Free Aussie Grit by Mark Webber Page A

weekend program
Wide World of Sports
, where skilled presenters like Ken Sutcliffe and Tim Sheridan worked very hard to get stories about me on air – Tim even brought a crew to Snetterton as early as 1995 to watch me in a Formula Ford race. But once again – and understandably so – there were just so many people asking me that familiar question: ‘How the f#*k is a boy from Queanbeyan going to get into Formula 1?’
    Once again it was Yellow Pages that helped us fan the flames. Bob Copp and his colleagues were particularly keen on seeing progress. They didn’t want to see me in Formula Vauxhall, Formula Renault or any of those other categories that were starting to flourish back then. ‘Formula 3 or nothing’ was their attitude, and they were prepared tosupport us to get there because it’s a category that people can understand, especially in Europe. Double F1 World Champion Mika Häkkinen had won the title in 1990, and the man who later put together the longest career in F1 history, Rubens Barrichello, succeeded him in 1991.
    There weren’t many drivers going from Formula Ford straight to F3 at that time. A few had done that in the past, Ayrton Senna for one, but in the mid-nineties a lot of younger drivers were going to the middle categories to get a bit more experience before they moved into Formula 3. We didn’t have the time or money to do that: we had to skip a year at university, you might say, missing out part of the apprenticeship to catch up.
    The overall cost for the UK F3 season was £245,000. Yellow Pages and Dad put a hundred grand in between them – Dad had had 15 months to recover from the shock of 1995 and there was also some inheritance money from my grandfather. We put it all together to buy a Formula 3 car. We were going to do the season with Alan Docking – the man who had given me the F3 test on the back of my Brands Hatch performance. ‘We’ll just go with the flow, mate, and see how we go,’ was Docko’s approach. Typical Australian way …
    So we bought a brand-new Dallara race car with a Mugen Honda engine, which was the best engine-chassis combination available. The way it works is that the driver brings a racing budget with him in exchange for the structure, the technical support and the experience of the team that signs him up. After four races we were fourth in the British F3 championship. I started with two sixth places at Donington Park and Silverstone, finished the Thruxtonweekend without adding to my total, but then I won the fourth race at Brands Hatch on the full Grand Prix circuit, not the shorter layout used for the Formula Ford Festival, starting from pole position and setting fastest race lap as well. We were taking some big scalps like the works Renault team, or Paul Stewart Racing, the title-winning team set up by Jackie Stewart and his son. We were up against some pretty reasonable outfits and we certainly didn’t get the same Honda engines as PSR! That was the only race I won that year, but I was consistent and quick everywhere else.
    But after the fourth or fifth race we were out of cash. The money from Yellow Pages and Dad had stretched only as far as acquiring the car and getting going. We hadn’t paid Docko the money to continue racing for him and his patience was being stretched pretty thin.
    Then, not for the first time, Annie had a brainwave.
    By that time David Campese, the winger Dad once played with in the same Queanbeyan Rugby XV, had become one of Australia’s greatest-ever players. Peter Windsor, a fellow Aussie and all-round sports fan who was team manager at Williams before becoming a respected motor-sport journalist, had been following my progress and suggested that I try to get in front of Campo somehow. The best chance would be while David was in the UK on his final Wallabies tour before he retired to set up a sports management company back in Sydney. Peter gave Campo a quick snapshot of who I was and what I was doing. He also found out when