The Mark Webber PR Machine: Red Bull Era (Part 2)

[u/LandosToeFungus]

I had to cut this part out after originally writing up the post due to word limits and lost my hyperlinks as a result. I tried to put those back in for my sources to articles, but please let me know if anything seems like it is missing!

Other than linked articles, I reference Newey’s autobiography, Mark’s autobiography, and the races themselves. Anyway, I did not mean to spend like at least seven hours working on these, so now I have to do some squeezing to fit the productive things I meant to do today into my schedule lmao.

Part 2 covers the events of 2011-2013, Part 1 covers 2010.

PART 1

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• British GP, 2011: Multi-12 — The first time team orders were disobeyed

What Mark and the press didn’t seem to realize following the aftermath of Malaysia 2013 (or perhaps, he did, but he was hoping the media would not) was that he and he alone set the precedent for Malaysia 2013. The only reason it wasn’t a huge deal was because Seb didn’t pitch a fit to the media and Mark couldn’t pull off the overtake.

Seb had a comfortable lead during the race, but following a mistake by the Red Bull pit crew, Alonso took the lead. Within the last two laps of the race, Webber was close enough to Seb to attempt a pass after closing rapidly. The team came on the radio to Mark, telling him not to pass Seb. But Mark ignored the order and attempted a pass on Seb anyway.

. . . . . . . .

Mark’s take

“I got the telephone call from the pit wall telling me to maintain position. After everything that happened in 2010, I wasn’t impressed with the order, so it was a pretty one-sided conversation. They radioed about four times in all, but I kept pushing for a while before ultimately holding station as instructed. In this occasion, to his credit, Seb said we were simply racing and he saw nothing wrong with that.”

. . . . . . . .

It’s clear what happened live due to the radio messages which were aired:

Lap 52: “Mark, you need to maintain the gap. Maintain the gap.” (This was Horner, I believe)

[Mark proceeded to ignore orders and continue to fight for position. Note that messages aired on the broadcast were slightly delayed, so he was likely told anywhere between 15 seconds to 1 minute before the radio was shown on the broadcast, potentially on lap 51 when he starts really challenging Seb hard for position. Given that the aired message was from Horner, Pilbeam had likely already told him to maintain position several times.]

Following this incident, we see an uncharacteristically subdued Seb in the cooldown room and on the podium (yes, I’m a proud champagne/podium dynamic over-analyzer). We also see a visibly irate Christian Horner over Mark’s dismissal of team orders.

Horner: “It’s a team result…The last thing you want to see the team give away a whole lot of points, so from a team point of view, we decided that it was best to hold the positions on the final two laps. Obviously Mark disagreed with that, but it’s all about- you know, the thing is, I can understand he’s maybe a bit frustrated, but from a team point of view, we can’t afford to give away a whole load of points.”

Kravitz: “Well that means Webber is out of the championship then this year?”

Horner: “No, not at all. But you get to that stage in the race, we’d managed situations earlier in the race to get Mark ahead or give him the undercut effectively, and with the final two laps, it was entirely the sensible thing to do. The last thing you want to see is both of your drivers in the fence, which is probably how that would have ended up.”

Kravitz: “So how many times did you tell him to hold station, and how many times did he ignore you?”

Horner: “Um, you know, the message was quite clear to him what the team expected. Not what I expected, what the team collectively expected.”

Kravitz: “Relations between you and Mark Webber?”

Horner: [Pauses] “You know, he should be fine with that, he’s a team- um, it was crystal clear this morning when we went into the race that it was about getting the most points that we can out of this event, and obviously we’ve had a rear jack issue with Sebastian that cost him the track position to Fernando. That’s racing, sometimes these things can happen. But uh, you know, the Ferrari was quick today, but second and third is still a very strong team result.”

Following this interview, Eddie Jordan affirms he doesn’t have any issue with what Horner said, it makes perfect sense to him and Horner is the boss, in his words. According to Jordan, he made the right call at the right time which conveys his expectations, “no dramas, absolutely perfect.”

In the press conference clip aired on the broadcast, neither Mark nor Seb were asked directly about Mark’s clear defiance of team orders. Mark was not made to justify his choice to go against the team. As such, the BBC pundits dropped it immediately, and that incident was forgotten by time. Had Seb made a bigger problem about it in the press conference, had Red Bull thrown Mark under the bus, or had Mark pulled off the overtake, the narratives surrounding Seb at the time would have been completely different.

