Aussie Grit by Mark Webber

Author:Mark Webber
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia
Published: 2015-10-19T23:00:00+00:00

9

Smile Back on the Dial: 2007

IT’S STRANGE, BUT THE YEARS THAT DEFINED MY F1 CAREER and gave me my greatest successes are the ones I’ve struggled to find the motivation to write about. I don’t think it’s because I’m disappointed how it panned out for me personally because I’ve never forgotten where I came from, or what I managed to achieve. When I left Australia to follow my dream, I was determined to stay in Europe for as long as possible. That could have easily been no more than six months but as it turned out, I’m still racing 20 years later and remain a paid professional, and we’re becoming few and far between these days.

The real problem stems from the fact I fell out of love with Formula 1. I was disappointed to discover a darker side of the sport which I was unaware of when I was racing for lower-ranked teams. But when there are race wins and championships at stake and the big money that goes with them, you enter a world where you simply become a pawn in someone else’s game, where politics and hidden agendas are the order of the day. I remember Sir Frank Williams saying when I signed for his team that I was the most apolitical person he had ever met in F1. I knew what the word meant all right but I couldn’t understand why he would use it; after all I was just a racing driver so what did politics matter …

Disillusionment with life on the inside, as it were, was increasingly matched by disappointment with how the sport was evolving. I’m old-fashioned; as a Grand Prix driver I loved to race and liked those races to be sprints from start to finish. In recent years, that component has been diluted almost to the point where the drivers are either vastly over-qualified for the job they have to do or the job has become so easy that anyone with half an idea could graduate to F1 with relative ease. Where once being granted an F1 super-licence was a privilege and something you aspired to – you could only get one if you had finished in the top three of an FIA-affiliated championship – in more recent years it seems you can apply for one on the back of a cornflakes box!

I also became frustrated with the sanitising of the sport and how attempts were made to quash any kind of individuality, which is why larger-than-life characters are sadly missing from the sport these days. I found it insulting to be told what my response should be to certain questions, sometimes about subjects that carried us outside the safe (or blinkered) confines of the paddock – like going to race in Bahrain, where the escalating civil unrest had resulted in the 2011 race being cancelled. I was carefully drilled by Red Bull Racing’s PR machine about what to say – or not to say – to the media so it didn’t

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