1 No Wings, Learning to Fly: 1976–94 I WAS AN ADDICT BEFORE I WAS 10. I simply couldn’t get enough: I’d have my fix on a Sunday night, or Monday morning, and I’d keep coming back for another hit, and another one after that. It started in 1984, when I was just seven years old. That was the year Nigel Mansell should have won the Monaco Grand Prix for Lotus but crashed in the wet on the hill going up towards Casino Square. His accident left a young bloke called Ayrton Senna in with a great shout of winning his first Grand Prix in a Toleman Hart, of all things, but the race was stopped because of the rain and Alain Prost was declared the winner for McLaren on count-back instead. I remember it like yesterday. My drug, of course, was Formula 1. I was born on 27 August, 1976, midway through the memorable year when Britain’s James Hunt and Austrian Niki Lauda went head-to-head for the world title. Their season-long duel, including Lauda’s near-fatal crash in Germany, was the subject of the highly successful 2013 movie Rush. When I came on the scene the Webber clan was living in Queanbeyan (from the Aboriginal ‘Quinbean’, meaning ‘clear waters’) in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales, hard up against the border with the Australian Capital Territory. It’s best known for producing people who excelled in sport, like cricketer Brad Haddin, squash star Heather McKay and Rugby Union great David Campese. Queanbeyan had been the stamping ground for the Webber family for a couple of generations by the time I arrived. My paternal grandfather, Clive, was born in Balmain in Sydney and my grandmother on that side, Tryphosa – Dad tells me it’s a Biblical name but he’s never come across it in his reading – was from Cessnock in the Hunter region of New South Wales. Both of them moved to the Queanbeyan area early in life, before they knew each other. They married in Queanbeyan in 1941. My dad, Alan, came along in 1947 and he has one sister, Gwen. Clive was originally a wood merchant, back in the days when there was good business to be done delivering firewood. He delivered wood to Hotel Currajong, where then Prime Minister Ben Chifley spent a lot of time, and also supplied wood to Parliament House. When war broke out Clive went down to Sydney to enlist but was sent home when they realised they needed to hang on to the bloke who delivered wood to such important addresses. He continued as a wood carter until 1955, when he bought what became the family business, Bridge Motors, a Leyland dealership with two petrol bowsers on the footpath on the main street of Queanbeyan. My dad and mum met in the early sixties. My mum, Diane, was from a well-known local family, the Blewitts. Her dad, David George Blewitt – ‘DG’ for short – and her mum, Marie, were married in 1947, but Marie died of cancer at the age of 48 so my sister Leanne and I never knew her. Dad tells me Marie was a wonderful lady: they got along famously and she worked for him at one stage. DG had 2000 acres which my mother’s sister Pam still owns and runs. Mum was at school with Dad’s sister and often used to spend time at their home. Mum likes to say she couldn’t stand Dad at first, but he insists that was only because he used to like watching the ABC, all the old English comedy shows he still enjoys, and she thought he was being a bit of a smartie-bum, as he puts it. She must have got over that because they started going out in 1968 and were married in 1971, on Dad’s 24th birthday. As he likes to say, he ‘Blewitt’ when he married her! My sister, Leanne, came along in 1974 and in 1976 I followed. I share the same birthday with cricketer Sir Donald Bradman and, coincidentally, with two Grand Prix drivers from the not-so-distant past, Derek Warwick and Gerhard Berger. Dad built our family home in Irene Avenue, an awesome place that for me was filled with good memories. I went to Isabella Street Primary and then Karabar High, both close to home. I represented the school in athletics and Rugby League, I played Aussie Rules and I was quite keen on cricket and swimming. I was a jack of all trades and legend of none! Perhaps surprisingly it was my mum who encouraged me to get involved in as many different sports as I could. ‘Having a go’ was how she put it, and I was only too happy to take her advice. Beyond the normal schoolboy activities, Dad was all over motor sport. As a youngster he used to hitchhike to Warwick Farm, which was then a popular Sydney motor-racing venue. Naturally, with Clive running a mechanical repairs business, there were always motorbikes around so it’s no surprise that I grew up with an interest in motor sport myself. I often think of my grandfather Clive. He was a really special person – incredibly popular, always had a smile on his face, a hell of a man for a practical joke. He was unique and definitely important to what