Years ago, when Lewis was my teammate at McLaren, the two of us did voiceovers for an animated series called Tooned in which we played ourselves. It was my second foray into the world of quality drama after an Oscar-winning Head & Shoulders ad I did in 2011, and I thought it was pretty good, actually, and certainly something to show the kids one day.
Anyway, Tooned featured a large underground track that the cartoon Lewis and I used for practice, and because of that a lot of people assumed that such a thing really existed at McLaren HQ in Woking.
Reality flash: it didn’t.
What we did have, however, was a simulator – and that became my home for two days prior to the race. Actually, the car felt all right. I began to wonder if I was worrying about nothing. True, I rolled it into the harbour. Twice. But I reassured myself that it couldn’t happen in real life thanks to the barriers, and felt that the overall experience was pretty positive.
Next thing you know, I was arriving at the circuit. Like Hannibal in The A-Team, I had assembled my old crew – and I didn’t even have to disguise myself as ‘Mr Lee, the dry cleaner’. With me came Brittny, Richard, my physio Mikey, my best mate Chrissy Buncombe, my PR guy James Williamson – all the old faces.
Even so, walking into the paddock was strange. What struck me was a sense that things were unchanged, but at the same time had moved on. And there was something else, too: I felt no pressure. Well, I did. But it was all self-inflicted. As for external pressure? None. Everyone was all like, ‘He’s had seven months out of a car; he’s never even driven these new ones. You can’t expect him to be as good as he was.’
And despite that – or maybe even because of it – I found myself wondering, Just a minute. How well could things go here? After all, this was Monaco, a circuit I knew like the back of my hand, a mostly happy hunting ground over the 16 times I’d raced there. Yes, it was the scene of my worst accident (practice, 2003, a 185mph crash that earned me an overnight stay in hospital), but it was also the venue for one of my best-ever laps (2009, a qualifying lap for Brawn that put me on pole, from which I went on to win the race).
Added to all that, I used to live there, so it was virtually a home race for me.
So I started to dream. Not big. I’m no fool. It’s not like I was thinking podium. But I hoped to finish in the top ten; I hoped to beat my teammate, Stoffel Vandoorne; and I hoped to be able to score the team’s first points of the season.
Practice one came round and they started it up. I swallowed, riding the weirdest sensation that washed over me. A feeling of being like an alien in this car, that lasted as I dropped the clutch to pull out of the garage, going down the pit lane, watching the speed limiter and working out where all the buttons were on the steering wheel, all of which were so different from what I was used to.
I went out. The first corner is in the pit lane still, and then you go up the hill and then to Casino Square, by which time I just about had the hang of it. I remember going through Casino Square with the biggest smile on my face, because all of a sudden it felt so normal, so natural, and I was, like, Are you kidding me? This is seven months off. It’s a completely different car. And yet it all felt so normal to me. So brilliant.
By the end of the lap I felt full of renewed confidence that while things had moved on, they hadn’t moved that far. It was still a car. It still had four wheels touching the road, and the steering wheel in my hands did what it always used to do.
Saturday. Qualifying. I was feeling good, and Q1 went well, in the sense that I was comfortably through into Q2 and feeling happy with the car. My confidence in it was growing and although I was still missing a bit on braking I was certain I could gain more. What’s more, I knew I’d left a bit out there on the circuit. In other words, there was still room for improvement.
My next lap didn’t start too well. Bit of a braking SNAFU on turn one. But it didn’t matter, because by the time I’d taken the little drag up the hill, it was ancient history and I was back to absolutely loving the drive, a huge grin stitched on my face as I eased it through Casino, getting the maximum out of it at last, touching the barrier a tiny bit on the way out, correcting a hint of oversteer. For the rest of what was a blissful lap I felt that I almost – almost – had the measure of the car.
‘You’re P9,’ they told me at the end of it. ‘You’ve qualified into Q3.’
Which was like pole position for me. I was on cloud nine.
What’s more, I’d beaten Stoffel, my teammate, who had qualified tenth, and in Formula One the only real test of your individual strength as a driver is whether or not you can beat your teammate.
Two hours later I came back down to earth with a thump that must have registered on the Richter scale.
‘We’ve got a problem.’
‘What problem?’
‘A problem with the engine. We’re going to have to change it.’
‘Meaning?’
