“I DON’T have a world championship.

“Do I think I could have had one? Well, absolutely. Am I a multiple world champion? No, I’m not. I’m not at that level. But one? Yeah, it could have happened. But that’s the fine line after a long season of grand prix racing... ”

Mark Webber is reminiscing about the biggest disappointment of his professional career with the type of candidness that has helped make the affable Aussie a homeland hero. His sporting prowess alone — nine wins, 42 podiums and three third place driver’s championship finishes in a stellar 11-year Formula 1 career — had already ensured that national treasure status, but his no-nonsense, say-it-as-you-see-it personality is an even bigger hit with fans. With Webber, glory and failure are treated with the same deference.

And there was no more crushing blow, the type that only elite level sport can deliver, than the finale of the 2010 F1 season. It had seemed all the milestones of his career — the incredible fifth place finish on his F1 debut at the Australian GP driving the uncompetitive Minardi, his maiden grand prix victory in Germany in 2009, the first for an Australian driver in 28 years — had been slowly building up to a glorious climax. In a season that had seen him win most races and suffer a horrendous, death-defying crash in Valencia, going into the last race in Abu Dhabi Webber was involved in a dramatic four-way shoot out for the championship with Fernando Alonso, Lewis Hamilton, and his teammate and arch rival Sebastian Vettel. It was the German Vettel that won the race and with it the world title — and Webber’s best shot at ultimate glory slipped away.

“Well yeah, there was a lot that went on,” Webber says of his defining 2010 campaign, “and there’s not many drivers that take the championship to the last race and be involved unfortunately — or fortunately if you’re a neutral — with four drivers going for it. And yeah, I led the championship for a long part of it, and Seb led it for one race, which was the last race, and he got the championship in the end. That was a classic year of grand prix racing. It’s a shame the way it went”.

His bitter conflict with Vettel, unflinchingly detailed in Webber’s new autobiography Aussie Grit, is apparently no longer of any consequence — “there’s no need to make a big thing of it, I think everyone is bored of it now.”

Yet the triple whammy draining effect of that, losing out on the world title and the feeling that Red Bull were giving Vettel preferential treatment — “we went through a lot together, and some of it I wasn’t obviously best pleased with” — slowly began to wear down Webber’s enthusiasm.

For someone that had “got to F1 late and already used up a few coins”, things were never quite the same.

“The other years were still strong, but when you’ve fought for the championship and the results could have added up to winning it, having lead the championship and going so close to winning it, you can only go one way from there. So that took a while to come back from.”

Webber lasted another three years in F1 — his last race, a second place finish, was the Brazilian grand prix in 2013 — before signing to drive for Porsche in the World Endurance Championships.

Webber hopes to use his own profile to raise that of GT Racing.

“We’re hoping to get a few more drivers over, a few champions, to show them it’s the next best thing.

“It’s becoming very well respected by the drivers, they can see how genuine it is, and that is only something that will help them as they get them on the track. They’re learning a lot and will carry on learning. It’s not going to happen overnight. But it’s a really good place to be.”

So good, in fact, that Webber has no regrets bowing out of Formula 1 precisely when he did.

“Definitely not,” he insists. “There were a few creeping frustrations and I went out on a good race. If I was on the stock market, I more or less did it perfectly, didn’t I?”

Aussie Grit by Mark Webber is out now in hardcover and E-Book format.