Not long after I’d met Colin at the British Grand Prix, Peter Collins phoned me to say that Lotus needed someone to go round all their suppliers and check quality control and compliance, because the standard of work required to supply a Formula 1 team was exemplary. This was a fantastic opportunity to get close to an F1 team and – hopefully – get to know Colin. I jumped at the chance. So, for more than a year before I eventually drove for Colin, I was working for him as an inspector and engineer, outsourcing suppliers, effectively checking to see if they had the technical prowess to supply the parts to Lotus. I was given a Ford Escort 1300 and a basic salary plus fuel expenses. I didn’t think twice because, although it involved a lot of driving to and from work and the various sites, it felt like my chance to get to know Colin. Plus the weekday hours allowed me to carry on with my weekend racing in Formula 3. I would visit various suppliers’ factories and report back with my opinion on whether a particular site was up to scratch. Despite his vast experience and my relative youth, Colin rarely questioned my assessment. He would obviously ask for facts and evidence to back up my judgement, and he expected that I had done my research and homework, but invariably he would listen to my presentation and accept my conclusions. Fantastically, it wouldn’t be long before I would get the opportunity to show Colin what I could do behind the wheel of an F1 car, rather than a Ford Escort.
Before then, however, my 1979 Formula 3 season was about to get much worse: in mid-September, I broke my back in a very serious accident at Oulton Park, Cheshire. From my point of view, the incident was totally avoidable. Andrea de Cesaris (who only recently passed away, bless his soul) was coming up on the inside of me going down a hill, but there was no room. In those early days, he had something of a reputation for being erratic at times, and on this particular day his car touched mine and instantly flipped me over. My car somersaulted at about 165mph and landed upside down. It was a massive accident.
At the moment the car flipped, there was a serene quietness; all was silent as I flipped through the air. There was a slowness to the sensation; I felt like I had a lot of thinking time and I knew that this was going to be a biggie. By sharp and very painful contrast, the second my car impacted on the ground, everything went from quiet, calm and slow to a cacophony of noise, smells, violence and pain. I blanked out, my back was crushed and two vertebrae were badly broken.
When I came round the pain was excruciating. I knew my back was badly damaged. They took me to hospital and informed me that I had crushed my lumbar spine. Overnight, I was half an inch shorter in height. I was angry about the crash because I felt it was avoidable. I was always far more at ease with accidents I had caused myself, through my own errors, but this had not been my fault. The recovery took many weeks and I would be left with painful sciatica in my mid-20s. However, just as with the head injuries at Morecambe and the neck fracture at Brands, I knew I was lucky to be alive.
I remember lying on a gurney outside the X-ray room later that day, when they were running tests on me. There was a young man next to me who didn’t look in pain and was talking, but his head seemed somehow disconnected to his body, which wasn’t moving. I asked him what had happened.
‘I was playing rugby and I ran up behind someone in a maul and apparently it’s snapped my neck. I can’t feel or move my arms or my legs.’
You see what I mean about being lucky?
CHAPTER 3
TESTING FOR LOTUS AND SLOWING DOWN TIME
When you are operating at the very highest level in any sport, your reflexes, senses and reaction times are acutely honed. This is the result of combining pure talent with thousands of hours of practice. It is said in some sports psychology circles that, aside from natural ability, luck and sheer determination, to perform a chosen sport to the skill level of a world champion you have to have practised that particular discipline for a minimum of 10,000 hours.
For example, if a member of the public, rather than a professional tennis player, faced a serve from Roger Federer, the ball would fly past them virtually before they even realised he’d hit it. Yet his top-seeded rivals not only see that ball, they are usually able to return it with venom. The same amount of world-class skill applies to all sports at the highest levels, and Formula 1 is no exception. With this in mind, and given the context of my very first test in an F1 car, I want to talk to you about a racing driver’s apparent ability to ‘slow down time’. Let me explain.
