VALENCIA // Flat out in seventh gear. It is the right side of 300kph when you are on a qualifying lap, but as wrong as it gets when you trip over a slower car. That was the situation Mark Webber encountered in Valencia yesterday. Red Bull-Renault's Australian driver found himself pincered behind Heikki Kovalainen's Lotus after a painfully unproductive start.
His engine faltered on the line at the start of the race, which made him easy prey for several of the following drivers as he made a tardy getaway from second spot, and a subsequent nudge from Rubens Barrichello's Williams-Toyota compounded Webber's misery, forcing him wide and elbowing him further down the order. In less than the space of a lap, he had plunged from second place to ninth. The decision to make an early tyre stop was measured: he was not going to gain anything sitting at the back of a queue of cars on a track where passing is so difficult and a change of tactics might allow him to find a little clean air, in which he could make better use of his faster pace. But he never got that far.
As he came up behind Kovalainen on lap nine, he initially thought the Finn was letting him through. "Heikki seemed to be going to the left and I prepared to move to his inside," Webber said. "He then edged back to the right, though, and I realised he was defending. "Fair enough, he's entitled to do that, so I thought I'd try around his outside, but then he braked..." Webber has been a consistent factor at the front this season and slower, lapped traffic usually moves obligingly out of the way, upon receipt of waved blue flags from the track marshals.
This, though, was a race for position and Kovalainen was not obliged to concede and he was not going to make it easy for Webber to get through. "On the previous lap," Webber said, "I braked 80 metres later than Heikki did when I hit him." Caught unawares, he was now simply a passenger as his car rode up on the back of the Lotus and went airborne as it flipped over violently. For all the accident's ferocious speed, Webber's mind went into slow motion. "It felt as though I had plenty of time to think," he said.
"I was wondering whether this was going to hurt, trying to remember whether there were any bridges or anything to hit at that point on the track, because that would have been pretty serious. "The car righted itself pretty quickly, though, and I had quite a soft landing. I was definitely lucky." It is the first time this year that the Australian has come away from a race without scoring any championship points.
Having led the title chase after the Turkish Grand Prix last month, two races ago, Webber has slipped to fourth in the standings, 24 points behind Lewis Hamilton and 12 behind his Red Bull teammate Sebastian Vettel, the race victor in Valencia. Yesterday, though, such things mattered little. He is still in touch and next comes Silverstone and the British Grand Prix, a happy hunting ground for Red Bull.
Any qualms about getting back in the car? "None at all," he said. sports@thenational.ae
