Mark Webber: Le Mans interview 13 | 06 | 2014
PORSCHE RETURNS TO fight for overall victory in the world's greatest endurance race, the Le Mans 24-Hours, for the first time in 16 years this weekend, and leading the challenge is former Red Bull F1 racer Mark Webber.
But the Aussie, whose Porsche 919 hybrid starts Saturday's race from fourth on the 56-car grid, is hoping not to have a repeat of the disappointment he experienced on his debut in the race as a 21-year-old in 1998.
"Bernd Schneider, who I was sharing our Mercedes with, alongside Klaus Ludwig, put the car on pole position," Webber, looking extraordinary lean and fit for a 37-year-old, explained today.
"But just as I was about to get into the car for my opening stint, we had to retire the car because of a steering pump failure. I never even got a chance to do a lap in the race that year."
Webber returned to Le Mans 12 months later, and admits it was the making of him.
On Thursday during qualifying, air got under the front of his Mercedes CLR at Indianapolis. In a split second, the car was airborne.
"It just took off: it actually happened quite a lot to sportcars in that era," he laughed. Everything seemed to happen in slow motion once I became airborne, and everything became very quiet."
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With the car rebuilt, exactly the same thing happened to him again in the Saturday morning warm-up as he hurtled down the Mulsanne straight — a closed-off public road normally used by cars, tractors and HGVs — at more than 200mph.
Hours later, in the race, the Mercedes of Webber's team-mate, Kirkcaldy racer Peter Dumbreck, famously took off, somersaulted and landed in a clearing in the nearby forest. Miraculously no one was injured.
"Those few days were the making of me," Webber continued, "because it was a horrible weekend all round. Things happen for a reason, but it was a horrible experience at the time."
Now returning to sportcars after his impressive career in F1 — where he won nine grands prix and finished on the podium 42 times — he's visibly itching to get back on-track, rather than simply talk about it. Have the cars changed much in the subsequent 15 years?
"The cars, strangely, don't actually feel a lot different to what I drove in the late Nineties," he stated. "The technology is obviously a lot, lot different, but everything else is really just a little bit fast-forward.
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"It's braking later; higher top speeds; the cornering speeds are obviously higher; and we're 12secs a lap faster than when I was here last time, which is massive.
"Basically the cars are just that much more efficient because they're reaching very high speeds on the straights, yet they've got the high performance in technical areas like Porsche Curves.
"Fifteen years in motorsport is a long time in terms of technology and development. The technology then was very basic, and almost Neanderthal to what it is now."
Webber's Porsche, like the cars of his main rivals, including the pole-sitting Toyota, plus Audi, is now all about hybrid technology and harnessing the energy which would normally be wasted by directing it elsewhere in the powertrain.
Does he have the car to win this year round the 8.47-mile track, and add to Porsche's 16 Le Mans wins?
"Look, to do 24 hours and the 5100kms — the length of a full F1 season — you need to have a smooth race," Webber explained. "Keeping the garage time to a minimum is going to be crucial. Many, many times here, it's not been the fastest car that has won the race.
"In my opinion, Toyota are the favourites. Audi are in very good shape. We have done a very impressive job in the space of time we had.
"Let's see how we go. For us to be sitting here saying we have a chance to go for the victory is extremely optimistic. I think if we circulate strongly for a long period of time, learn as much as we can, and get close to the end and we're competitive, then … well anything can happen."
Related: Toyota bags pole at Le Mans
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Jim McGill