Top Gear chats to Mark Webber

So I get this phone call from Porsche. It’s about a GT3 RS we’ve booked in to do a group test with. “We’ve had someone else ask to borrow it one of the days while you’ve got it and we wondered if we might be able to make that happen at all.”

Not a cat’s chance in hell, I’m thinking. Let someone else interfere with what we’ve got planned? Not going to happen.

“…it’s Mark Webber,” the voice finishes.

Which is why I’m now at Cadwell Park in Lincolnshire, having left home at some ungodly hour this morning and attempted to have a suitably intense drive up here in the GT3 RS. It’s the right tool for the job, but this is Winter and Leicestershire isn’t Scotland. Even at 6am it was a bit of a plod if I’m honest.

At least I’d made the effort, though. I roll up at the circuit. It’s dreary, dank and grey, but there’s a Cayman GT4 parked up outside the portakabin that doubles as the salubrious VIP suite.

Mark comes out to say hi. He’s got a very firm handshake, but the fact he came out of the warm inside when I turned up tells you most of what you need to know about him. Well, that and the fact he loves the GT3 RS.

Turns out he’d left at an equally ungodly hour this morning and driven up here in the GT4. “Fair play to you though, it was all I could do to take the quickest route here. I’m not pretty at that time of day.”

I ask him what he thinks of the GT4. “It’s a bit gutless. The steering’s mega and I think it’s another winner, but I’d like more power. I don’t like what I’m hearing about them changing hands for ridiculous sums, though.”

The reason Mark’s at Cadwell today is to make a short masterclass film for Red Bull on how to drive hairpins and chicanes (it'll air on redbull.com during 2016). They were going to use the GT4, but were hoping for the GT3 RS – hence the original phone call.

Mark goes out for an exploratory few laps in the GT3 RS. Cadwell in November is very, very hairy. Super slippery under the trees, standing water on the back straight, that sort of thing. Not for the faint-hearted. In the passenger seat I’m giving the imaginary brake pedal a good work out, and remembering just how little tread depth these Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 tyres have on them.

Today may be about hairpins and chicanes, but the film crew want pick-up shots of it sliding about. I’m intrigued about this. Mark is a circuit driver through and through – grew up racing karts, then single-seaters, the stuff that sits low and sticks to the surface.

But he also loves road cars. Loves them. Has a nice little Porsche collection going that includes an original 1956 356 Spyder, GT3 RS 4.0 and 918 Spyder.

We have a discussion in the portakabin, “Let’s find a mega quick corner and I reckon I can buzz you really nicely”, Mark says. The crew raise concerns about safety. “Mate, you’re safe as houses. I’ll come along, eke up to the camera. I’m still going to give it, you know, some margin, because it’s all expensive stuff, but I can run it to a few inches if you like.”

It’s pouring with rain, but Park corner is ideal for a spot of skidding. It’s an open right hander with plenty of run off. Taken at about 40mph in second gear it’s the one I’d have chosen, too.

Mark runs it straight a couple of times, then gives it a gentle lob sideways. You think I’m going to say it was perfect first time? Well, it wasn’t. But it was second time: confident, smooth, full turn of opposite lock, not too wild, snatchy or lairy. Nicely performed for the camera and bang on line. Can’t say fairer than that really. Cameras are happy, we head back indoors for a cup of tea and a warm up.

What most surprises me about Mark over the course of the whole day is his focus and discipline. Whether it’s getting the line right through corners or conducting interviews, his manner is crisp, direct yet friendly and open.

And he packs so much in. When he’s not driving or talking to me, he’s on the phone, usually conducting interviews. Twenty minutes on the blower with L’Equipe in France, calls to Germany, everything is ordered and packed in under the direction of his media and PR manager, Barbara Proske.

If it was me, I’d get hopelessly distracted and confused, but even after a 20 minute phone interview, he switches back to me and picks up the conversation exactly where we left off.

We talk cars and hobbies. Mark’s first motor was a 1969 Toyota Corolla, his worst, a Holden Commodore, “it wasn’t straight when I got it, and it was no straighter when I got rid of it.”

He’s taken up flying helicopters in the past few years, and still rides bikes for recreation and fitness. At a good level too – earlier in 2015 he did the Leadville 100 mountain bike race in Colorado. I know a thing or two about biking – the Leadville is not something you undertake lightly.

