Yahoo Autos Mark Webber Didn't Love Le Mans
YOU MEET PEOPLE IN THIS JOB. I first met Mark Webber in college, though, watching F1 on TV. Maybe not so much met as shouted at, across airwaves and distance. His car would come on screen, and my friends and I would yell “Mahk Webbah!” in this terrible fake Australian accent, every lap. Possibly because Webber is Australian. Also-lest I paint an incomplete picture-because we were idiots.
Then I met him for real. Several months ago, in the Algarve, a region of Portugal that looks a lot like Southern California. Portuguese water dogs hail from the Algarve. So does Bonnie Tyler, who sang “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” She lives there part of the year and thus bears a resemblance, on paper, to the average German car executive. Every Teutonic car suit I’ve met has loved Portugal in the winter and seemed ported in from the video for an Eighties power ballad. German car companies launch cars in Portugal for the same reason that American car companies launch cars in California: It’s convenient, and the heart of the machine is unlikely to be eclipsed. Good roads, good weather, close to home.
Webber, now retired from driving, has become a Porsche brand ambassador. Like me, he was in the Algarve for the launch of the 2018 911 GT2 RS. The event dinner-these things always have dinners-was preceded by a cocktail hour. I didn’t recognize him at first, back to the crowd, talking with a few engineers. He looked like any other unreasonably healthy person, with nice clothes and shoulders like cut glass.
Being a person of both class and taste, I day-dreamed about throwing a pie at his head on principle. Then he turned around. A voice in my head apologized to no one in particular, then hollered like a dingus. (Mahk!)
He sat down at my table. We fell into conversation. The man gamely answered questions about Le Mans-he drove a Porsche 919 there from 2014–2016-plus supercars and the off-record oddities of F1. He told several bougie and charming stories that alluded to the kind of life you’d expect from one of the planet’s premier pro athletes. He was about to hop a plane to Asia, he said, for a WEC race. He was saving to buy a piece of land in New Zealand, large and green, where he could build a dirt-bike track and keep a stack of KTMs. He talked about his various 911s-a 2.7 RS, a 997 GT2 RS.
It was the kind of discussion where you find yourself reveling in someone else’s success, but also feeling increasingly silly about any life choices that kept you from, say, getting paid to see the world from inside a multimillion-dollar piece of carbon-fiber.
Halfway through the meal, I asked some question that prompted a long answer. Webber picked at a salad and began talking. I slowly buttered a piece of bread and considered his words. Plus my vanilla-pudding abs and the physical rigors of being a contractually obligated pro driver. The butter was salty and warm and spread like cake icing. The bread smelled like campfire. The crust crackled in my fingers and left bits of carbonized flour on the plate.
His body is almost surely a temple, I thought. What a pain in the keister that must be. My body is also a temple, but it has graffiti on the walls and a few moldy take-out boxes on the front steps and maybe also a weathered sign out front reading NO TRESPASSING: HAZARDOUS RADIATION. I eat things, not always with good intentions. I exercise, but rarely enough.
The butter did that fresh-butter thing, where the smell reverses through your nose and wafts around your head as you chew.
We discussed the nature of sports cars, old and new. How much testing it took to make the 919’s headlights work at 210 mph. A usable pattern that didn’t blind traffic. So much frustration, the drivers joked about folding a team engineer into the car’s dinky cockpit, just to share how challenging it was, how little they could see.
I conducted a brief mental tally of the endurance races I’ve been fortunate enough to enter. None produced 200 mph. Certainly not at night. I think I saw 120 mph in a Plymouth Neon at Buttonwillow at 3:00 a.m. once.
“I always liked Le Mans,” Webber said, “but I never came to love it.”
You do not hear those words without asking why.
“It was too . . . French. But your senses are so heightened. You smell everything from the car. Even trackside barbecues. If someone goes off, you can smell the grass.”
“Even on the Mulsanne?”
“Speed didn’t matter. It was always there.”
My mind vapor-locked, a mash of envy and dreamy France smells. They brought dessert without asking. A small army of waiters, plates at shoulder height. Two cones of ice cream, hollow centers, in a bowl. Then a tureen of fresh strawberry syrup, thick as lava. It fell over the ice cream in slow motion, layering crimson.
Webber watched as the waiter poured his. A pained look. A third waiter appeared, noticing distress. There was a short, hushed discussion. It was made clear that the plate would find another table. Maybe the kitchen. Someone would eat it. The dish disappeared. Webber’s shoulders relaxed.
I stared at my cones. I briefly toyed with the idea of not eating them. I flashed back to the fastest thing I have ever driven, a 1990s GTP prototype I tried at Laguna Seca. Downforce like an F1 car. After a few laps, my muscles were so weak, they might as well have been hit by a train. My arms could barely turn the wheel.
Out of shape. Could be skinnier. Then I realized that my spoon was already full of strawberry goo and halfway into my mouth.
It was delicious.
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