Mark Webber could be forgiven for wanting to pinch himself just to make sure that the past year hasn’t been a dream. This is not surprising really, for a driver who, in his quest to become the first Australian in over a decade to hold down a regular place in Formula 1, has managed to attract the patronage of two very different sporting giants – the Aussie Rugby Union star David Campese and Mercedes sports chief Norbert Haug.
“Every morning when I wake up I’m so happy,” admits 21-year-old Webber, who began 1997 struggling to raise the budget to graduate to the British Formula 3 Championship and ended it on the same Mercedes junior programme that pushed Michael Schumacher, Heinz-Harald Frentzen and Jan Magnussen into F1.
“I remember when I was karting looking at pictures of Schumacher, Frentzen and [Karl] Wendlinger [who formed Mercedes’s junior sportscar squad of the early ’90s], and thinking ‘imagine that’. And here I am now, being looked after by Mercedes.”
Webber is happy to admit that without finance first from Campese and then Mercedes he would never have completed an F3 campaign that saw him finish fourth in the British championship as well as in the end-of-season Macau Grand Prix blue riband. “David [Campese] dug me out once,” he says, “and then Mercedes dug me out again in the middle of the season.
“After I won the Formula Ford Festival at the end of 1996, I needed to build a profile in Australia to try to help with sponsorship to take me into British F3,” he explains. “I wanted a link with David that I could dangle in front of sponsors. The connection with David is that we are both from the same place in New South Wales; in fact, we were born in the same hospital in Queanbeyan. When we got in contact, he said that he was setting up a sports marketing company.”
Webber explains that, although Campese’s company made a not insignificant contribution to his F3 budget, the coffers were all but empty after five races in the Autosport-backed British F3 series. “I’d put my head on the block and taken a lot of risks to do F3, but our backs were firmly against the wall even though we’d managed to get some good results.
Webber grabbed attention winning the Formula Ford Festival at Brands Hatch in 1996
Photo by: Andre Vor / Sutton Images
“Then I had the best phone call a young driver can ever receive: it was Norbert Haug to say he wanted me to do a test in the CLK-GTR,” says Webber, he had…
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