Mea Culpa: Interview with Mark Webber

On November 28th, Mark Webber will begin a new chapter in his career when he will drive a Ferrari-powered Red Bull car for the first time at Barcelona. It will be a homecoming of sorts, because management aside, there are still a lot of guys in the Milton Keynes team who were there in the days of Jaguar Racing, and there are a few others he knew when he was a Renault test driver in 2001.

Webber left Jaguar at the end of 2004, having decided that Williams was where he wanted to be. It's easy to forget now that at one stage he had a chance of going to Renault, but he had his heart set on Williams. It's fascinating to speculate what might have happened had he - and not Giancarlo Fisichella - spent the last two years alongside Fernando Alonso.

But Williams was where he wanted to be, even if his manager Flavio Briatore was keen to slot him into Renault. It was, you might say, a good idea at the time. However, incumbents Juan Pablo Montoya and Ralf Schumacher were keen to go elsewhere, and Jenson Button successfully extracted himself from a commitment to join. All seemed to know something that Mark didn't.

To be fair, perhaps none of them could appreciate quite how spectacularly the team's relationship with BMW would unravel, and when the Australian signed up he could have had no idea that the second season of his deal would see the team readjusting to customer team status. Last season was disappointing, while this year was a disaster by the team's usual standards.

A succession of mechanical failures (not down to Cosworth) robbed Webber on the few occasions when things seemed to be coming together. Monaco was the biggest heartbreak, but at least for a while he ran with Alonso and Kimi Raikkonen, and looked as though he was always meant to be in such company.

But he did enough to ensure that when Red Bull went looking for a driver, he was high on the list. Cynics would point out that Briatore's offer of a Renault engine deal may have had some bearing on Red Bull's decision to hire one of the Italian's proteges, but no one is ever going to concede such a thing.

The decision to take Webber seemed a little odd in the light of Red Bull's marketing agenda and youthful image - why take a second experienced English-speaking driver rather than someone out of the programme? But on the other hand, it suggests that the team is serious about on-track performance, and it reflects the influence that Adrian Newey is having in all areas.

Having looked at all the possible alternatives, clearly Newey decided that Webber - acknowledged as an ace in qualifying - had the most to offer in terms of benchmarking the pace of the RB3.

Mark Webber and David Coulthard © LAT

Any question marks about the unbalanced line-up could be answered in 2008, when many suspect, rightly or wrongly, that Coulthard's seat will be up for grabs. Meanwhile it will be fascinating to see how the pair stack up against each other this year. A Newey car with the engine that won the 2006 Formula One World Championship? It's a tantalising prospect, and one that Webber himself is looking forward to.

AC: How do you view this season? It wasn't exactly what you would have hoped for...

Webber: "Of course not. There's no point in looking at it through rose-tinted glasses - the season has been nothing short of a disaster. There's no beating around the bush. We had just a few points' finishes, which was incredibly hard to swallow for everyone, and hard personally of course for me to swallow. It knocks your motivation around, it knocks a lot of things around. You can only take so much, and anyone would go through that.

"So I am looking forward to next year, because I need something fresh, and I need a new environment to recharge my career, hopefully. I see very good potential at Red Bull. Williams will have a better season than they've had this year, I'm sure of that - it can't be any worse! - but it was time for me to try something different. I'm not prepared to wait and see if there is an if over that. I think there won't be an if over Red Bull, I'm quite confident they will do well."

AC: Coming into this season, BMW had gone. Were you still reasonably hopeful it would be a good season, despite the customer engine?

Webber: "Absolutely. My biggest worry coming into this season was Bridgestone, to be honest. Cosworth didn't worry me at all. And we had the best engine for the first part of the season. We had the best engine. It was maybe a little bit fragile, but no more fragile than anybody else's, really, at the start of the year.

"After five or six races we had a little bit of a reliability problem, and that affected us with a 10-place penalty in Nurburgring - I think we should have finished fifth there. But we couldn't capitalise on our form early in the season. Even up until Hockenheim we had flashes of going reasonably well, although there were a few tracks where it didn't happen for us, because we just didn't have the pace.

"So Cosworth hasn't held us back at all. You can say that a manufacturer off track, in terms of sponsors, and the pull of the events you have to do away from the race circuit, there can be a little price to pay with that. But there's no question that we haven't performed with the engine we had."

AC: But there was a limit on practice mileage, which couldn't have helped on race weekends, even with a third car

Webber: "Yes, but we did have the third car, and it was brilliant - a huge advantage for us. If we didn't, then I think there would have been more pressure to wind the engine down more, and do more laps. At the end of the day, we could do more laps if we wound the engine down. If you've got a really lightning car, if you do a small amount of laps you're going to be there anyway, give or take a bit. It would have been nice to do a few more, but that's what we had."

AC: Was Monaco the high and low point all season?

The Williams FW28 Cosworth catches fire at Monaco © LAT

Webber: "It was. In Monaco, there are so many things that can catch you out over the course of the weekend in terms of keeping the thing off the fence, qualifying with traffic, qualifying with guys stopping on the track. We started on the front row, and we were racing quite strongly. Kimi was the fastest guy, Fernando was controlling the pace, and Fernando couldn't go much quicker, really. He was doing a good job with what he had.

"Fisi thought I was Rosberg, so I lost a lot of time behind him, because we had just lapped about nine cars in one go - there was a big train. Fisi thought I was Nico, because Nico was around that group. That cost me some time.

"Given the season we'd had, a podium was still going to be a very strong result for us, and maybe we could have got something a bit better, although it was probably unlikely. Kimi wouldn't have stopped without the safety car from us.

"Monaco was gutting, because I wanted to be on the podium with guys I respect, and no lucky result. Just be on the podium with really good drivers, and that was going to happen."

