Aussie Grit by Mark Webber Read Free Book Online Page B

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 buildup 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 ournaïveté 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