Aussie Grit by Mark Webber Read Free Book Online Page A

to Melbourne, where Bob was based, the following week – and she flew solo because my services weren’t required at that stage.
    That’s how Ann started working with us. As a woman working in a very male-dominated industry in Australia I think Ann has always felt she had to make her point a bit harder or more strongly to be taken seriously, something she never had to do back in the UK. But when she securedthat Yellow Pages sponsorship she had something she was in charge of. She took ownership of it, and it was down to her – and me – to show Yellow Pages we could make it work.
    Bob Copp got it from the start: he understood the need to rejuvenate the company image for the internet era. He knew that a third and more of the Yellow Pages client base was in the automotive business sector, they had already had some involvement at Bathurst and he knew the way forward wasn’t with touring cars, so Ann’s proposal had turned up just at the right time. I had youth on my side, while innovation and technology – key parts of the Yellow Pages profile – were crucial ingredients of single-seater racing. Bob Copp was looking for emerging talent; Ann was fervently hoping that I was it.
    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: