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Question: Mark, a win to take you into the winter, how are you feeling right now?
Mark Webber: Yeah, very good. Felt good all weekend to be honest. Seb did a great lap for pole yesterday but y’know today I had a little bit of the rub of the green. It would have been nice to have a race with Sebastian all the way through but I think he’s had a little bit of a problem. It’s a win that you’ll take, for sure, because I’ve had enough bad luck and whatever you want to call it. That’s the way that motorsport goes sometimes. So, very important win for me and the team again to finish on a high. I enjoyed the last few laps, to be honest. It’s always nice when you finally… I could pit a bit later and cover people off and do all that sort of stuff, so that was good. I enjoyed doing the last few laps. That was a nice way to finish. I want to dedicate this win to a close friend of myself and my family, Bob Woods, who’s a very ill man at the moment, so this win is for him.
Question: Mark, it got a little tight between you and Fernando after the first round of stops. He took three-and-a-half seconds out of you there. Were you ever concerned at that point?
Mark Webber: Well I knew he gained something out of that first round of stops. Obviously I went a bit longer than I would have liked to because Seb had the priority obviously on the first stop, so I was out of juice on the tyres at that point so I knew I was going to lose if someone else was going a bit shorter. In the case it wasn’t just to lose out a bit to Seb obviously I lost out a bit more to Fernando. I was a bit surprised at the margin, nearly three seconds or a bit over. He must have had a good stop and risked a little bit more here and there on in and out laps. I think I had a bit of traffic on my out lap as well, so, y’know, sometimes that’s just the way it goes.
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Formula 1: Mark Webber Storms to First Victory of 2011 at Brazilian Grand Prix
Question: Mark, finishing with you, obviously a dominant year for Red Bull but next year are you going to give the little fellow to your right [Vettel] a bit of a harder time, do you think?
Mark Webber: I think I can have a stronger season than this year. Clearly I started off poorly for lots of different reasons. You’ve got to look at all different areas to get at the highest level, and when the bar’s high it’s obviously not just Seb. I don’t come here thinking about just him, we’ve got some class operators in other teams: JB, Lewis, Fernando… these boys are on the case. So, that’s what makes it rewarding. It’s a nice little tonic for me to finish the year, that’s why those last few laps for me to feel the car and give the RB7 a bit of a send off for me because it hasn’t had an amazing amount of memories for me but today was a very special day for me and I’ll have that over the winter. Although some other nice drives as well but Seb clearly had a great year and so did the team, Renault, reliability. We were bomb-proof in many areas and that made it hard for the opposition. So that is important. And I’m looking forward to learning how to surf in the winter and backing off a bit, recharging and then coming back in February and concentrating on the job again.
Question: Well done, Mark. Is there a little bit of relief there, to have won?
Mark Webber: There is, yeah. Just the feeling is nice. Obviously in motor sport you take them as they come. It was actually brewing into a reasonable little battle with Seb and I. The pace wasn’t too bad at the end of my stints. I’m not exactly sure when he started to have a few little issues, but obviously I can only control what I’m doing, so I kept pushing and then really it was down to then covering off whatever Fernando might be able to do, and that obviously turned out to be possible and then we spread the race out, then obviously made sure we loaded the tyres correctly to get to the flag. Yes, with ten laps to go, I started to think ‘OK, it’s nice to finish the year with a win, nice to finish with the car feeling good underneath you, nice to have my second victory here in Brazil - it’s always been a nice little track for me, a little classic.’ It’s been a pretty good year but not like 2010 obviously, so all the guys on my car, Gav and Ciaron in particular, have worked their nuts off all year so it’s been good, and I’m happy to get the win today.
Question: And you were talking about those last ten laps; certainly the last three were all fastest laps of the race.
Mark Webber: Yeah, it was getting a bit frustrating because I kept pinching the front a little bit into turn eight. On the last lap I got it a little bit better otherwise I was probably going to bail a bit earlier, but I kept pushing pretty hard. Yeah, that’s what it’s about, isn’t it, pushing yourself and backing yourself and having a crack. I was only racing myself at that point so it was a nice little feeling, as I say, to have the car working well underneath me. As I said, this winter a close family friend of ours has been in very very ill health so I dedicate this win to him.
Question: What was the team saying to you about Sebastian’s problems?
Mark Webber: It came pretty quickly. I thought he was either in tyre trouble way earlier than he should be or no KERS or something was going on, because one thing Seb doesn’t do is forget how to drive from one lap to the other. When I started to take a pretty big chunk out of him per lap, I thought something might have been going down and then Ciaron informed me that he had a gearbox problem and I think I could smell it a little bit when I got close, and there was also a little bit of fluid. Normally, that’s a nice feeling… OK, it was mixed obviously for me, because there was the chance to get the win but I know how hard the guys worked on Seb’s gearbox last night because it wasn’t completely smooth. They got it together but it turned out, obviously, in the end that something’s let them down. I thought that with that far to go in the race he obviously would not finish but the car still got home and that’s it.
Question: Mark, your season started off with momentum, quite bumpy; thing smoothed out, pace got better. How much will this win kick-start the momentum for next year and give you a flying start?
Mark Webber: Well, Dan, even if the win didn’t come today, I think there were some positive signs in the last three or four events. To be honest, the team knows there’s been some races where it’s been a reasonable pace for me, considering some of the things that have been going on, whether that’s damage to the car or bits and bobs here and there. That’s not an excuse, it’s just what happened. Sometimes my pace on Sundays has definitely been better than it was at the start of the year so there were some indications to get more positive. Today was a good Grand Prix for me, the pace was good, all that sort of stuff. Obviously if Seb… we’re not sure how it would have turned out but maybe I wouldn’t have finished too far behind, maybe a little bit ahead. Who knows how it would have worked out if he made a mistake or whatever, or if I made a mistake? We can’t judge what would have happened in the rest of today’s Brazilian Grand Prix but it’s not a bad thing to finish the year like this. One of the most important things is that I’ve started to feel the car a little bit better, in terms of direction and working better with the guys and what we need to do, which happened a while ago, not just at this race but starting to get a bit more of an understanding, which, together, has actually helped both of us again, because we’ve got the most out of the car and that’s been a success for the team as well. Yeah, happy for the win mate, that’s for sure.
Question: We saw quite a high number of gearbox problems in the course of the race. I was wondering, do you think that’s mechanical fatigue at the end of the year or the particular challenges of Interlagos?
Mark Webber: I think it’s mechanic fatigue maybe? Caipirinhas? You never know. It’s been a long year, maybe a bit of a coincidence. Turn two is pretty hard, inside, outside with the rear end of the car there. The gearboxes these days are pretty reliable. They’ve got to do a lot of events. I don’t know in terms of the cycles of where people were with their boxes but I think because we’ve had a couple of high-profile ones today - obviously one with Lewis and Seb who got home - that’s the way it’s been but it’s unusual to have retirements these days. Normally the cars are like a computer game: they just keep going round. The drivers drive them. We had a few stoppages today.
Question: Mark, you had it seems this time you had a quite normal start, you hadn’t any problem and sometime you had a gap of up to three seconds to Sebastian. Do you think under normal conditions you’d have been able to fight him on the race?
Mark Webber: As you say, the gap was in the three-second window. Be nice to be a bit less but that’s what it was at that point. When you’re within that margin it can be the drop of a wheel nut, it can be a small lapse of concentration from Seb and you’re there. So, it’s impossible to say how the rest of the race would have gone. Sebastian was very strong in qualifying and very strong at the start of the stints and I felt I was a bit more comfortable at the end of the stints, which was probably one of the first times this year, to be honest. Difficult to say mate, but it would have been a very tough race to challenge Seb hard but we never know.
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