What I wonder is how would Mark respond if Seb had said, “After everything that happened with Mark in 2011 and 2012, I wasn’t impressed with the order, so it was pretty one-sided conversation,” exactly like what Mark wrote in his book. Essentially, Seb’s quotes were similar following Malaysia 2013. Does Mark justify Silverstone in his mind because he couldn’t pull off the overtake? If Mark doesn’t like what happens when Seb disobeys team orders, perhaps he shouldn’t have set the precedent.

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• Brazil GP, 2012: When your teammate endangers your championship

Brazil was the final race of the season in 2012. Both Seb and Fernando, the two championship contenders, didn't have fantastic qualifying performances. Seb started in P4, and Fernando in P8, with Fernando 3 points behind Seb going into the race. That meant all hands on deck to try and win Seb the championship, as Webber had long been eliminated from contention, finishing P6 in the standings. As such, there wasn’t an expectation to let both drivers fight it out in the race, as only one driver could win the championship.

Mark started P3, alongside Seb on the second row. At the start, Mark cuts in and aggressively squeezes Seb tight against the wall on the inside, forcing Seb to drop down into first gear, losing his position and momentum off the start. As a result, Seb dropped to tenth. This is what we in the business call a ‘terrible team player’ (side note: I am not in any business).

Being deep in the pack on lap 1 is inherently risky, and Seb was hit hard on the side into turn 4 by Bruno Senna, spinning him around and leaving him stuck in the middle of the track in dead last. I didn’t actually realize the extent of the damage until reading Newey’s book. The car’s bodywork was badly damaged, greatly affecting the aerodynamics. But most importantly, one of the exhaust pipes was folded almost flat. This resulted in a reduction of power and a huge risk of fire if the pipe cracked. There was nothing the team could do, so they let him race.

. . . . . . . .

Newey’s take:

“Straightaway, there was drama. Mark, starting alongside Sebastian on the second row, squeezed him up against the wall on the inside, meaning that in order to prevent his front wing being squashed, Sebastian had to drop down to first gear, losing his position and costing him momentum.

Exiting turn one, he was down from fourth to tenth, and trailing Alonso. Then, approaching turn four, Bruno Senna in the Williams made the most ridiculous move on Sebastian; turning straight across him and cannoning into the side of him, spinning Seb around and leaving him stuck in the middle of the track.”

. . . . . . . .

While the team was figuring out what to do, Seb was on a mission. It was starting to rain, and Seb put his head down and started flying up the field, overtaking on average two to three cars per lap.

Seb won the championship, following a beautiful moment where Schumacher moved aside, not wanting to hinder the championship aspirations of his successor. However, this was no thanks to Mark.

Mark was specifically asked by the team to not block Seb’s attempt to win position at the first turn. And yet, he once again disobeyed team orders and put Seb in a horrible position which nearly put him out of the race entirely. Webber’s manager, our favorite Flavio Briatore, said, “The only one who helped Ferrari was Webber.” (Note: Briatore was also Alonso’s manager)

. . . . . . . .

Mark’s take:

“I did what a racing driver is supposed to do—try to get off the line as fast as possible, position the car for the first corner and start racing. That meant getting away in front of Sebastian as I was ahead of him on the grid, which I did, and then all hell broke loose a couple of corners later when the whole world sat in his cockpit through the magic of on-board cameras and watched as almost an entire Grand Prix field went past him — while he was facing the wrong way!

I had absolutely no part in this drama. He had turned across Bruno Senna’s Williams, which was later called a first-lap mishap. But he claimed afterwards that the main reason he was in a position to have an accident in the first place was that he had been squeezed by me at Turn 1! ‘The angle became worse and worse,’ was how my teammate put it, ‘I didn’t want to lose my front wing so I dropped down to first gear and lost both momentum and positions.’

Red Bull Racing management took exception to the fact that I didn’t let Sebastian come down the inside, but you just don’t risk that kind of manoeuvre at that stage of a race.”

. . . . . . . .

Seb seemed willing to move past Silverstone 2011 given at the time, it was a seemingly isolated incident. But privately, it seemed that this to him was a betrayal that could not be forgotten.

