TRIBUTE: Mark Webber retires

Mark Webber will retire from professional motor racing next month with nine Formula 1 Grand Prix wins and a world sports car driving championship to his credit.

An F1 world title eluded him, although he was third three times (2010, 2011 and 2013), and so too has victory at the Le Mans 24-Hour.

But, hey, it’s been a helluva career for a kid from Queanbeyan.

Webber’s dad, Alan, in whose tracks the son has followed as a genuinely good bloke, was a motorcycle dealer but when junior got the racing bug the father quickly decided it would be better – that is, safer – he did it on four wheels rather than two.

So Mark Webber got into karting and then Formula Ford, the second bottom rung of the open-wheeler ladder (above only Formula Vee).

Before the 1995 Australian Formula Ford Championship was over he was off to Europe, at 19. Jason Bright won the Aussie title as Webber’s absence from the final round left him fourth.

His first wins on what could be considered internationals stages came in 1996 – at the British Formula Ford Festival, the category’s virtual world championship at the Brands Hatch circuit, and in Formula Holden, then Australia’s premier open-wheeler category, at Adelaide’s GP.

Webber advanced to Formula 3 with expatriate Australian Alan Docking’s team in England with his sights firmly on F1, but he took a detour via sports cars.

His manager and partner (and now wife), Ann Neal, took the bold step of insisting to Mercedes motorsport chief Norbert Haug at an Australian GP ball in Melbourne that he must meet Webber and ought to look at hiring him as a driver.

Wonder of wonders, it worked. Webber spent two years under the tutelage of Mercedes gun Bernd Schneider. Alas his time with the three-pointed star came to an ugly end with two enormous crashes at Le Mans in a Merc that was then outlawed because its aerodynamics were so extreme it was lifting off and jumping high safety fences, landing among trees.

Webber had to buy his way out of his Mercedes contract.

Another expatriate Australian, aviation tycoon Paul Stoddart, came to his rescue, fielding him in Formula 3000, then the main European open-wheeler support category to F1.

He won a couple of races, at important tracks too – Monaco and Silverstone.

Then came a test driver role with Flavio Briatore’s Benetton F1 team, after a brief dalliance with Tom Walkinshaw that ended with Webber getting out of a cockpit refusing to be hustled into signing away his future on a long-term contract.

Stoddart had bought the lowly Italian-based F1 team Minardi in 2001, giving Fernando Alonso his GP debut, and the next year he opened the door for Webber into GP racing.

In a remarkable debut at Melbourne’s Albert Park circuit Webber finished fifth, holding off the Toyota – also having its first F1 outing – of Mika Salo.

Webber’s form at Minardi was so impressive that he was snapped up for the next season by the Ford-owned Jaguar team.

He continued to impress in two years there, without reaching the podium though, and then came what seemed the dream offer – to race for Williams, the once-mighty team he had seen win so often as a kid watching late-night GP telecasts with his dad.

Although he made it to the podium with ‘Team Willy’, it was not the outfit it had been and the relationship quickly and sadly soured. His results sheet wasn’t flash, but wise heads in the F1 paddock could see that Webber had something, especially qualifying speed.

What had been the Jaguar team, offloaded to Red Bull for $1 to avoid folding and incurring massive payout liabilities, picked him up for 2007 as teammate to David Coulthard.

There was more heartache yet, many poor starts for whatever reason, but finally – in his 131st GP, at Germany’s ‘new’ Nurburgring – Webber broke through for his first F1 victory. And many of us still have his cockpit celebrations ringing in our ears from the telecast. “Yes … yes … yes … yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,” he bellowed.

It was only months after he had badly broken his right leg when his bicycle was hit by a car during his charity endurance event in Tasmania.

Eight more wins at the highest level of motor racing were to follow, most notably twice each at Monaco and Silverstone, two GP ‘Grand Slam’ races even if they carrry the same points as any other.

A young German kid, Sebastian Vettel, had arrived at Red Bull Racing the same year that Webber struck that gold at the Nurburgring, and the pair had a fractious relationship.

Webber, and even more so his management and supporters, felt that Red Bull favoured Vettel, who was the star graduate of its junior development squad. Indeed, Vettel was the favourite ‘son’, won four consecutive world titles, and made it absolutely clear in the 2013 Malaysian GP (the day of the infamous ‘Multi 21’) that he was not prepared to adhere to any team orders to sit behind Webber on track.

The man who had created the brand ‘Aussie Grit’ was losing his affection for F1 and there were no wins in what was to be his final season of GP racing.

But Porsche, the road-car marque he had most loved since driving a borrowed 911 as a teenager, came calling, wanting him to race its new hybrid Le Mans prototype in the World Endurance Championship.

He’s had a fun three years, winning seven six-hour races with his co-drivers, young New Zealander Brendon Hartley and German veteran Timo Bernhard, even if he hasn’t stood on the top step at Le Mans.

The trio were the WEC drivers’ champions last year, helped Porsche to the manufacturers’ championship and another beckons this season.

The Webber car has won the past three WEC rounds and there are three to go – at Fuji in Japan this weekend, and culminating in Bahrain on November 19.

It’s been a great journey for a bloke now 40, with homes in Britain, France and Queensland, who not only has had a ball most of the time but also given his fellow Australians tons of enjoyment and cause for pride. Not only for what he’s done on the world’s racetracks, but off them.

He says he has “new and exciting [ambassadorial] opportunities with Red Bull, who I will have been with for 10 years next year, Channel 4 in the UK, and Network Ten and Michelin in Australia… and I’m working on a couple of new ventures too”.

All that on top of being a “special representative” for Porsche – only the company’s second, along with Walter Rohrl, the 69-year-old German dual world rally champion of the 1980s.

Webber already has a collection of Porsches in his garages, including a 918 Spyder, a 911 R, a GT3 RS (991), a 911 GT2 RS (997), a 911 GT3 RS 4.0, a 1954 356 Cabriolet and a 1974 2.7 Carrera.

No doubt there are more to come.

What a fairy-tale life for a kid from Queanbeyan.