie certainly wasn’t: the next time we went back over there she actually walked out of the office. They had bigger fish to fry than
their Australian bloke, I knew that, but what were we going to do about it?
I was doing nothing – and that’s not a good place for a racing driver to be in. We were anxious to start rebuilding my single-seater career, but any time I drove another car – in F3000 testing, for example – we would receive a letter from AMG’s lawyers saying we were in breach of contract. When we protested that we had clearly terminated the contract, they asked for a payment to release me – starting off at US$1,000,000.
The figure had something to do with their belief that they had actually made a long-term investment in me as a driver, but there was only one possible response to that, so we laughed and said, ‘What – you nearly killed me twice and you want a million dollars?’
We were prepared to go to court to sort it all out if we had to, but we didn’t believe that Mercedes really wanted that. Nor did we; our priority was just to go racing, but it dragged on and we stayed strong until the figure came down to what Mercedes-Benz had originally put into my F3 career.
I’d like to set the record straight though, and say as clearly as I can that the Mercedes ‘university’ was an awesome experience for me, and I’ve always enjoyed a good relationship with Norbert Haug. He and I got past the Le Mans episode and moved on.
But by late 1999 my three-pointed-star romance was well and truly over. The severe case of the Benz was all finalised around November because I needed to be clear of anything to do with Mercedes before I could get on with my racing life.
*
Ann and I were determined to keep the Formula 1 dream alive. We promptly jumped from the frying pan straight into the fire. I walked away from being a professional racing driver and took the risk of putting my reputation on the line once more by starting more or less from scratch to reignite my single-seater career. And that’s where Irishman Eddie Jordan, or EJ for short, comes into the picture.
Ann knew Eddie from way back. EJ had a reputation for fostering young talent – he gave Ayrton Senna his first F3 test – and he had been keeping an eye on my progress. After Le Mans 1999 we asked if we could have the benefit of a bit of friendly advice. Eddie made himself readily available at a time when he had plenty on his plate; Damon Hill’s position in the Jordan F1 team was looking precarious in the build-up to the British Grand Prix. Whether Eddie knew it at the time or not, he was my lifeline and I was clinging to it! He told me I was welcome to use the gym at Jordan F1, which is where I bumped into the Jordan team principal Trevor Foster. Hearing from Trevor that my ex-Mercedes teammate Ricardo Zonta was ‘the next big thing’ simply added fuel to my motivation.
You can tell the desperation creeping in when I confess to having turned stalker again. On the Thursday of British Grand Prix week in July 1999 I decided to follow EJ when he left the Jordan factory. Ann and Dad were with me; the plan was to way-lay him somewhere, but Eddie’s driver was probably wise to the fact that some nutter was on their tail on the M40 motorway and he managed to shake us off when they dived into a service station and disappeared. I’ve never been sure in my own mind what I was going to say or do if I actually came face-to-face with EJ, especially as he
had already been more than generous with his time over the previous few months.
I wasn’t the only serial pest. Ann was making herself just as much of a nuisance with endless calls to Ron Walker in Australia, trying to drum up financial support. Later, and to his eternal credit, Ron confessed it was because we were so damned persistent that he always took our calls. That’s what was so awesome about individuals like Ron and EJ: we had a small band of people who
would
take our calls and leave the door open for us. We must have driven them crazy.
Things happen for a reason, as we always say. And the reason that one of the most important things in my life happened was Eddie Jordan. Not long after Le Mans I was with EJ in his office up at Silverstone. Two weekends after my Le Mans experience Heinz-Harald Frentzen had taken Jordan’s second Grand Prix win in France. Jordan were looking pretty sharp, so I was hoping to pick up some shakedown work – the initial, very limited try-out of a new car, or some F1 testing for them. I thought I could do the job. Eddie did keep my hopes up for a while on that score, but it eventually came to nothing. Still, imagine a kid from Queanbeyan chewing the fat with EJ!
On that particular day at Silverstone he said, ‘You’ve got to meet one of my sponsors from Australia. He’s an absolute nutter: he’s over the road testing in F3000 so go and introduce yourself.’
Off I went to the Silverstone track, just across the road from the Jordan factory. I walked up to this man, Paul Stoddart, and said, ‘G’day mate, I’m Mark Webber and I want to drive for you.’
His answer was, ‘Okay then, we’ll do a test.’
