The trials and tribulations that have dogged Mark Webber so disastrously in a season barely into its stride are setbacks he will be anxious to forget as he strives to change his rotten luck in his 200th grand prix on Sunday.
And if paddock rumours have, as is the norm, any credibility this could be the Australian veteran’s final fling in Formula One as the ongoing hitches darken his dreams.
Word is that Webber will opt out of the elite F1 series for a five-year spell in sports car racing with Porsche at the end of, if not before, his contract with Red Bull, which runs out at the end of this season.
As if his problems in a promising thriller of a campaign for everybody else this year have not been upsetting enough, he goes into this weekend’s Bahrain Gand Prix with a carry-over penalty of a three-place relegation down the grid in Sakhir for his clumsy misdemeanours in China last time out.
What happened in Shanghai? He had been ordered to start the race from the pit-lane after a team mess-up that dropped him out of the second qualifying session short of petrol.
Then at 11.16am on race morning, the FIA, the sport’s rule makers, announced Webber would have to start from the back of the field because Red Bull had made some gearbox and set-up changes.
During the race he was frantic to make up lost ground and set about shrinking the gap — and then his troubles began all over again at 3.29pm.
He was steadily reducing the distance to the front-runners when he rashly dived up the inside of Jean-Eric Vergne’s Red Bull sister-team’s Torro Rosso at Turn 6 in a bid to snatch 12th place.
But all he managed to do was clout the Torro Rosso with his left front wheel and was found guilty by the stewards for his carelessness.
As if that embarrassment was not hurtful enough, at 6.10pm the judges decided he should suffer their wrath with the punishment for Bahrain.
Webber’s attempts to justify his motives fell short of the acceptable when he pleaded in vain: “He was really, really wide and it looked like he had opened the corner for me, giving me the line.”
Vergne responded: “I didn’t even close the door. I just took the corner normally and suddenly, in the middle of it, I felt a hit.”
After a telemetry and equipment failure in the season opener in his native Australia, when his excellent second place in qualifying crumbled into a sixth place finish, well adrift of shock winner Kimi Raikkonen’s Lotus, Webber’s heartbreaks were only just beginning.
Both his confidence and his reliance on the team in the light of their apparent favouritism for Sebastian Vettel, the three-time champion, suffered a massive blow in Malaysia in round two.
That is when he was tricked/forced/duped/outsmarted — call it what you like — out of a 10th career win when an uncaring Vettel snubbed team orders to overtake Webber and win a race that looked certain to be clinched by the Red Bull number two.
Whatever respect or remote comradeship they might have had collapsed in the light of German wonderboy Vettel’s betrayal and subsequent lack of genuine apology for a ruthless action that divided the opinions of the F1 world.
Vettel now heads the table on 52 points. Webber is sixth on 26. And the question is: will either driver help the other in the title chase? My gut feeling, despite assurances to the contrary from Red Bull team boss Christian Horner, is an emphatic “no”.
The question mark over the 36-year-old Aussie’s F1 future, not just with Red Bull, looms darkly and not just because of his disillusionment with the team, but in the light of the alternatives said to be on offer away from the grand prix scene.
Horner insists there is no leaning towards one driver or the other and refutes allegations of a sordid team fix in Malaysia. “Complete rubbish,” he snaps.
“Forget a conspiracy. It is all about trying to get two cars to finish as high as we can. And anybody who thinks there’s a conspiracy here at Red Bull against either one or the other driver doesn’t know what they are looking at.”
When he was asked if he would prefer a different teammate next season, Vettel did nothing to allay any fears over the team’s camaraderie with: “It’s not for me to decide.”
— Ted Macauley is a motorsport expert based in London.