‘You’ll have to start from the pit lane. So you’re last.’
I was like, ‘Did you know that this might happen?’
They cleared their throats and looked at their shoes. ‘Yeah, we just didn’t want to tell you before qualifying.’
I thought about it and climbed down from the ceiling, deciding that they’d probably done the right thing, because if I’d known about the possible engine problem then I probably wouldn’t have performed so well and I’d have got nothing out of the weekend.
But yes, it hurt, especially as it was only my car, and Stoffel moved up to ninth as result, leaving me staring down the barrel of a Sunday race that was not going to be fun in the slightest.
And boy, was I right about that.
I woke up the next morning grimly contemplating a day of driving around Monaco for two hours being lapped – and nothing that anybody said could cheer me up.
Sure enough, as the race proceeded and a change of pit-stop strategy came to nothing, I sat there simmering, with Pascal Wehrlein in front of me – until, 50 laps into the 72-lap race, I could take it no more and spoke to my engineer. ‘Can we just pit again, put new tyres on and then we’ll see if we can catch and overtake Wehrlein?’
What did we have to lose? Monaco is terrible for overtakes – an average of 12 per race compared to 52 for somewhere like Shanghai. But that’s still 12 overtakes, and there was no reason I couldn’t be one of them.
Yes, they said. So I pitted, we put on another set of tyres and I set off again. The pace was good, especially when I was in clear air, and pretty soon I found myself going from being 20 seconds behind Wehrlein to catching him up – until I was right on his tail and thinking about making my move.
Again, what did I have to lose? If it worked it would be a great move. If it didn’t, we’d crash, I’d hit the bar early and drink lots of beer.
It was just before the tunnel, the double right-hander. I came up alongside him on the inside. No one really overtakes there, but I was feeling pretty gung-ho and thought I’d have a go. To be fair, if he’d seen me, it would have been okay. It’s just that…
He didn’t.
And by the time I realised that he wasn’t aware of me it was too late because he was already turning in, and we touched. Ding. As we did that, I braked, so my car went backwards, his shot forward, our tyres clashed – and that was enough to flip him over onto his side against the barrier.
Wehrlein had hurt his spine in a crash earlier that year, so I was worried about him. I couldn’t see anything because the floor of his car was blocking my view, but I was close enough to know that his head was against the tyre wall. All I could do was pull away from his upturned car and make my way through the tunnel, creating more sparks than a welder on a deadline before pulling off the right-hand side at the other end.
As I got out of the car I heard that Wehrlein had clambered out of his Sauber unharmed, so at least he was okay. Probably cursing me, mind you. The accident was more my fault than his: 60/40, I’d say.
As for me, I had to do the walk of shame back to the paddock, the boats in the harbour on one side, the grandstands on the other, the crowd being kind enough to clap and wave as I trudged dejectedly past, even though they were probably thinking, Look at him. What a wanker. He’s just crashed when he was in last place.
And still my day’s woes were yet to end. Monaco is the only circuit where the paddock and the pit lane are in completely different places, and I reached the garages first. There I discovered that Stoffel had been running in tenth, and thus had been about to score the team’s first point of the season. The mechanics had been levitating with excitement at the thought of scoring a point at last. But because of my little incident the safety car had gone out, which meant that all the cars had bunched up, and they were all on newer tyres than Stoffel, and so…
Well, in the end he hit the wall after being tipped off the track by Sergio Pérez, but I could tell they were pissed off at me. It was the little giveaways that did it. Like the way they looked at me, shook their heads and then threw their gloves on the floor.
I felt bad for them (while at the same time thinking, For goodness sake, it’s only a point. This is a team that should be fighting for the World Championship) and left them to it, onto the second leg of my journey back to the paddock, interviews all the way down – can’t say I was at my most gracious – until I got to the engineers. ‘Sorry guys.’
‘Don’t worry,’ they said, ‘it happens. We shouldn’t have put you in that position of starting last.’ And then, when I saw the mechanics again after the race, they’d cooled down and I gave them all a hug and apologised, and they were, like, ‘It’s cool, it is what it is,’ just that they were upset because that they’d lost a point, which would have been the first point of the season.
Except – what am I saying? As it turned out, I did in fact get two points out of that race.
I got two penalty points on my super licence for flipping Pascal Wehrlein against the tyre wall.