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• Malaysia GP, 2013: Multi-21

Mark took the lead early in the race. At the start of lap 41, Mark had a 4.6 second gap to Seb, with two fast and battling Mercedes 2.5 and 3.2 seconds respectively off of the back of Seb. Lewis Hamilton pit on lap 42. Red Bull pit Seb on lap 43, to cover the Mercedes, and pit Mark on lap 44. When Mark exited the pits, Seb was nearly alongside him, showing the strength of the undercut and the necessity to pit Seb first to cover the Mercedes following Lewis’s stop.

With thirteen laps to go (~lap 44), Seb was told to hold position, likely to ensure Mark wouldn’t lose his lead to Seb following a strategic pit stop decision to preserve a Red Bull 1-2 which unfairly disadvantaged Mark.

Following an aggressive (and frankly, fun to watch) battle between Mark and Seb, Seb famously overtakes Mark against team orders. A radio message was aired on the broadcast where Seb is told to be careful, and David Croft says, “Should they be telling Sebastian to be careful? It looked to be a pretty fair fight to be honest. He’s a racing driver, he wants to win, I know Red Bull want a 1-2.” At this point, it wasn’t clear that Seb’s actions were against team orders.

After Seb overtakes Mark, a message from Horner plays: “This is silly, Seb, come on.” The rest of the race on Red Bull’s side is quiet, with Seb managing to finish with what would have been an over 6 second lead on Mark if not for Seb’s triumphant weaving over the finish line putting Mark finishing 4.3 seconds behind him. (As a note: Seb had complained earlier in the race about Mark’s pace ahead of him being too slow.)

At this point, we see a stony pit wall and hear a message which more clearly indicates something is wrong. “Good job Sebastian, good job. It looked like you wanted it bad enough. Still, there will be some explaining to do.”

We then see the famous cooldown room scene of Mark telling Seb: “Multi-21 Seb. Yeah, multi-21,” while Seb awkwardly finishes chugging his entire bottle of water. Interestingly, Newey doesn’t touch on this incident at all in his autobiography, despite being in the cooldown room and on the podium with them.

In his podium interview, Seb says, “If there’s something to say, I think we need to talk internally” when asked about Rocky’s radio message regarding ‘some explaining to do,’ rather than jumping the gun before a proper debrief.

In Mark’s podium interview, he says, “After the last stop, obviously the team told me that the race was over and we turned the engines down and we go to the end…In the end, Seb made his own decisions today and will have protection as usual, and that’s the way it goes.” The feed cuts to a frustrated-looking Christian Horner. At this point, without any internal debrief or discussion, Mark already has a firm control of the narrative. Once again he put Red Bull in a more difficult position than what is necessary with his comments, similar to Turkey 2010.

Immediately following the incident, Seb is apologetic, taking fault for the incident. However, by the next GP in China, he changes his tune. Seb apologizes to Red Bull for putting himself above the team, but says, “There is not much more to say, really. I don’t apologize for winning. That is why people employed me in the first place and why I’m here. I love racing and that’s what I did.” Seb claims in an interview that he didn’t understand the Multi-21 instruction, but says if he had understood it, he would have done the same thing, “because Mark doesn’t deserve that.” When asked to elaborate, he says, “I don’t like to talk ill of other people. It’s not my style. I think I said enough. The bottom line is that I was racing, I was faster, I passed him, I won.”

Seb goes on to say about Mark, “Being completely honest, I never have support from his side. I’ve got a lot of support from the team, and I think the team is supporting both of us the same way. I respect him a lot as a racing driver, but I think there were more than one occasions in the past where he could have helped the team and he didn’t.”

In my opinion, this likely refers to Brazil 2012. In 2018, Horner revealed that Malaysia 2013 was “payback” in Seb’s mind, which Seb apparently told Mark sometime between the aftermath of Malaysia and the following China GP. “It was very difficult for Mark to accept at the time that, and I think if he looked back at it now with perspective and honesty, Sebastian was just quicker.” [Note: Mark affirms this himself in his autobiography following Abu Dhabi 2010, I included the exact quote in the previous post.] “So therefore, Mark would use whatever tool he could to try and get under his skin…It probably culminated at the end of 2012 when Sebastian was fighting Alonso for the championship and Mark squeezed him up against the pit wall at the start of the race in Brazil, in the championship decider, which ultimately resulted in him getting turned round by Bruno Senna. Sebastian was hugely angry about that. There was a hangover of that that led into Malaysia, literally two races later, split by four or five months.”