I’ve stood for, the legacy left to his own son and to me. Dad’s pretty similar. He likes to say every day is a birthday for him, he doesn’t want to have any enemies, just wants to have a good time. Clivey was a legend and many of Dad’s traits – and some of mine as well – have come from him. Mum’s dad, DG, loved us to bits, but he was a farmer and always busy. I remember him worrying incessantly about me either injuring myself on the motorbike at the farm or starting bushfires. Over the years I did both, so perhaps he had every reason to be worried! It’s fair to say, too, that I was never going to be a farmer. I was always at the workshop tinkering away with Clive. The business grew, so they moved it out of town, and Dad took it on from there. It wasn’t the showiest joint around but it was always a popular spot – the same guys were always around the place. Opposite our house in Irene Avenue in Mark Place lived a family called the Zardos. Both their lads used to work at Dad’s petrol station and Gino Zardo went on to become one of the best photographers in New York. He calls me ‘Sparky’ whenever I see him, and that’s all down to Clive. When I was born Clive said, ‘He’s a little Champion spark plug!’ and the name just stuck. Clive died of cancer at 78 when I was 15. The day he died, I was staying with one of my best mates, Peter Woods, and his mum came down and said, ‘Your granddad passed away.’ I was a mess. Seeing what he’d had to go through for the past three years of his illness had been extremely painful for our family. Clive hadn’t even seen me go-karting, which I started when I was 13. I would love for all my grandparents to have seen what I’ve achieved, for Mum and Dad’s sake. You always want those sorts of relationships to go on forever, but of course they can’t. Dad’s a big, solid man, as you would expect an ex-Rugby player to be, whereas Clive was like me, lean and tall. Mum often says in some of the photos when he was young he’s just a dead ringer for me when I was that age. Tryphosa died around the time of the first Melbourne Grand Prix in 1996. I remember Dad getting the phone call just as we were leaving the hotel and being totally blown away by how strong he was. I think of them often and when I’ve raced, although they never saw me turn a wheel, they’ve always been with me. Cancer and its impact on so many lives means something specific and very painful to me. Queanbeyan wasn’t a big town by any stretch of the imagination, but Leanne and I quickly built our own separate group of friends as we were growing up. My earliest memories of Leanne are of being on the farm on our motorbikes and tailing lambs. She was always into animals and had a far more natural instinct for the farm than I ever did. We had massive family times together on the farm in the evenings, my grandfather DG, Aunty Pam, Uncle Nigel and their two boys, Adam and Johnny, Mum, Dad, Leanne and me. There were lots of summer holidays to Mollymook on the New South Wales south coast where Dad’s sister Gwen had a holiday home. Leanne and I would both take a couple of friends so there were always lots of kids running amok or hitting the surf. In school term Leanne and I were always on a different program. I was always late to bed and late to school, she was the complete opposite. Mum used to take us both to the Queanbeyan swimming club on Wednesday nights and I remember how freezing cold it was. Leanne and I did a bit of recreational stuff together but that stopped when racing took over. Dad had played Rugby Union through school and on weekends until he was in his thirties. He was pretty good, too: he represented New South Wales as a junior, played first grade in the local competition and he likes to boast that he played for Queanbeyan alongside Australian great David Campese in 1981. Thanks to Mum and Dad, sport certainly played a large part in my own upbringing. Dad still remembers very fondly the day I was picked above my age group for a Rugby League final: I scored two intercepted tries and helped us win the local shield. I played full-forward in Aussie Rules and kicked quite a few goals, and I had a crack at tennis as well. I wasn’t a gun at any of it, but the mentality in the Webber household was to have a crack. Queanbeyan was a small enough town with plenty of competitive families who loved sport. There was always that natural sort of comparison going on. ‘Were you in the newspaper?’ was a frequent question among the people I grew up with. But it was always very friendly: it wasn’t a contest between parents as to whose son had done what, it was always just a question of wanting to do well, because that’s what we were encouraged to do. I did enjoy sport, and I’m pretty sure that’s where my competitive nature grew. Whether it was a football match or a computer game, I always liked to win. My only problem was that I wouldn’t put in the practice and the discipline to improve. It wasn’t till I was much older that my focus sharpened and I could see the benefits of applying myself. I got a privileged insight into the need for discipline and dedication in sport at a pretty early age. When I was 13 I ‘worked’ for a year as a ball-boy for the Canberra Raiders, a little job that came about because Dad knew the Raiders’ Under-21 coach, Mick Doyle. Ball-boy for Mal Meninga and those blokes for a year – what an opportunity! Ten dollars a game was big bucks in those days, and I even travelled to all the away games, which meant hotel rooms in places as far afield as Brisbane. Phenomenal experience for a kid in his early teens! To see those guys play, to hear the legendary coach Tim Sheens firing them up – I didn’t fully realise how lucky I was to have that experience. At that stage I simply didn’t understand how important motivation was. Those players did whatever it took to get them out on the paddock week in, week out, because that’s what competing and winning is all about: turning up and having a real go. Sport apart, school and I didn’t really connect. Depending on which of my teachers you asked, they would tell you: ‘Mark Webber? He was loud . . . he was popular . . . he was articulate . . . he was a bit arrogant . . . he was lazy and unmotivated . . . he drove his car like a maniac!’ Most of those descriptions were true, I suppose, but the negative stuff didn’t come about because I didn’t like being at school in the first place. Far from it: I loved school, I rarely missed a day. But I was mischievous and disruptive in the classroom, no question about it. It used to frustrate Mum quite a lot and she threatened me with boarding school on a number of occasions. Dad didn’t help matters because if the school hauled him and Mum in when I was in trouble he’d laugh when he heard what I’d been getting up to. He even went so far as to tell them that he wished he had thought up some of my pranks when he was at school. Actually he had: one of them was stuffing potatoes up the exhaust pipes of the teachers’ cars and he confessed he had done that in his own youth. On another memorable occasion I was in an agriculture class and I buried all the shovels. Next day the teacher couldn’t find them; I got a telephone call and told them they were right there beneath their feet! My last year at school was when I had the biggest fun I’ve had in my life, because I got my driving licence. I was never one for studying but when there was something I was interested in, like getting my licence, it seemed to come more easily. I got the book you needed to study to go for your licence one day and passed it the next! I had just one lesson from a friend of Dad’s who ran a driving school, but Dad had let me sit on his lap when I was eight or so on the way out to the farm, and I’d had plenty of chances to drive tractors and other farm vehicles before I was 10, so the licence was never a problem. My first car was a 1969 Toyota Corona, two on the tree, $500, and you can imagine the stuff we got up to. At school lunchtimes I would load up the car with mates and head for the nearby rally stages or fire trails. Sometimes I’d go and recce them on my own then put the wind up my passengers later by spearing off the tarmac road straight onto dirt tracks, safe in the knowledge that I knew exactly what I was doing. They weren’t massively impressed! Nor was the teacher who hopped in with me one day to go and buy some ice. He said later I had two speeds, Fast and Stop, and swore he would never get in a car with me again. On our muck-up day – the final day of Year 12 when the students virtually take over the school – the boys filmed an on-board lap of me driving around Queanbeyan which involved several near-misses with parked cars and plenty of handbrake turns. My trademark move was to stop at pedestrian crossings with the handbrake; somehow I never managed to convince Dad that the square rear tyres with wire hanging out were a standard tyre defect! Speaking of tyres, all four of mine were let down one day – by one of my teachers. Mr Walker taught science and I was never in any of his classes, but he clearly took exception to the fact that I used to park in the staff car park. Well, it was convenient – much closer to roll-call. Once we got to the bottom of it, some mates and I went round to his house one night about a week later to get a bit of our own back. Nothing serious: just some flour and eggs, or maybe a couple of those potatoes stuffed up the exhaust pipe. That plan had to be abandoned – Mr Walker was sitting in his car even though it was 10.30 at night! I also used my Toyota to deliver pizzas around the Queanbeyan and Canberra area. I soon found out there was a skill to learning house names and numbers and finding flats and units, after countless episodes of knocking on doors with a pizza in hand only to be told, ‘Nah mate, you’ve got the wrong house.’ Delivering to parties was always the worst: I’d always get the piss taken out of me in my horrendous uniform with a little leather pouch which I would rifle through trying to give back the right change. Dad says now that he was worried I might turn out a bit of a devil, but every now and again I would knuckle down to school work. The most important thing for me was to have a relationship with the teacher. If there was a bit of friction between us, that meant I never had the motivation to pay attention. But a few teachers along the way worked out how I ticked, things clicked and I made a half-decent stab at their subjects. A lot of the people I knew did well at Karabar High, but I used it mainly for socialising, playing sport and having meals at the canteen! * When my love of Formula 1 emerged Dad was as happy as a sand-boy. Australia had started getting television coverage of Grand Prix racing in the aftermath of Alan Jones’s World Championship year in 1980, although races weren’t always shown as they happened because of the time difference, and I think Dad was delighted that I had caught the bug. He was particularly impressed by Jack Brabham, long before ‘Black Jack’, as he was later known, became the first knight of motor racing. Jack had made a name for himself on speedway circuits that weren’t all that far from where we lived. His was certainly the biggest name in the Webber household, and my story as a racing driver really begins with how inspirational Jack was both to Dad and then to me. Dad was a huge open-wheeler fan. He loved going to watch Jackie Stewart and other international drivers racing at Warwick Farm against our local heroes in the Tasman Series. Touring cars, which are so popular in Australia, just never cut it as far as we were concerned – it was the Indianapolis 500 and Formula 1 for us! The best drivers in the world were in single-seaters and Dad loved the precision and accuracy of that kind of racing. I guess most young boys follow what their dads love, and that’s what I did. Mum could hardly get me off to school on Monday mornings after a Grand Prix; I’d tape every race, watch it ‘live’, then watch it again when I got home from school. Mum and Dad used to have friends round, parents of other kids I knew and while they sat there I’d be watching a Grand Prix for probably the eighth or ninth time, the same race over and over again, with a bowl of my favourite ice-cream. The Australian Grand Prix was staged in Adelaide starting in November 1985, when I was nine years old. It was televised by Channel 9 in those days. I needed eight video tapes just for that one race weekend alone! It was always the final race of the season, so after Adelaide I’d be in mourning for four months before F1 came round again, the first race usually broadcast from Brazil, to see the new drivers in their different helmets, and all the different teams. It was just brilliant, I loved it. Dad and I couldn’t wait for each new season to start. The first year Dad took me to the Grand Prix was 1987, when I was 11. The drive took us 14 hours and I got the sulks when Alain Prost, who was my hero in those days, retired after 53 laps with a brake disc failure. At that stage Alain had won two of his eventual four World Championships; he had also recently overtaken Jackie Stewart’s long-standing record of 27 Grand Prix victories. How could I possibly have dreamt that 25 years later Alain Prost and a kid from Queanbeyan would go cycling together on one of the most famous stages of the Tour de France and be on first-name terms? But I will never forget the first impression these cars made on me in Adelaide. Our seats were on the front straight; Martin Brundle, now a popular television analyst of the sport, was first round in his Zakspeed and I nearly lost my breakfast! It went past us so fast I just couldn’t believe there was a driver at the wheel. To me, these guys were absolutely bloody awesome – I even climbed trees trying to get a better view. That’s when F1 started to become religious for me. But for all the passion I put into it, I never thought for a moment at that stage that I would get any closer to Formula 1 than hanging off a tree in Adelaide to watch those great names rip past me. These drivers were a million miles away from the kind of racing I had first been exposed to, which revolved around dirt-bikes, sprint cars – brilliant little rockets designed for high-speed racing on short oval tracks – and midget cars. For several years, starting when I was just eight and going through to my early teens, Dad took me to our nearest speedway at Tralee, in the Queanbeyan suburbs, where I perched on his shoulders to watch the exploits of local blokes like George Tatnell and Garry Rush, a 10-time