From the Pulpit

On the face of it, Mark Webber and Williams were made for each other. The one: a quick, tough Aussie who called a spade a bloody shovel and wasn't afraid of a shit-load of hard work. And the other: a team whose initial successes were strong-armed in their direction by just such a man.

Alan Jones (said strong-armer) was the sole driver employed by Williams Grand Prix Engineering in 1978, their first proper year in Formula One, and both Frank Williams and Patrick Head fell in love with him more or less straight away. More than that, though, they have spent the past 30-odd years looking to hire a Jonesy facsimile.

David Coulthard, who made his Williams debut in 1994, tells a story in which, on the Friday evening of one of his first Grands Prix for the team, Patrick asked him to "drive more like Alan".

Naturally enough, David assumed Patrick was referring, albeit with an English public school twang, to Alain Prost - who was, after all, the reigning world champion and had won said championship at the wheel of a Williams.

But no; Patrick was in fact speaking of Jones, long retired, but still the archetype in his (Patrick's) eyes, still the paragon of no-nonsense hardiness to which all Williams drivers were still expected to aspire.

And yet, after just two tricky seasons together, Webber and Williams are no longer an item. More than that, though, whatever each party says to us pressmen on the record, their relationship has been an acrimonious one.

It was some of Williams's own people, for instance, who quietly perpetuated the rumour (unfounded in my opinion) that Webber is one of those drivers who is brilliant over one lap but often fades over a race distance; equally, frustrated by his inability to win the trust of the team's biggest cheeses, Webber has become perhaps a little readier than he should have been to bitch about Williams's modus operandi.

Alexander Wurz will replace Mark Webber at Williams in 2007 © LAT

What went wrong? Might it be that, much as Frank and Patrick like their drivers to be tough, they cannot cope when they turn out also to be tough-talking? I think it might.

Mark came from a school - Jaguar Racing, run by Tony Purnell and Dave Pitchforth - in which process and procedure were all. Responsibility culture pervaded the team's very soul, to the extent that there was sometimes perhaps even a bit too much democracy about the Milton Keynes plant.

But what that responsibility culture fostered, above all, was a modus operandi under which mistakes, whenever they were made, were almost gleefully set upon and analysed. Why so? Because, went Tony's and Dave's theory, every mistake that you can analyse and find the root cause of, and which therefore offers you an opportunity to improve associated processes and procedures, is a mistake that, by rights, you should never make again.

Yes, Purnell and Pitchforth were bundled out of Red Bull Racing almost as soon as Red Bull owner Dietrich Mateschitz's (tiny) cheque had cleared in Ford's Dearborn bank accounts - and before we will ever know how successful or unsuccessful their version of Jaguar Racing might have been.

But, although Red Bull Racing are now a very differently flavoured equipe from the team that Tony and Dave developed, and although the new team's newly appointed boss, Christian Horner, soon stamped his own quietly industrious methodology (as well as Red Bull's larger-than-life brand essence) on to the way things were done at Bradbourne Drive, Purnell's and Pitchforth's responsibility culture lives on. And the team are better for it, and Webber will recognise it when he first sees evidence of it again. And he will like what he sees.

Moreover, Mark's no-nonsense attitude makes him unwilling to bite his lip - which readiness to make waves has sometimes been construed as a political streak. Is it? Who knows - and, moreover, who cares?

'Political' has been an F1 buzz-word for a generation, and it is usually used by the teammate of a driver who is getting his way within the team and driving better as a result. Thus Prost thought Ayrton Senna 'political'; in turn, Nigel Mansell thought Prost 'political'. Which, in no uncertain terms, means that 'political' is OK.

Next season's Red Bull RB3 will be an Adrian Newey car, of course - and, as a result, Newey has and will have an increasingly powerful influence on the way things are done at Red Bull Racing.

His extraordinary track record - championship after championship at Williams and McLaren in the 1990s - anyway guarantees that.

But, as and when the RB3 next year begins to show itself to be podium-worthy or better - as indeed it surely should and probably will - then a 'what Adrian says goes' mind-set will surely gain a foothold within the team. And Mark will be - and already is, I am sure - mindful of that. And without crawling - that is not his way - he will waste no time in finding ways to show Adrian that he, Mark, is the team's main man.

Adrian Newey © LAT

Webber's teammate, Coulthard, will be attempting to do exactly the same thing, of course. Indeed, he will have a year's head-start, but that apparent blessing may in fact be double-edged. Coulthard was hired before Newey; as such, it axiomatically follows that Newey had no say in Coulthard's hiring.

Worse, perhaps, Coulthard occupies a space in Newey's mind that has little to do with the brave new RB3 world he hopes he is creating for 2007. No, in Adrian's mind, surely, DC is still to some extent the polite bloke who drove the other car when Mika Hakkinen was winning race after race and championship after championship in beautiful Newey-designed McLaren-Mercedes 'Silver Arrows'.

Moreover, although he sometimes tries to deny it, money is important to Adrian. (Why does he bother to deny it, by the way? How can money not be important to a man whose hobby is buying and racing cars such as Ford GT40s and lightweight Jaguar E-Types - cars, in fact, which would have cost him more than US$1 million each? And what does it matter anyway? Money is important to all of us - and to F1 people more than most.)

And the only way that Newey can continue to command the US$10 million-per-annum stipend that his lifestyle demands is by demonstrating that his F1 cars are quicker than anyone else's.

Which brings us almost full circle: to the theory, which I have already said I repudiate, that Mark is brilliant over one lap but often fades over a race distance. But the part of that theory I repudiate is that he often fades over a race distance; as to whether he is brilliant over one lap, then, yes, I think he is.

So, I am led to believe, does Newey. And there is no better or more oft-quoted measure of a car's innate speed than its qualifying performances.

QED? Yes, QED.

Believe me: Adrian needs Mark as much as Mark needs Adrian. Upon such needy associations are world championships built.