Paul Stoddart looms large in the next three or four years of my career. ‘Stoddy’, as everyone in the business knows him, is a boy from the Melbourne suburb of Coburg who made good. What thrust him onto a bigger stage was his purchase of ex-Royal Australian Air Force planes from the VIP fleet in Canberra in 1989, and all the ancillaries that went with them. That was a major stepping-stone to his own overseas expansion through his charter company, European Aviation, and the beginning of a lucrative period in his life that would lead to Formula 1.
Paul had been a club racer back at home and retained a keen interest in cars; when money came his way he was only too happy to channel some of it into his first love. He did so in part by accumulating an amazing number of historic F1 cars and occasionally racing them himself; more significantly, by 1996 he had also become a sponsor of the Tyrrell F1 team, but his hopes of acquiring it lock, stock and barrel were dashed when someone with even more money came on the scene – British American Tobacco. By 1999 he had switched his sponsorship support to Jordan, which is why Eddie was keen for me to meet Stoddy, and perhaps capitalise on our Australian connection. There was a time when it looked as if there might be a Formula 3000 hook-up between them, but that never materialised. Paul would end up instead in a partnership of sorts with Tom Walkinshaw, another prominent name in UK motor-racing circles. Tom, an uncompromising Scot, was by then head man at Arrows in F1; he had Australian connections through Holden and was another motor-racing man with an eye for a deal. Big fish swim in small circles …
The result of my first encounter with Stoddy was a test in one of his F3000 cars. The first time I got back in a racing car after being nearly killed at the greatest sports car event in the world was in September 1999 at … Pembrey, a tiny circuit just to the west of Llanelli in South Wales. Still, who was I to complain? McLaren had taken Prost and Senna there for private testing on the tight little 2.348-kilometre track with its variety of corners, so if it was good enough for two multiple world champions, it was good enough for me. But the contrast between the Circuit de la Sarthe, legendary home of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and this little Welsh track was not lost on me. The only positive way to look at it was as the first step on a long road back.
I was expected to do well simply because I had been with Mercedes as one of their lead drivers. But because my 1999 season had been entirely centred on Le Mans and the sports car series had been cancelled, I hadn’t been in a racing car for three months. That’s an eternity in any racing driver’s life, and consequently I wasn’t really as car-fit as I would have liked. Even so, the test went well and Stoddy said, ‘Definitely, come back again.’
My next test for Paul was at Donington Park in the Midlands on 13 October, on the same day as another young Australian called Paul Dumbrell, but our two agendas could not have been more different: one Aussie was paying Stoddy shedloads for the privilege of testing his car and the other – me – was trying to persuade him to invest enough money in me to let me do the F3000 championship the following year. It was a far more serious hit-out than Pembrey; I got in over 40 laps in the European Formula F3000 car and it felt good to be in a single-seater at a reasonably quick track again.
Next, in the second week of November, came the official test session at Jerez ahead of the 2000 F3000 season, which would embrace 10 rounds starting at Imola in Italy. Stoddy gave me another chance to show what I could do. Being out on the Jerez track in south-western Spain for that official test with a bunch of other drivers was a good feeling. It had been a lonely few months. Each team was allocated two new sets of tyres, one of which you had to bolt on at the start of the day, and I wore the first set out just getting back up to speed. But I was fourth-fastest in the final session and over a second quicker than Marc Hynes had been in the same car – always the crucial comparison – so it ended well enough.
Two weeks later the various teams moved north-east to Barcelona and I was quickest on the opening day of the test there. I wasn’t playing catch-up any more and had the chance to show some genuine speed for the first time.
Late in 1999 I was in Monaco hosting some guests of Yellow Pages and I took the opportunity to announce that I had finalised a deal with Paul Stoddart and his European Formula F3000 team. What we had negotiated was a package deal. One component was the full F3000 championship in 2000, which meant 10 races in support of the European Grands Prix; another was some testing for the Arrows F1 team, because Stoddy and Tom Walkinshaw had agreed to join forces, meaning the F3000 outfit would essentially be the ‘junior’ Arrows team; and the third component would be occasional guest drives for sponsors and other VIPs in Stoddy’s two-seater car. The package was worth £1.1 million; to simplify matters Paul converted it to a loan which I would pay back as and when.
This was far removed from my Mercedes deal, and I was no longer a paid driver, but we had nothing else. We certainly had no money to pay for a drive. I would be racing in Formula 3000, but racing with a team that had only qualified for the previous year’s series by the skin of its teeth.
Still, I was back in single-seater racing, even if it was far from an ideal scenario. Beggars can’t be choosers; I had to make this gamble pay off. Looking things in the face, I was just a reject. I was out of sports cars and hadn’t been in a race for 14 months. The little voice in my ear was back: ‘Mark, what the hell are you doing?’