national sprint car champion. Some of the big American names came over as well. I remember Dad being blown away by seeing Johnny Rutherford, the multiple Indianapolis 500 winner from Texas who was nicknamed ‘Lone Star JR’, out here in a sprint car and behaving as if he was just a normal bloke. A particular favourite of ours was another American called Steve Kinser. It was mesmerising to watch him – he seemed to be able to put his car wherever he liked, he could pass anywhere at all. Dad had never raced but he was what you would call a petrol-head and I was delighted to go along with him. But even later, when the idea of racing in my own right first began to take hold in my mind, the question remained: ‘How the f#*k are you going to get to F1, coming from Queanbeyan?’ It was a legitimate enough question. You can count the number of Australians who have achieved anything significant in Formula 1 on the fingers of one hand. When I was a boy F1 was in the air because of Alan Jones, and before that because of Jack Brabham, but as far as we were concerned it was a game for Europeans, Americans and Brazilians, not for people like us. * I’d been riding motorbikes since I was a little tacker of about four or five when I had the run of DG’s farm at weekends. Dad would set up little tracks for me and I’d race around for hours on end on my Pee Wee 50. One day I had a massive shunt which knocked the stuffing out of me. I would have been eight at the time and I was covered in blood and black and blue all over. Dad wasn’t too keen to take me back to the farmhouse for fear of incurring the wrath of Disey – my mum. Instead he drove me straight home to Queanbeyan and cleaned me up the best he could. I also had a decent stack with my auntie Pam: I was sitting on the tank, grabbed full throttle and if I remember rightly the two of us cleaned up a fence. Dad had the Yamaha dealership in Queanbeyan for 16 years, but he never encouraged me to get into bikes in a serious way. He once sold a road bike to a fellow who was killed on it a few months later. Dad had felt misgivings about the sale at the time and he took it badly – he felt very sorry for the family. He and I never did anything competitive with bikes, but Bridge Motors did have a little team in motocross and speedway. Dad used to say those kids would ride over the top of each other to win, never mind what the other competitors might do! But it wasn’t until I got to 12 or 13 that I put my foot on the first rung of the motor-racing ladder. One of my schoolmates’ father was doing some racing of his own in midgets, but he also had a go-kart and I was pretty keen to have a go at that. Dad reminded me that the whole Webber family had had a crack at go-karting one time at a fun park up in Surfers Paradise. He wasn’t particularly impressed by my skills on that occasion! But as most motor-racing people will tell you, karting is the perfect way for a budding racing driver to get started. You can drive them as young as seven, or even earlier, and it was through karting that some of F1’s biggest names – men like Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher – were introduced to the sport they would eventually dominate. Karting trains the young driver in precision, car control, basic setting-up of the kart, and the hustle and bustle of racing wheel-to-wheel. I will admit I found it quite intimidating. Those things are pretty quick when you’re only 13 and they don’t have bodywork to protect you – but once you get the hang of it and relax, it’s brilliant. To help me develop my fledgling skills, before delivering pizzas to the wrong addresses I worked at the local indoor go-kart centre, where Mum or Dad had to come and get me, often at two or three in the morning – and I had school the next day. The other boys and I used to finish up there at midnight, then we’d drive the karts for two hours ourselves. There would only be three or four of us but we’d switch the tyre barriers around to make much more advanced tracks than the punters would use. We also used fire extinguishers to wet certain corners on the braking points, the apexes or exits, really mixing up our skill sets and our feel for grip from the tyres. Dare I say it, there were even nights when we’d take the karts out onto the road! The centre was on an industrial estate and at two in the morning it was a very quiet place. The only other traffic we might see would be the cars visiting the nearby red-light district! I guess the karting bug bit me, but at first I was still doing my ball-boy duties for the Raiders and I couldn’t attend all the meetings. By the time I was 15 Dad had bought me a second-hand kart, which we used in 1990 and 1991. On the karting scene there was a meeting roughly once a month out at the Canberra Go-Kart Club. There were six meetings in 1991, the year in which I turned 15, and