Free Aussie Grit by Mark Webber Page B

David was flying back to Australia, so he gave me the heads-up and off I went in my B-reg with a copy of my CV and sponsorship proposal tucked under my arm to stalk David at Heathrow. I handed the documents overto him and said if he was feeling bored on the 24-hour trip back to Australia he might like to read my proposal. When he got back he said he would be interested in managing my commercial affairs in Australia, and that’s how our association started.
    But what Ann was proposing in early 1997 went way beyond that. Some months after David agreed to represent me, she picked up the telephone in the middle of the English night, rang Campo and put our future in his hands. I had gone to bed that night destroyed, convinced we had reached the end of our journey. David’s response – as an individual, not as a businessman – was phenomenal: overnight he sent the money we needed to cover what was owing to Docko and enough to get us through the next couple of races. While it was not enough to keep us going for long, it was an extraordinary gesture that let us battle on. It was also a lesson I have never forgotten about hunger, determination – and the need to lend an occasional hand.
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    While Ann and I were going cap in hand to Campo, a quite different avenue was beginning to open up for us. At the Australian Grand Prix in March 1997 I introduced myself to Norbert Haug at the official Grand Prix Ball where Yellow Pages always took a table, not only to entertain their own guests but also as an opportunity for me to network with F1 names. I’m not sure where I summoned up the courage to approach Norbert, but I seem to remember Ann pushing me towards him!
    Norbert was the man in charge of the Mercedes racing program, which at that time supplied F1 engines to themighty McLaren team, and his influence spread far and wide through the Mercedes-Benz empire. This 20-year-old Aussie gave him his card and said, ‘Hi, I’m Mark Webber, I won the Formula Ford Festival last year, I’m doing Formula 3 this year and I wondered if you would mind if I kept you in touch with my results.’
    To my surprise he said, ‘Thanks, no problem,’ and Ann was good about making sure we kept him informed of my progress. We weren’t totally ripping up trees but we were getting good results, and she was determined to make people aware of what we were trying to do. In those pre-internet days that meant getting the results out – good, bad or indifferent – by the now antiquated method of faxing them. We sent them to Norbert and anyone who might be half-interested in following a young Aussie’s journey as he tried to come up through the ranks. It was a team effort: Ann and I would come home from a race meeting on Sunday evening shattered, but both of us would still be at the fax machine in the early hours of Monday morning, punching in more than 30 individual numbers! I was always reminding Annie to make sure her release didn’t run on to two pages because it then took twice as long to feed the sheets into the machine.
    As things turned out, the fax mill worked. One morning – 15 May 1997, to be precise, just as I was getting ready for the sixth round of the F3 series at Croft up in North Yorkshire – I’d just jumped out of the shower to answer the phone at the top of the stairs. Luckily I sat down to take the call, otherwise I might have fallen down the bloody stairs.
    It was Norbert Haug himself on the other end of the line. It seemed Gerhard Berger, who was then driving forBenetton in what would turn out to be his last season as a Grand Prix driver, was unwell. Regular Mercedes sports-car driver Alex Wurz, an Austrian like Berger, was going to stand in for him.
    ‘Alex drives with Bernd Schneider for us,’ said Norbert. ‘Do you want to come and do the Nürburgring sports-car race in his place?’
    It blew me away, being asked to race at one of the most famous circuits in the world, up there in the Eifel Mountains in Germany, for one of the