Mark Webber: The next chapter

Mark Webber’s autobiography begins not at the start, growing up in Queanbeyan, nor does it begin with the moment he felt close to losing it, sitting upside down in a wrecked car.

Instead, Aussie Grit opens with the events of the 2013 Malaysian Grand Prix – the moment that would put into motion Webber’s exit from Formula 1.

Released last month, the book points to an F1 career fraught with pit stops and false starts. Now retired from F1, Webber is back to the world of international GT sports car racing, this time with Porsche.

Long battles fought out for hours on the track, it’s racing as it should be and suits Webber’s ‘Aussie battler’ mentality to a T.

“There’s no sportsman or sportswoman, or businessman for that matter, where you have 20 years of trying to make it and nail everything perfectly,” says Webber.

At 24, an age when many drivers already have several seasons under their belt, his arrival into F1 was later than most. His debut, racing for the Minardi team on home soil in Australia, marked a poignant entrance to the sport.

While recognising the race as a key moment in his 11-year F1 career, for Webber his journey had begun long before. In a sport as competitive as F1, he had already passed “another 10 milestones before that”, he explains, talking about that first time on the grid.

“When you start in F1 you have to do whatever it takes to survive, especially back then when there were a lot of talented guys after seats.

"There was a real talented group coming through then. There was Fernando and youngsters coming through all the time; Jenson hadn’t long been in there. It was just a great bunch coming through that window.”

Now enjoying the second chapter of his racing career, Webber has quickly regained his feet in the world of GT racing, where he first began and where the grass-roots grit he savours is rife.

“There’s no dark horses, no smoke and mirrors, it’s just special people with a genuine passion for this beautiful hobby that they have. You don’t come across that in F1,” he says.

“I’ve had a bit more time to get to know people who are so passionate about this, more than you do in F1. In F1, you just drive around on your own planet. Now, I do more listening and hearing about why it is they do what they do and they love the sport.”

Speaking to Webber, it’s clear that he too loves the sport. Indeed, there’s real passion in the way he describes Le Mans.

“It’s a classic car race,” he nods. “We saw last year what a phenomenal car race it was -- 24 hours in the rain flat out. It was a sight to behold and to be involved in. We were scraping for second at the end there. It’s old-school – light, night, rain, driver sharing.”

Of course, for anyone familiar with Webber’s career pre-F1, his first time round in GT racing wasn’t without its potholes either.

The Mercedes that Webber drove in the ’99 Le Mans flipped in both the practice and qualifiers – a fate that also befell his teammate five hours into the race. Embarrassingly, Mercedes was forced to shelve its racing program and Webber was left without a team.

It was this that turned Webber towards open-wheel racing once again but, with all the problems he faced in F1, one has to wonder where he would have been had he not made the move.

The way Webber talks about his exit from F1 creates a picture of a sport motivated not by the passion he craved but, instead, by what money could be generated from it.

“If I was on the stock market, which I’m not, I more or less did it perfectly, didn’t I?” he jokes. The analogy is an interesting one; with all the money, the corporate involvement and the politics, it’s a sport that’s very much enmeshed with the financers that support it.

“It’s always been like that and it always will be like that when you have so much money involved in it. Drivers are part of that, it’s marketed like that,” he explains.

For him, F1 has become a “broken record” with a great deal of change needed.

“The consumer is getting too much rammed down their throat in terms of regulations and penalties and different tyre compounds. I mean, at Le Mans we had loads of different compounds in the race but nobody mentioned anything about it.

“I think F1 has just got to go back to the drivers. The drivers need to be the stars and at the moment the technology side is very dominant. They need to somehow get back the fans that they’ve been losing, raise interest and get people back into it.”

Perhaps this is why Webber’s book begins where it does, at the dramatic climax of his F1 career.

Though it’s obvious that much of his animosity towards the sport is the result of bad blood and frustration at problems outside of his control, he’s able to recognise that there lies the drama people crave.

The point at which he begins his autobiography is the moment his then teammate, Sebastian Vettel, overtook Webber to win despite instructions from his team not to do so.

“Generally,” he admits, “that doesn’t end well when there’s two teammates going for the championship. Historically it’s rare, and historically there is also conflict. That’s the way it is.”

Perhaps Webber’s readiness to accept Vettel’s move during that race is also a sign that he would have done the same thing. If the focus is to be on the drivers, then why must they follow the rules of their team?

Nobody watches F1 because they want Red Bull or McLaren to win; they watch it because they want their nation to win. The fact Webber agrees his old team can win, that Red Bull “can do it” despite the discord the two once had, shows what little value lies in the teams from the outside.

If F1 is to remain popular it needs to return to the drama that first inspired a young Webber.

To borrow his own term, it needs simple grit, not corporate influence. It needs scandal, not terminology. It needs the passion that Webber has rediscovered in the world of GT racing.

Aussie Grit is published by Macmillan Australia and is out now.