there would be four heats at each. Dad didn’t actually come to my early races! He was busy building the new service station so I went with my schoolmate Matthew Hinton and John, his dad. In 1990–91 in that second-hand kart we were doing pretty well at meetings in and around Canberra. Then Andy Lawson, who ran the Queanbeyan Kart Centre, custom-built a frame to fit me. Andy was a plant engineer but Dad reckons he could easily have made a living as a race-car engineer in Formula 1. He fabricated his own go-karts, did all the engine preparation and he was able to coax the last ounce of power out of them. Dad insists we owe a great debt to Andy, one of those brilliant backyard engineering blokes that Australia and New Zealand seem to produce who can put something in the lathe and 10 minutes later the component is made. Dad had known of him for quite a while without getting to know him well. Andy also prepared karts for a family called the Dukes. The boy, Ryan, had already won an Australian title; Dad thought he could learn from his father, Ray, and I certainly learned quickly from Ryan. They were what Dad likes to call ‘decent people’: no helmet-throwing, no tantrums, just good, down-to-earth sporting types, the kind of people he was more than happy to be associated with. Around this time Dad made a business decision that had a big impact on both our lives. ‘I never forced Mark into racing,’ he will tell you. ‘He just wanted to do it, he had a natural aptitude for it and he was able to run at the front pretty quickly. It’s also fair to say that the racing was a means to a short-term end: it allowed me to spend more time with Mark than I had been doing. I invested long hours in Bridge Motors, time that took me away from family life, so I decided to lease the service station to Caltex. It was probably the best goal I ever kicked because it gave me two things: money, as it left us comfortably off, and that even more precious commodity, time. It allowed me and Mark to go racing together – and it gave him a privilege I never enjoyed because he was given Fridays off school to travel with me to his next race meeting!’ Through ’93 we kept the Lawson kart and also ran a Clubman with a bigger, more powerful engine. Dad decided we should try our hand in places like Melbourne and Sydney – he loved to see me winning all those races close to home but he had the bigger picture in mind and he felt he needed to throw me in at the deep end. The idea was for me to learn, to improve my racecraft, and competing at Oran Park or down at Corio in Geelong was a good way to do it. I won quite a few races and the 1993 NSW Junior National Heavy title. I wasn’t the right size or weight for karting; I wasn’t an absolute gun but I probably could have done better if Dad had put in the resources others were putting in. On the other hand he was probably aiming a bit higher already. * Halfway through 1993 a well-known face in Australian motor-racing circles, ‘Peewee’ Siddle, ran a Formula Ford trials day at Oran Park. Greg, to give him his real name, was the Australian importer, in partnership with Steve Knott, of the famous and internationally successful Van Diemen race-car brand from the UK. For many decades, Formula Ford was the worldwide entry-level category for aspiring racing drivers. It kicked off in the UK in 1967 and soon spread through Europe and across to the States. It reached Australia in 1970. The idea behind Formula Ford was to provide a basic single-seater car, each with the same engine – they started with Ford Cortina GT power units – and without wings in order to keep the design as simple as possible. The essence of Formula Ford is learning how to handle yourself in ‘traffic’, as we call it, because the lack of wings means the cars can run in close formation and the racing is often spectacular, wheel-to-wheel stuff. The day at Oran Park cost $5000. Ten drivers from Canberra and Queanbeyan – or their families – tipped in $500 each. They made two cars available, one set up for smaller drivers, the other for us taller blokes. I had a go in both and at the end of the day I was 1.6 seconds quicker than anybody else. That was the first time I’d driven a Formula Ford and I thought they were shit-boxes compared to the sharpness and agility of a go-kart! But I enjoyed being in a car with a gearbox, sliding it around, and what I really liked was being on a big track – checking the kerbs, using big lines, coming right out wide through the corners and nearly touching those walls at Oran Park. Dad reckons that day was when the penny dropped: ‘Over a second and a half – that’s light years in motor-racing terms. I couldn’t get my head around the fact that he was going so well, but I figured it couldn’t all be down to the engine because everybody had the same one. I thought, “Maybe he has got some ability after all.” ’ As for me, I was still very young and I believed Formula Vee, an open-wheeler class a step below Formula Ford, was as far as I was ever going to go. Dad was thinking about the path ahead: Formula Ford, on to Formula 3 – the first acquaintance with cars with wings and aerodynamic characteristics – then on to one of several possible stepping-stones to the pinnacle of Formula 1. But that never crossed my mind. Through Peewee (who probably knew more about my ability than Dad did, given his long experience in motor racing) we learned that Craig Lowndes’s 1993 Australian Formula Ford Championship-winning car was available. Dad had a careful look at it, thought it had been pretty well maintained and we bought it, but we did struggle a bit with it in our first year. It was Andy Lawson who set the car up; he’d never worked on a Formula Ford and it was a hard first year for us, especially as we jumped straight into the national series. I didn’t really have much of a clue about setting a race car up. I was still at school; some of my mates and I used to play computer games, but of course they were of limited use when it came to the real thing and there wasn’t a lot of spare time to go and learn on-track rather than on-screen. It’s fair to say that in year one in Formula Ford my feedback to my team was useless, and it hadn’t improved a lot by the time we went into our second season either. That first year Dad and I put about 100,000 kilometres on the old Landcruiser as we criss-crossed this huge country on our way to and from race meetings. The trip from home to Adelaide in South Australia, across the endless Nullarbor Plain to Wanneroo in Western Australia and back to Queanbeyan was 10,000 kilometres on its own. The 1994 Australian Formula Ford Championship consisted of eight rounds, crammed into a six-month schedule from February to July. Our three-man team – Michael Foreman, my go-kart buddy and mechanic, Andy Lawson, my engineer, and me, the driver – had absolutely no experience of the category so we didn’t set the world on fire that first year, but we were up there some of the time: third at Phillip Island was my best result and 30 points meant I finished 14th overall. I also got the chance to compete on the track where my addiction to racing had begun. We went to Adelaide to take part in the non-championship Formula Ford races on the undercard at the Australian Grand Prix. Before we set out I had a monster shunt in the final championship round at Oran Park. I lost control at the dog-leg at the bottom end of the circuit, got on the grass, hit the wall and destroyed the car. It was my first big crash and it hurt! It was a relatively small injury, but a massive wake-up call. Dad had to spend money, and Andy had to spend so much time putting everything back together as best he could – and I spent plenty of cold winter nights in the workshop helping him and Michael to rebuild the car. I remember thinking that this could be the end of the road for me; the shunt had dented my confidence and serious doubts had set in: was I cut out for the job of being a racing driver? Earlier that year the death of three-time Formula 1 World Champion Ayrton Senna in the San Marino Grand Prix had also weighed on me. After watching that Imola race I went to bed expecting that Senna would be okay. When Mum woke me with the terrible news I cried into my cornflakes. Dad sat at the other end of the house because he didn’t want to watch the news reports confirming Senna’s death with me. I didn’t go to school that day; Dad granted me a rare day off. Next day even friends who didn’t follow motor racing tip-toed around me because even they knew what had happened and what it meant to me. It was a nightmare: Ayrton Senna wasn’t supposed to be killed in a racing car, he was invincible. I was shattered. But ultimately neither Senna’s death nor my own Oran Park mishap affected my determination to keep racing. F1 and Ayrton Senna were a long way away from where I was, after all. But by the time we went to Adelaide we were really at the Last Chance Saloon. If we got blown away in these races, with no results to speak of and no cash, we would probably have to pull the pin on the whole thing. But I fell in love with the street track straightaway, and we were quick the whole weekend. So much so that we were on the front row alongside that year’s champion, Steven Richards – and then the bloody battery failed. Once I got going I drove through the whole field on the formation lap to take up my position, which you are not supposed to do. The stewards black-flagged me – the sign that a driver has been disqualified. I was livid, but all I could do was complete the first part of the race and then dutifully pull in. We returned to Queanbeyan spitting chips, but happy that our first crack at Adelaide had gone well despite that final disappointment.