AC: What other races do you have most regrets about?

Webber: "In Melbourne we had third - fourth was nowhere there, just like in Monaco. Whoever was fourth, we had them well and truly covered. We were leading or whatever and just about to stop. In Malaysia, we could have got some good points. Hockenheim, Nurburgring - probably fifth from the back of the grid. We were very heavy and very quick in the race. There are a lot of ifs and buts, whens and maybes..."

AC: There was a run of races in the second half of the year where you weren't getting into the top 10 in qualifying. What was that all about, bearing in mind your usual form?

Webber: "In Canada I got caught behind Nico. At Silverstone, Nico and I both would have been out if Jarno didn't blow up in that session. There was a couple of thousandths between us. At Monza it was very odd, what went on there. I wasn't going that well, but it was quite strange how slow I was in that qualifying session on those tyres. I had absolutely no grip at all. The set I had at the start of the race had loads more grip than I had in qualifying. I think I just had a bad set of tyres."

AC: The Williams aero efficiency is one thing that's been mentioned, but what were the main weaknesses this year?

Webber: "It's not really important for me to have an opinion on that, because it hasn't been important in the past and it won't be important in the future. To be honest, my future isn't at Williams, so I'm not bothered about what went wrong. I am bothered, but I'm not bothered about talking about it now, because it doesn't help my situation."

AC: Bearing in mind your expectations going in, how do you view your time at Williams - have you learned a lot?

Webber: "I've learned a lot about life, a little bit about racing, but more about life, in terms of dealing with people. Just how your respect for different things changes, how to deal with different situations. Last year I got myself incredibly wound up about the situation during the course of the year, because we weren't as competitive as we would have liked to have been at certain times. And that was what we thought was a disastrous year, which it was really.

"I wasn't a big fan of the one tyre thing, but no one's interested in listening to excuses. The scoreboard never lies and spilt milk is something I haven't been a big fan of either. You've just got to get on with it. This will help me in the future of just being Mark Webber, I suppose, but it's not really been good for my career."

Mark Webber and Sir Frank Williams © LAT

AC: When you joined, it seemed clear on the outside that Ralf and Juan Pablo were keen to get out. Did that not concern you?

Webber: "Ralf had many chats to me about it, but until you go in and try, you don't know."

AC: Couldn't you see which way the wind was blowing?

Webber: "What's wrong with using the word 'mistake'? I've said I've fucked up. I made a mistake, it was my personal mistake. It's not really regrets, I have to live with it and get on with it. We made some incredible decisions through the early part of my career to get where we did. It always turned out right, and this one didn't. Press on mate, that's life, get your chin up and get on with it."

AC: Was Red Bull always the main option this time, bearing in mind that there was a Renault seat available?

Webber: "Yes, Flavio honed in on them. Red Bull came pretty late, but well, and that was it. Of course I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't have been interested in the Renault situation, but if you're not the flavour of the month... It just goes in the balance of Heikki [Kovalainen] because he's in there and I wasn't. I was there, and I could have had a seat [for 2005], but that was the decision we took at the time.

"That's what happens in a sportsman's career. Every now and again you come to a T-junction. It's left or right, right or left, and things change. I'm not bitter or twisted at all, I'm still very close to all the Renault people, and will continue to be. I have massive, massive respect for them. I hope we can have a good season with them. I've got huge respect for the way that Flavio's handled my career, so I've got no regrets about anything. It's just the way it's gone."

AC: Are you looking forward to working with Adrian Newey?

Webber: "He's really the only person in the team that I haven't spent a huge amount of time with. I raced against Christian Horner in F3000, but all the soldiers on the floor I know from Jaguar, Jonathan Wheatley the team manager I worked with at Renault, and there are other guys I know from Renault.

"Adrian is a guy I don't know as well as those guys, but I've already struck up a relationship with him. I hope it will improve. Probably our relationship will get better if we can achieve things together. Inevitably, when you don't achieve things together, your relationship is not great. So I'm looking forward to it.

"It's the same with all the guys who are borderline genius, they have some different ideas sometimes, and that's what you've got in Adrian. I'm very happy that he's maybe slowing down a bit in his racing cars and he's going to look after himself now!"

AC: What about David Coulthard? From the outside it does seem like an unusual combination - especially at Red Bull we'd expect to see an experienced guy and a younger guy. How do you see that working out, especially as he is well established there?

Webber: "I think it'll be good. They've kept David for some continuity there, he's obviously done a good job for them this year, they know what type of vehicle he's been driving and what material he's had. They came on the market and I was the next choice. So obviously they didn't see a young guy doing as good a job as me. That's why they didn't take one."

Red Bull Racing © XPB/LAT

AC: How do you feel about the whole Red Bull marketing thing - all parties, girls and PR stunts? It's going to be very different from Jaguar and Williams...

Webber: "They're cool about that with me. They know how I am, my character, and they know what they're getting me for. I'm not saying I'm averse to having a good time, but some of the things they do are on the edge, and that's their angle at certain times. If they want to have parties, that's fantastic, and 80% of the paddock loves it. I'll be going to some of them, but not all."

AC: On the other hand they are into sports, and you're into cycling, canoeing and so on

Webber: "Yes, we've got lots of things where we can have a good time away from the track, so that will be good."

AC: The pieces seem to be coming together, but is it going to still be a building process - and there's a danger that you're there too early?

Webber: "If the aerodynamics of the car and everything else comes out sweet, then I won't be there too early. But I don't want it to be another learning year in terms of getting on top of the Bridgestones and all those type of things. I think they've got enough talented people there to dig out some quality stuff pretty quickly, hopefully.

"They will have a better year in 2008, I think, and it's just a question of how strong 2007 will be. I think they can still go out and get a good chunk of constructors points next year."