Australian Mark Webber trumped his Red Bull F1 team in securing his future beyond F1 by signing with the Porsche factory sports car team late last year.
From 2014 Webber will spearhead the German giant’s tilt at further endurance race glories – a fact announced last Thursday on Porsche’s own motorsport website.
So despite all the internal team politics and skullduggery masterminded at Red Bull by Austrian Dr Helmut Marko to favour Sebastian Vettel, Webber has had the last laugh by securing a very lucrative offer even before the first Grand Prix of 2013 – thus thwarting any attempt by Marko to leave him ‘high-and-dry’ at season-end.
Earlier this year, Webber hosted some of the international F1 journalists to a dinner in Melbourne prior to the Australian Grand Prix, including a close friend of your Car Showroom correspondent who told us at the time: “Mark is in a great frame of mind and I reckon he’s already ‘inked’ his 2014 deal.” The thinking then - and until last week - was that Webber was on his way to Ferrari to replace Felipe Massa. Even another friend of Car Showroom, an Italian F1 journalist, asked us for Webber background material as he too was convinced the Aussie would be lining-up for the ‘Prancing Horse’ in 2014.
Clearly Webber’s Melbourne dinner for his mates in the F1 media was because even then he knew he would not be back at Albert Park in 2014. Although the deal to go sports car racing with Porsche is not without some irony - Webber’s last race in sports cars, for Mercedes-Benz, almost killed him when aerodynamic problems sent his racer somersaulting off the Mulsanne Straight at Le Mans at more than 300km/h.
The other sub-plot to this, as Webber mentioned to a couple of journalists at Silverstone, is the 2014 F1 technical regulations which sees the introduction of new turbocharged 1.6-litre V6 engines. The F1 ‘Bush Telegraph’ is saying the Mercedes-Benz engine is already producing the best performance while Red Bull’s all-new Renault engine - which has just been shown for the first time - is a tad behind.
So with his post-2013 deal done and nothing to lose, are the gloves now off in the Webber V Vettel dual? Will the Aussie help Vettel to another World Championship or is it ‘Payback Time’ for all those races where Webber’s chances have been scuttled to allow Vettel to win?
Well last night’s dramatic British Grand Prix was inconclusive on that front, but we’ve got a feeling we haven’t heard the last of the Red Bull F1 politics. After-all Webber is a rugby league fanatic - a former Ball-Boy for the Canberra Raiders team in fact – so he’s familiar with terms like: “A Square-Up”, “Going The Biff”…and how we play State Of Origin!
At Silverstone last night, Vettel retired from the race lead with just a few laps to go with a broken gearbox allowing Petronas Mercedes-Benz driver Nico Rosberg to back-up his Monaco victory with a win in Britain.
Webber, with Australian tennis ace Lleyton Hewitt in his garage, turned-in the drive of the race to storm from dead last on lap one (after a turn one clash) to finish second just 0.76 seconds behind Rosberg in second.
Ferrari driver Fernando Alonso was third ahead of Lewis Hamilton (Mercedes-Benz), Kimi Raikkonen (Lotus), Felipe Massa (Ferrari), Adrian Sutil (Force India) and Australian Daniel Ricciardo (Torro Rosso). Ricciardo’s career-best performance at Silverstone (he started from fifth) was timely as he’s in the frame to snare Webber’s vacant seat at Red Bull.
But once again a string of dramatic tyre failures cast a pall over yet another Grand Prix. Pirelli introduced a new Kevlar construction tyre for the British Grand Prix but it seems a high circuit temperature (31 degrees) and drivers running over kerbs brought about some spectacular explosions of mostly the left-rear tyres.
Cars stopping to change tyres were showing signs of damage on the inside of the left rear (indicating the drivers were straddling the kerbs) and after two safety car interventions were required to clear the track of tyre debris, Pirelli engineers instructed the teams to raise the tyre pressures by 2.0psi (most F1 cars run rear tyre pressures in the range of 18-19psi except Red Bull who sometimes run as low as 16psi).
Vetell’s failure to score points has closed the championship ahead of next week’s German Grand Prix. Vettel heads to his home race on 132 points from Alonso (111), Raikkonen (98), Hamilton (89), Webber (87) and Rosberg (82).
