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what I really liked was being on a big track – checking the kerbs, using big lines, coming right out wide through the corners and nearly touching those walls at Oran Park.
    Dad reckons that day was when the penny dropped: ‘Over a second and a half – that’s light years in motor-racing terms. I couldn’t get my head around the fact that he was going so well, but I figured it couldn’t all be down to the engine because everybody had the same one. I thought, “Maybe he
has
got some ability after all.” ’ As for me, I was still very young and I believed Formula Vee, an open-wheeler class a step below Formula Ford, was as far as I was ever going to go. Dad was thinking about the path ahead: Formula Ford, on to Formula 3 – the first acquaintance withcars with wings and aerodynamic characteristics – then on to one of several possible stepping-stones to the pinnacle of Formula 1. But that never crossed my mind.
    Through Peewee (who probably knew more about my ability than Dad did, given his long experience in motor racing) we learned that Craig Lowndes’s 1993 Australian Formula Ford Championship-winning car was available. Dad had a careful look at it, thought it had been pretty well maintained and we bought it, but we did struggle a bit with it in our first year. It was Andy Lawson who set the car up; he’d never worked on a Formula Ford and it was a hard first year for us, especially as we jumped straight into the national series. I didn’t really have much of a clue about setting a race car up. I was still at school; some of my mates and I used to play computer games, but of course they were of limited use when it came to the real thing and there wasn’t a lot of spare time to go and learn on-track rather than on-screen. It’s fair to say that in year one in Formula Ford my feedback to my team was useless, and it hadn’t improved a lot by the time we went into our second season either.
    That first year Dad and I put about 100,000 kilometres on the old Landcruiser as we criss-crossed this huge country on our way to and from race meetings. The trip from home to Adelaide in South Australia, across the endless Nullarbor Plain to Wanneroo in Western Australia and back to Queanbeyan was 10,000 kilometres on its own.
    The 1994 Australian Formula Ford Championship consisted of eight rounds, crammed into a six-month schedule from February to July. Our three-man team – Michael Foreman, my go-kart buddy and mechanic, AndyLawson, my engineer, and me, the driver – had absolutely no experience of the category so we didn’t set the world on fire that first year, but we were up there some of the time: third at Phillip Island was my best result and 30 points meant I finished 14th overall.
    I also got the chance to compete on the track where my addiction to racing had begun. We went to Adelaide to take part in the non-championship Formula Ford races on the undercard at the Australian Grand Prix. Before we set out I had a monster shunt in the final championship round at Oran Park. I lost control at the dog-leg at the bottom end of the circuit, got on the grass, hit the wall and destroyed the car. It was my first big crash and it hurt! It was a relatively small injury, but a massive wake-up call. Dad had to spend money, and Andy had to spend so much time putting everything back together as best he could – and I spent plenty of cold winter nights in the workshop helping him and Michael to rebuild the car. I remember thinking that this could be the end of the road for me; the shunt had dented my confidence and serious doubts had set in: was I cut out for the job of being a racing driver?
    Earlier that year the death of three-time Formula 1 World Champion Ayrton Senna in the San Marino Grand Prix had also weighed on me. After watching that Imola race I went to bed expecting that Senna would be okay. When Mum woke me with the terrible news I cried into my cornflakes. Dad sat at the other end of the house because he didn’t