MOTORSPORT: Webber's story – grit without ultimate glory

Mark Webber's new book, Aussie Grit, and the recent Australian Story about him on ABC-TV have shed a lot of light on the dark side of Formula 1.

The TV program was enlightening, but inevitably limited by time.

The book, Webber says in the prologue, is "the whole story". Published by Macmillan, it's not quite that, but for anyone keenly interested in motorsport, and F1 in particular, it's well worth a read.

For those expecting a big dump on Sebastian Vettel, the young German who was his teammate in his final five years in F1, there's not a lot in it that wasn't already known by those who have followed Webber's career.

Certainly there are stories about the extent of Vettel's manipulation. Like when a solicitor's letter to Red Bull Racing after the infamous 'Multi 21' furore in the 2013 Malaysian Grand Prix claimed that the team order he defied had been "an unreasonable instruction" to him.

That may not reflect well on Vettel, but it's part – perhaps a large part – of what made him a four-time world champion at 26. It's that instinct to ensure he is the centrepiece of the team, the No.1 man, never giving a sucker an even break.

Senna and Schumacher were like it. Prost too, in a different way. There's another 14 world titles. Not the nicest of people perhaps, but drivers with the absolute ruthlessness to achieve what they wanted, never letting anybody, especially a teammate, get in the way of that ambition.

The Australian Story and Aussie Grit have finally revealed publicly the full extent of Webber's relationship with his much older partner, Ann Neal. She has played a huge role in his career for two decades and concludes that there was "far greater satisfaction than any title could bring from the way Mark conducted himself as a true professional, rising above all the bullshit and being able to hold his head high".

Webber can be incredibly proud of his nine GP wins. Many other drivers, some with more talent, ended up with far fewer victories. New Zealander Chris Amon, one of Webber's father Alan's heroes, finished with none. Italians Giancarlo Fisichella and Jarno Trulli are a couple more recent examples. Gross under-achievers in comparison with Webber.

But our man will have to spend the rest of his life wondering and explaining how and why he didn't win a world title.

He may yet be victorious at the Le Mans 24-Hour in his new sports car career with Porsche, but nothing will fully compensate for what got away from him in 2010. He led the world championship for so much of that season, and Vettel only once – at the end, when it mattered. In the next three years it was a comparative breeze for Vettel.

In the last two years of Webber's F1 career he wasn't the force he had been. There were victories at Monaco and in Britain in 2012, his second triumphs in each of those hallowed GPs, but it was downhill in the second half of that season and then he didn't win a race in 2013 as Vettel rampaged.

The politics, and the favouritism within Red Bull Racing towards the German, had worn down Webber by then. But, patriotism aside, was RBR wrong to make Vettel its priority?

Of the repeated controversies about the rights and wrongs of team orders, Webber says: "We were always free to race when my teammate was behind, never free to race when I was behind."

But there is this admission: "None of this should detract from the job Seb did. I can say with absolute honesty he is a better all-round driver than I ever was. He has some sensational qualities. There were things he did and you just had to take your hat off to him. He has a computer-like approach ... and he was a Red Bull driver through and through, whereas the hardest thing for me at RBR was to get some momentum going on my side. I always suspected Seb was just as much a pawn in the game as I had been and the pressure on him to deliver must have been immense. I'd just like to have had a crack at him 10 years earlier."

Just on whether this book is "the full story" ... towards the end of 2013 Webber said somewhere that he considered himself alongside the one-time world champions. That was a bit cheeky. He can mingle with the Jenson Buttons and Alan Jones' of the world on almost equal terms, but there will always be one difference – they got the job done.

Thankfully Webber does not repeat his perceived entitlement to membership of that "club" in Aussie Grit.

Something else is forgotten too. He recounts the 2007 Japanese GP at Fuji, when – after a safety car, but with visibility in the rain terrible – 20-year-old Vettel, driving for Red Bull's junior team Toro Rosso, ran up the back of Webber, probably costing him what would have been his first F1 victory.

"It's kids, isn't it? They haven't got enough experience. They do a good job and then they f..k it all up. A little bit of day-dreaming cost both teams a lot of points," Webber said in the immediate aftermath of that incident.

But I have a distinct recollection, and reckon there's something tucked away in a file somewhere that I can't easily put my finger on, that 24 hours later Webber back-tracked on that remark, especially as race leader Lewis Hamilton had created mayhem with his tactics.

Yet there is no mention of that U-turn by Webber on Vettel's behaviour in the book.  

As disappointing as it must have been to miss out on that first GP win, that colourful outburst, more than anything, may have been the root of what became the eternally rocky relationship between Webber and Vettel.

The German might never have forgiven him for it. And, patriotism aside again, that would be understandable. But it is not Vettel who emerges from Aussie Grit as the main villain.

That, in Webber's eyes, was Helmut Marko, the Austrian one-time GP driver who is Red Bull tycoon Dietrich Mateschitz's personal envoy in F1. Webber saw Marko as positively evil, besotted with Vettel and never prepared to give him, the Aussie underdog, anything near equal opportunity.

Team principal Christian Horner is painted as weak by Webber and Neal, never willing to stand up to Vettel but rather always pragmatically adhering to the Marko line.

Mateschitz is okay by Webber. Then again, he's the guy who doled out the big money – and still has Webber on the payroll with a personal sponsorship and as an ambassador for his energy drink. Yet surely Mateschitz was across, or approved of, everything Marko and Horner said and did? Perhaps it's his charm and pay cheques that make it easy to look kindly on him.

The biggest revelation in Aussie Grit is about an incident in Webber's time with Williams, the team he grew up idolising as he watched GPs on TV late at night in Queanbeyan.

It became clear early on in 2005 that joining Williams (against the advice of his manager Flavio Briatore, who wanted him to go to Renault) was not a marriage made him in heaven.

But the extent of the estrangement within six months is staggering.

"Frank [Williams] and Patrick [Head, team co-founder and long-time technical supremo] summoned me to Williams headquarters ... to tell me that they were 'massively disappointed' with my performance in their car," Webber recalls.

"The results hadn't met their expectations of me. Patrick delivered most of the dressing-down ... Patrick and Frank finished by saying, 'We've got you for another year but if there's a way we don't have you that would be fine'."

Webber says that Williams was not at all a happy place and that entering its factory "was like walking into a morgue".

Perhaps it was a miracle that Webber landed what, despite never winning a world title, became such a plum drive at Red Bull after his two years at Williams. Amazing too, perhaps, that he even stayed in F1 after that experience.

He talks of falling out of love with the sport when he saw its nasty side, of 2010 being "the beginning of the end", and then what became "a long goodbye".

Webber came up just a whisker short of a world title.

Those who have got that most difficult of jobs done don't have to worry about explaining why not when they get out of bed each day.

Webber doesn't have that luxury.

Perhaps he was a bit too nice a guy. He admits, though, that he wasn't quite in Sebastian Vettel's class.

Aussie Grit is a story pretty well and fairly comprehensively told.

Just not quite the whole story.

And there is at least one little mistake in it ... I had no hand in getting Webber and Minardi team owner Paul Stoddart up on the podium in Melbourne after that incredible fifth place on debut in 2002.

Indeed that "podium" was, as Webber says, "a highly irregular breach of [Federation Internationale de l'Automobile] protocol that might have cost us those two precious [world championship] points if the authorities hadn't shown a human touch on that day".

But Mark, mate, I'm not guilty.

There won't be any defamation suit though.

Thanks for the memories, that day – and over the years.