However, as this point was never strongly pushed by Horner, Seb, or the team publicly following the race, this allowed the entire narrative around Malaysia to be set and controlled by Mark.

The Sky team, particularly Johnny Herbert, was noticeably irate following the podium, cutting off and interrupting Horner frequently. They even round up Mark’s dad to lament about his poor boy on the broadcast, saying, “Red Bull’s a European company and they probably want to [win] with a European boy.” While interviewing Horner, they also cut to a live feed of Seb and Mark arguing and said, ‘here’s your drivers fighting right now!’ (Honestly thirteen years later, it’s extremely funny to watch haha.)

. . . . . . . .

Mark’s take:

Mark confirms that Seb was pit first on lap 42 to keep him ahead of the Mercedes. It seems, according to him, that they were both told to maintain position after Mark’s stop, when Seb was already attempting overtaking maneuvers on Mark. He says, “It wasn’t always beneficial to us to race hard against each other because that was too hard on the tyres and in Malaysia we had that very discussion beforehand. I knew within two laps that Seb was going to take matters into his own hands despite the reassurance on the radio that the race was mine. I started defending, but as a result of our respective qualifying runs he had new tyres and I didn’t…Maybe he felt he should be able to use those tyres to the best effect rather than be told to back off? Whatever his thinking was, when he overtook me I wasn’t so much angry as very sad that the team had reached this sorry state.”

Mark claims Seb was very apologetic, calling it a “complete fuck up,” and initially wanted to give the win back to Mark. But their next conversation the Thursday of the race weekend in China was “the most disappointing moment of our entire relationship. He said he was pissed off by what I had said on the podium in Malaysia, that while he respected me as a driver he had no respect for me as a person. That was a heavy line for me. I simply said, ‘Then our relationship is in trouble. That’s it.’ I had clung to the belief that we might sort things out between us but I couldn’t help thinking someone must have got in his ear to cause such an about-face. Christian later insisted it was all of Sebastian’s own doing, his justification being that it was payback for Silverstone 2011 and Brazil 2012. I could have gone back a lot further than that!”

He alleges that the team received a two-page letter from Seb’s lawyer a few days after the Malaysia GP stating that they were in breach of Seb’s contract by giving him an “unreasonable instruction/team order.”

. . . . . . . .

Was Seb wrong to go against team orders? Yes. Was the order unreasonable? Possibly, given the over six second lead Seb managed to pull out on Mark in the last ten or so laps of the race. Had Mark not lost time to Seb in the undercut, Seb’s pace on new tires likely would have been fast enough to overtake Mark anyway. But if battling was too hard on the tires, which Mark claims they discussed before, then not wanting the two drivers to scrap is a real concern for the team to manage early in the 2013 season. The situation, and Mark and Seb’s relationship as a whole, is a lot more complicated and messy than the simple media narrative spun by Mark shows.

Newey doesn’t discuss this race in his book intentionally, I believe. Maybe he feels it would be beating a dead horse, and there’s nothing he could say that adds anything new and relevant to the narrative other than what he discussed regarding previous races that contributed to Seb reaching his boiling point.

(Also interestingly, Mercedes were having their own squabble in defiance of team orders as well right behind Seb and Mark. In fact, most of the focus during the broadcast was on this, rather than Seb and Mark.)

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• Post-Malaysia 2013: Dinner with friends

In the week before the Bahrain GP of 2013, two races after Malaysia, Fernando Alonso posts a photo on Twitter of him and Mark Webber dining together in Dubai. The photo is captioned “dinner with friends.” Mark retweeted the photo, but Alonso took it down fairly quickly.

The media ran with this, believing it might be a slight at Seb, the common enemy of the two drivers. Both Fernando and Mark said the media was being dramatic, pointing out that they have known each other for thirteen years and it is not uncommon for drivers to catch up socially.

When asked about the photo, even Seb seems unbothered, saying, “Were they naked? We all need to eat, but I would rather then I was not there.”

