F1 legend Mark Webber still dreams of conquering the Rolex clock at Le Mans
Facing the Rolex clock at the famous endurance race arguably means the most to the Australian champion.
It’s a little surprising just how much love Australian motor racing legend Mark Webber has for the 24 Hours of Le Mans. After all, most people aren’t that fond of things that have tried to kill them. And not just once, but twice.
The French race is to the World Endurance Championship what Monaco is to Formula One, but it’s also much more than that. If F1 is the undeniable pinnacle of motorsport, Le Mans is the race that all F1 drivers want to win, such is its history and status.
The 2025 race was claimed by former F1 driver Robert Kubica’s team, AF Corse. Fernando Alonso is a previous winner. In fact, more than 20 Formula One world champions have tried their luck at Le Mans – surely one of the most enduringly brutal of endurance races – and most have left with nothing.
We’ll get back to the attempted murder of Mark Webber in a moment, but first there are a couple of things you need to know about Le Mans. Such as, the drivers aren’t really doing battle with each other. Or, at least, not exclusively. The winner is the team that covers the most kilometres in 24 hours, and while hypercars, such Webber’s LMP1 Porsche 919 Hybrid, are competing, so, too, are much slower LMP2 and LMGT3 cars. Imagine motorcyclists racing against actual cyclists and you’re not far off.
A driving stint can last up to four hours, half of the time, obviously, at night, sometimes in heavy fog or blinding rain, and with much slower cars clogging the track like mobile chicanes. It’s gruelling, often terrifying stuff. More than 20 drivers have died competing, and in one particularly horrific accident in the 1950s, more than 80 spectators were killed.
And through it all, your No.1 competitor is always that official Rolex clock constantly counting down.
“You’ve got to do as many kilometres as you can in 24 hours. The car doesn’t know it’s night – you’ve still got to be racing. Taking the car from night into sunrise, the optics and dealing with the speeds. And we have to lap back-markers often because they’re in slower cars,” Webber explains.
“There’s a huge amount of decision-making processes that go on in winning in sports-car racing. The opportunity lies in teamwork and trust, and everyone sticking together.
“It’s also the romance of the night. For racing drivers to drive a phenomenal racing car there at night is a beautiful feeling. You can smell the barbecues. You can smell the rubber. You can smell the petrol. Your senses are alive.”
Webber first arrived at Le Mans in 1998, four years before he’d make his F1 debut, but in that first year his car was retired before he even got behind the wheel. He finally got a drive in 1999, but soon wished he hadn’t, when, through absolutely no fault of his own, the Mercedes concept car he’d been driving took flight in practice, and then again in qualifying, flipping over and over through the air, flying over the safety barrier, crashing through trees before finally slamming back down to Earth. It was a spectacularly horrible accident from which Webber “got off very, very, very lightly, considering what could have happened”.
It was a controversial moment, to say the least, and 1999 was also the last year Mercedes entered a factory team in Le Mans.
But that was just the start of the Australian’s French heartbreak. He returned in 2014, now racing for Porsche, and was leading in the dying stages before engine trouble ended his race. Then, in 2015, his team was competing for the win, but finished second behind the other Porsche entry.
He was back at Le Mans again, in 2016, and back out in front, when mechanical issues again ended their race. Yet again, the other Porsche team won. Webber hung up the racing gloves in 2017, only for his former team to win Le Mans that same year.
Endless heartbreak, generously seasoned with genuine danger. It takes a unique person to fall in love with something like that. Well, perhaps not that unique. It turns out there are plenty of people exactly like that.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many grown men cry [than I have] at an event like Le Mans,” says Webber. “Mechanics, seasoned campaigners; whether it’s winning or losing, endurance racing gets to you because you’re so invested emotionally and you’re so, so tired.
“The chemistry and the camaraderie is very, very special,” he adds.
Why are we talking about a 100-year-old race on the other side of the planet with a former F1 driver when we could be talking about Webber’s success racing for Red Bull, his Monaco victories, any one of his nine first-place finishes, or his 40-plus podiums? Or, more recently, his role as fellow Australian Oscar Piastri’s manager, who he has taken from F1 rookie to World Drivers’ Championship leader?
It’s because I asked him about his favourite watch, fully expecting it to be the Rolex GMT-Master II he bought himself to celebrate his first ever F1 win at the German Grand Prix in 2009. But it isn’t.
“It’s funny, [nine-time Le Mans winner] Tom Kristensen would say he’d do anything for one of my Monacos and I’d say I would do anything for one of his Le Manses,” Webber says. “Drivers always want more.
“When I’m on the road, I have one watch with me. It just makes it a little bit more simple
when I’m travelling. I have the Rolex Daytona Oysterflex – it’s the most comfortable for me, and a very, very functional watch. If I want to go to the gym or I want to go swimming, I just never take it off.
“[But] my Le Mans watch is my favourite. We know every Rolex has, in essence, a lot of DNA towards racing and car racing. The Le Mans watch is the closest to racing, obviously. And I was very, very thankful to be able to get one of those watches.”
That “Le Mans watch” is the Rolex white gold Daytona Le Mans Edition – launched to mark the 100-year anniversary of the French race – and which Webber is often photographed wearing.
And it’s incredible to think that, for one of Australia’s most successful and celebrated Formula One drivers, it’s the one race that got away that still means the most. Such is the grip and power of Le Mans on anyone who has raced there.
“I had a crack at Le Mans and I was heavily involved in Porsche when they won those three races [2015, 2016, 2017], which was super rewarding,” Webber says.
“And, funnily enough, when I retired, I was a grand marshal for Le Mans in 2017, and they asked me to hand over the winning trophy, which was actually to [former teammates] Timo Bernhard and Brendon Hartley.
“And the boys, they all said, ‘You’re part of this win’. That was the most bizarre podium I’ve been on, in terms of how emotional I was and how attached I was to the win.
“They were still using my seat for the race the year after, because, between them, they couldn’t make a seat that was as comfortable as the one I made – probably because of the size of my bum. But ultimately they said, ‘We’ve still got your seat, it’s got your initials on it’, and that was really touching.
“I haven’t won, but I feel a lot of history towards it. I’ve had some really, really tough moments there. I’ve had some beautiful moments there, with some really tight mates, and that’s what it does.”
This story is from the August issue of WISH.
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