I ask him if he still has to watch his weight and fitness as much as he did in F1. “I was skin and bones in F1, virtually on the edge of starving myself. I had to hold that from Jan to Dec which was hard work. Everyone thinks it’s about keeping fit, but it’s actually about 70 per cent diet. I love a burger, that heavy s*** like ice cream and chocolate, but you have to be so careful, and watch the refined sugars”

“And Adrian [Newey] was relentless, he’d go, ‘well, mate, you know how long it took us to find half a kilo in the car?’ Overall I’m 5kg heavier now, but I reckon a fair bit healthier.”

Time for some more set-up stuff outside. I can’t sit in the car while they’re filming obviously, but I watch and am struck by how consistent Mark is. He discusses what the crew want with them, does it, makes sure they’re happy and then runs it as many times as they need, exactly the same each time.

I watch his braking points, his throttle position, how he sets the car up – it’s ruthlessly consistent. I know how difficult this is to achieve. I’ve spent many frustrated hours at race tracks trying to go faster, to be consistent – it’s the unseen side of racing, the drudgery of doing exactly, precisely the same thing, lap after lap after lap.

“It’s all feel”, Mark tells me later, “people talk about bravery, but we don’t see the bravery, we just do what we do – and we’ve been training for it since we were really young. So at the Porsche Curves, someone like Patrick Dempsey will be pulling his hair out trying to get it right, but for us all those muscle memory instincts and stuff are hardwired in. To learn that later, no good.”

By lunchtime the RS is out of fuel, so Mark finds out where the pumps are and goes off to fill it up. When he comes back I want to find out if, having switched from F1 to WEC, he harbours any desire to try anything else – rallying maybe?

“Not much, I have to say. I went with Colin McRae in the Focus in Wales. One of the biggest highlights of my life. I mean I was touching cloth The. Whole. Time. I was saying to him, ‘you don’t need to do this, this is too quick, just peel it back a bit’. ‘Och, you’ll be fine’ he says. ‘Jesus, I mean there were trees everywhere, coming at us at all angles”

“With those guys, I think they’re the best in the world. I mean we operate, well, it’s like Federer having 500 balls and having to serve them all into an inch square. That’s what we’re good at – giving it the same. Some would say it’s boring, but that’s a very hard skill to get right.

“Rally drivers are adjusting constantly. We’re doing micro-adjustments, really fine brake pressure changes, to the point where we feel the wind because the aerodynamics are so important now, but those boys. You take a slick tyre and you’re out the back of Monaco on some col somewhere, that level of feel, constantly catching a micro f***-up, that’s what’s mega.”

“Of all the guys I’ve seen, I think the two that most impressed me were Colin and Seb [Loeb]. Colin, he was awesome on a street bike, very fast in an F1 car, as was Loeb. But finding that last second and a half? Red Bull said he was very impressive [driving the F1 car at Barcelona], but if you cut to the chase, he’s a slow test driver. And that’s Loeb, who has an incredible middle ear. Incredible. 

“I’ve done a lot of stuff with him and you see how his gymnastic background helped him. I say to my sister’s kids, get on the trampoline, get yourself vertical, because that will be in the can for ever. And it’s safer than me jumping off garage roofs for kicks.”

So what about F1 vs WEC, then?

“I was tired of all the travelling. Endurance is less stressful. I mean I would love to win Le Mans, but it’s not something I lose sleep over. And the 919 is so much fun to drive – and so damn fast. At Shanghai, we’re only 0.4sec a lap slower in quali than Lewis was on his fastest race lap.”

“And I think what we’re doing is much more relevant, the downsizing of the engines, the way we have to harness energy. The biggest issue we have [in WEC] is looking after the gentleman drivers. You have 6 or 7 laps clean and then you catch the traffic up and the amateurs are an issue. The speeds in the GT3 class haven’t changed much recently, but in WEC they really have.”

End of the day. Filming’s over because the light has gone. In the portakabin we’ve been fiddling with a tiny trophy. “Ann only let’s me display winning trophies at home”, Mark tells me. I ask him if he’d be game enough to brandish that one like a winning trophy. It’s plastic and about five inches tall. “Yeah, we’d better do it properly though – let’s head out to the podium”

So we do, and it looks silly and I probably feel as daft for taking the picture as he does for brandishing the trophy. But he did it, and that’s what impressed me. And this is what impresses me about Mark Webber – he’s come through years and years of F1 bullshit without a scratch on him. He’s happy to come and spend a grotty day in a freezing shack at a track a long way from home and still be affable and friendly.

I suggest we swap cars for the journey home. “You sure? That’d be cool. I haven’t taken delivery of my RS yet” And off he goes, with me following soon after in the Cayman GT4. He’s wrong about that, by the way.