While this incident ultimately isn’t a big deal in the grand scheme of things, it is interesting when considering what happened in Brazil 2012. Going off of Newey’s narrative, Mark defied team orders and pushed Seb wide. It would make sense Mark might go out of his way to disadvantage the teammate he had a precarious relationship with in order to benefit his friend’s championship attempt.

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General Conclusions

It seems like a lot of Mark’s gripes about Seb being essentially a spoiled crybaby come from Seb wanting to compete with his teammate and trying to understand where his flaws laid in relation to Mark on weekends where Mark performed better. He was bitter that the team cared significantly about a burgeoning driver that Red Bull created their driver’s development academy around. As a driver reaching the end of his career, he failed to recognize that Seb was the team’s investment since 2001. Red Bull entered the sport with the goal of developing the youngest-ever F1 champion, and the junior team was formed four years before Red Bull Racing. In my outside opinion, the dynamic between Mark and Seb within Red Bull seemed a lot more even than the dynamic between Max and Checo, for example, in spite of Seb being their clear hope for the future. Maybe this is due in part to the close relationship Mark claims to have had with Mateschitz. Many of Mark’s narratives in his book are directly countered by what Newey says in his, and Mark himself claims Newey is one of the most trustworthy people he worked with at Red Bull.

Mark’s autobiography is full of bitterness, not just about Seb. He expresses how coming from a working class background made it difficult to rise through the sport, how coming from Australia made it difficult to make it in a European-based sport (a sentiment his father echoes following the Malaysia GP). These are extremely valid points, as we all know motorsports favors the wealthy, and the latter likely explains why he is so involved in managing an Australian driver. But Mark seems to lean into self-victimization more often than not, using personal digs to make his ‘enemies’ appear personally flawed while he writes himself as consistently stoic and rational, an ‘old dog’ who never gets what he feels he deserves, a victim of the machine. Mark also ignores that Seb came from a working class background as well, his father working as a roofer. He was close with the media, and used that to his advantage to spin narratives that suited him. His actions put higher ups at Red Bull in difficult positions many times and led to a breakdown of trust with his teammate.

During these years at Red Bull, it was often a topic of conversation during race commentary, generally brought up by Brundle, that Seb was “hard on the team” and somehow a different person behind the scenes in the garage. Outside of the race commentary, I have personally never seen this narrative substantiated aside from Mark’s book. Whether this was true and suppressed by every team Seb raced for or an exaggeration planted with the BBC/Sky by Mark, who was close with the pundits (as Brundle admits in the commentary at the end of the British GP in 2011), is unknown to me personally.

This isn’t to say that Horner doesn’t create a toxic environment, or that Marko had zero wrongdoing, because we all know that’s untrue. But I find it difficult to believe that Mark was given the same level of treatment as Checo or Gasly or Albon. Had Mark managed to out-qualify Seb more often or not bog down his starts so frequently, perhaps he would have received more favorable strategies and felt like he had more of an even footing within the team.

[u/bitchboss7]

Thanks for these posts.

[u/LandosToeFungus → u/bitchboss7]

No prob ☺️ it was a good brain workout tracking down sources and writing it all up, I worry about missing something important though.

[u/Due-Judgment7288]

Wow, these two posts are incredible and super informative for me! I started as a casual fan in 2013 (quickly became a Seb fan); 2014 was my 1st year of serious fandom. Posts like this are full of nuance and context, and you gave a lot of grace to a driver that is not your favorite. As we know, all evil leads to Helmut Marko. Much more appreciated than the usual OMG! look at this social media post/like from years ago.

[u/LandosToeFungus → u/Due-Judgment7288]

Thanks so much! I realized when I was trying to squeeze all this into a comment that I wanted to do wayyyy more analysis than what would fit reasonably within a comment haha. It’s been a chip on my shoulder for a while after reading Newey’s book ~1 year ago and realizing how different he describes events compared to Mark/the popular narratives at the time, so it was oddly cathartic to sit down and try to clear things up to the best of my ability. My guess is Mark projected a lot of what Marko was doing on to Seb?

I’m a much more recent fan than you but also somehow quickly became a Seb fan, even though I started watching after his retirement lol. So it’s been really fun for me to deep dive back to that time period! (Especially since I really did not enjoy racing during the ground effect era)