Mark Webber's Test of Endurance

Mark Webber walks and talks like a man happy with his lot right now. Less than a season out of Formula 1, and he’s relishing the new challenge presented to him by Porsche in the FIA World Endurance Championship. Or, in words you might expect from a no-nonsense Australian, he’s “bloody enjoying it.”

“I couldn’t be happier at the moment and F1 isn’t something that I miss at all,” he says. “I’m loving a new challenge and I’m loving being with a great marque like Porsche, and being part of its comeback with all the history that entails.”

Getting more specific on the aspects of his new career path that give him the most satisfaction and he says he’s “loving working with the engineers” as Porsche develops its new 919 Hybrid LMP1 contender. He finds “testing very rewarding, because of the progress we are making.” And working closely with his two teammates in the No. 14 Porsche, Timo Bernhard and Brendon Hartley, is something he’s “getting a real kick out of right now.”

Then there’s the chance “to do a stint and be within a tenth or two every lap for an hour.” That’s an oblique reference to his final seasons in F1 on the quirky, high-degradation Pirelli tire.

“It’s like a tennis player trying to hit the white line every shot,” he continues. “It was something I wasn’t able to do in F1 at the end. I’m not knocking F1; it’s just different. But it’s really nice to be able to just focus on your driving and get great satisfaction out of it, and the way you do that is operating in a very tight window.”

Webber’s second sports car career – don’t forget his two seasons with Mercedes in 1998-’99 and a near miss in the FIA GT Championship in the first of those seasons – has proved rewarding so far.

“It’s been a pretty reasonable start, I have to say,” offers the 37-year old. “Our biggest achievement of the season by a long shot was our attempt on Le Mans.”

The No. 20 Porsche driven by Webber, Bernhard and Hartley was leading the race in the 22nd hour – and on course for a second-place finish behind the chasing Audi that eventually won the race – when it retired with engine failure. That dramatically exceeded the expectations of a marque whose rhetoric was supremely respectful of the history of Le Mans and the reputations of LMP1-H rivals Audi and Toyota coming into the event.

“You have to take your hat off to everyone for leading laps so deep into the race,” says Webber. “There was a bit of luck involved and a bit of attrition, but you don’t get to be hanging around at the front with a couple of hours to go if you haven’t got a lot of things right. That’s the biggest feather in our cap so far.”

The chances of a victory were remote, given that a handling imbalance that had afflicted the car since Saturday evening left it some way short of the pace of the winning Audi driven by Andre Lotterer, Marcel Fassler and Benoit Treluyer as it recovered from technical problems of its own. But Webber most definitely thought that a podium was on the cards when he climbed back aboard the 919 for the run to the finish on Sunday afternoon.

“When I got back in the car for the final stint, she was a bit sore and a bit tired, but I thought we had a good shot at making it home,” says Webber. “But that’s Le Mans – there’s something waiting to trip you up around every corner.”

Webber’s own performance at Le Mans inevitably came under scrutiny: he was, after all, the newly arrived big shot from F1. The statistics reveal that he was slightly slower than co-drivers Hartley and Bernhard, who were in turn a pinch slower than their teammates in the No. 14 car, thanks to the handling problem mentioned earlier. But there’s no worry on Webber’s part there.

“I’m very relaxed on my contribution in terms of my driving,” he says. “The track on which I have the least experience is Le Mans. I certainly wasn’t keen on being super-adventurous during the race to see where I could improve. The goal was very clear: to keep the car circulating.”

Webber, of course, has gone to Le Mans in the past. Twice he was on the entry list with Mercedes back in the late 1990s, but it should be pointed out that neither time did he actually take part in the race: in 1998 his Mercedes-Benz CLK-LM was out of the event with engine failure before he got to drive; and the following year, his Merc CLR was famously withdrawn after its second aerial incident of the event in the race-day warm up.

Webber thinks that his limited experience from 1998 and ’99 was actually of no help at all in 2014.

“It wasn’t worth having,” he explains. “In actual fact, it was worse to have that experience because the braking points were so far off compared with today. It actually took me a bit of time to adjust properly.”

Porsche returned to the pinnacle of sports car racing in 2014 proclaiming only modest ambitions. There was talk of the odd podium and proving that the 919 Hybrid was competitive, but victories? Such talk was noticeable by its absence – which was fair enough, given the complexity of the latest breed of LMP1 machines and Porsche’s lack of recent experience in chasing overall victories.

As Fritz Enzinger, Porsche’s vicepresident LMP1, noted: “People are expecting victories from us, because we’ve won Le Mans 16 times, but we shouldn’t forget that the last one was in 1998.” But three races down, and Circuit of The Americas next, those goals – a podium, proof of competitiveness – have been achieved: the former, first time out at Silverstone in April when Webber, Bernhard and Hartley took third; the second at Spa, where the sister car earned pole, albeit in mixed conditions, and led the opening stint.

That’s inevitably led to a tentative revision of those aspirations…

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