Bad Luck Could Not Be Any Worse for Webber

With news of Mark Webber’s unfortunate accident last weekend at his own charity cycling event come two concerns. First and foremost is the hope that Webber will fully recover and have no permanent effects from his injuries, which are reported to be a broken leg and other minor injuries.

The second concern is that Webber’s career will be threatened. While the obvious question is whether or not Webber will race again, and all signs right now point to a Yes answer, the most meaningful question is how will Webber’s forced time off play into new teammate Sebastian Vettel’s rise to the top of F1.

To backtrack a bit, many fans of Webber’s understand how bad luck has played a significant role in his F1 career to date. Although he chose to switch teams when he did, Webber’s timing has been dubious as he joined the Williams-BMW team in the exact season that his former Jaguar, soon-to-be-Red Bull, squad was crossing paths with Williams, soon-to-be-without BMW, in the F1 pecking order. The result was two lost years at a team on a downhill slide.

Then there were various races where potentially high finishes were spoiled by mechanical failures or unusual incidents. One of the most notorious was in Japan ’07 when future teammate Vettel smashed into the back of Webber during a safety car period while both were running in podium positions.

But this latest setback in Webber’s career will have the biggest impact. With Webber on the sidelines, the primary testing focus will now be on Vettel in an offseason where the Adrian Newey-designed chassis is fresh off of capturing its first victory (albeit with a Ferrari engine and presented by junior team, Toro Rosso) and where the engine supplier Renault will certainly be given the opportunity to “equalize” its powerplants with the more powerful lumps from Ferrari, Mercedes, and BMW. Make no mistake, the senior Red Bull operation will not run second fiddle to junior Toro Rosso in ’09 (now wholly owned by Red Bull, by the way). And for further measure, Toro Rosso management will cement its junior status with its imminent driver pairing announcement.

Newey’s Red Bull creation seems tailor-made for Vettel. It is sensitive towards oversteer but very quick in the right hands. And there is no doubt that Newey and the Red Bull folks want to win big. True, KERS is a huge wildcard along with the new aero regulations. However, for the upcoming season, everything else being equal, I would expect the ’09 Red Bull to be a fantastic car. And with Vettel behind the wheel, we could see the type of jump in performance from ’08 to ’09 for Red Bull as we saw in ’93 to ’94 for Benetton with its rising German driver of the day.

Vettel is amazingly mature for his age and relative inexperience. I use the term “relative” because he has actually been directly involved in F1 since mid-2006. And watching the young German come alive on Saturdays and Sundays of race weekends erases any doubts that he has enough skills in setting up the car to consistently run competitively.

So as Webber works hard to recover in time for a short bit a testing prior to the season-opening Australian GP, his new teammate will be pounding around at the next test in Jerez and when the new car debuts in Feruary mapping his brain to the nuances of the senior team car and how he can extract maximum pace out of it.

The opening event of 2009 should be an exciting one for Red Bull. The team will have its best-ever driver pairing and most competitive car yet. During his career, Webber has always had an edge over his teammate (although his brief pairing with Nick Heidfeld was a close call). But now, facing his stiffest competition yet, he literally begins the quest on one leg. In what should be the strongest season of his F1 career, I predict Webber will for the first time nevertheless be playing second fiddle to his teammate.