In late 1979, I was delighted and very excited to be invited by the Lotus Formula 1 team to test with them at the Paul Ricard circuit in France, along with four other aspiring drivers (Peter Collins had kindly put my name forward). Among the names there was Elio de Angelis. He was a lovely guy and brilliant driver, and we had briefly been team-mates for a one-off Formula 2 race at Donington in 1978 (where I crashed out in second qualifying after hitting an oil patch left by another car). Elio had already raced a full year in F1 for the Shadow team. Two of the other drivers, Eddie Cheever and Jan Lammers, also had some F1 experience, and there was another Brit in contention – Stephen South, who was doing well in F2. So the competition was stiff, but this was potentially my big break so it was a huge day in my career. When David Phipps from Lotus had phoned to offer me the test, he asked if the accident at Oulton Park had injured me as badly as he’d heard. I was not going to let a broken back compromise this remarkable opportunity, so I simply told David I was fine, then phoned the doctors for more painkillers and packed my bag.
I had a long wait on the first day as all the other drivers went out on track before me, but eventually my turn came and I was strapped in for about 20 laps. I knew that if I blew this chance, my hopes of a Formula 1 seat might be gone forever.
You would think those first few laps in a Formula 1 car would’ve been the most exciting moment in my life, and that I would be stunned by the car’s performance. Not so. I was actually hugely disappointed and incredibly frustrated, even unnerved. It was a massive anticlimax. I didn’t understand what was happening. Everything seemed to come at me so fast – the corners, the decisions, it was all just too quick. For example, I was going down the main straight okay but then having absolutely no time to go into the corners; it was all a blur. At the end of my session I was five or six seconds a lap off the pace. Five or six seconds – in Formula 1, five or six tenths of a second is a lifetime!
The grip never felt right and the gearbox was a real struggle, too. It was so disappointing. I thought the car would handle much better, have more grip, be nicer to drive and corner, but it was just ugly. At one point, the great Gilles Villeneuve came up behind me in his Ferrari so, of course, I let him past. Then I vainly tried to follow him. For a couple of the slower corners I was keeping up with him. That momentarily buoyed my spirits, but then he went around a fast corner lightning quick and, when I tried to follow him in the same manner, I span off. I remember just thinking, How the hell did he go around there that fast?
I was really dejected when I finished my laps and rounded up my things at the end of the test. I trudged back to my hotel and phoned Rosanne, who instantly knew something was wrong. She asked me if I was okay and I said, ‘Rosanne, I don’t know if this Formula 1 game is for me.’ I was so dejected; the experience just didn’t work for me. I thought, This is a step too far – it doesn’t work.
However, the next morning something amazing happened. For one, I was given a car that had fresh tyres. So immediately the levels of grip I could feel were completely different. I was naive and wet behind the ears, so I didn’t fully realise the colossal influence worn tyres would have had on my performance the day before. We were talking five seconds! The gearbox was smoother too. So that was all massively encouraging in terms of performance. However, if the car on day one had been a struggle, then surely this faster, grippier car would be even worse in terms of being able to cope with its pace and computing the speed? Not so.
The human brain is an incredible piece of technology. What had happened is that during the night, while I was consci
ously thinking about the events of the first day and later during my sleep too, my brain had upscaled and processed what it had witnessed the day before. Remarkably, within two laps on the following day, everything was different. The car was going faster in terms of absolute speed and grip levels were far higher, but to me it all seemed so much slower and easier to process. I was hitting 200mph but I could see the trees going past, I could even pick out individual branches, as well as parts of the fencing and barriers. As the laps went by, it felt progressively ‘slower’ and more manageable, even though my lap times were getting quicker. My confidence soared; I started to feel the car instinctively, and within a few laps I was six seconds quicker than the day before. Then you think to yourself, Well, that wasn’t too hard after all! It was such a huge relief.
Driving a Formula 1 car is all about having the time to make decisions. If you go into a corner and feel like you are doing 200mph on the approach, then it is very hard to make the right decisions at the right time. At that velocity you are covering approximately the length of an entire football pitch every second, so factor in maybe a rival trying to overtake you or oil on the track, bad weather, tyre wear, fuel worries and so on, and you have a lot for your brain to compute, all at a viciously fast speed.
However, on that second day it all felt so much more . . . ‘leisurely’ is not the right word, but certainly more manageable. I could see my racing line miles ahead; I could feel the track, change gear smoothly when I needed to, and so on. Going from the night before, telling Rosanne that I wasn’t sure if F1 was right for me, I suddenly knew I could do it. Once you get that feeling, you can work on making it better and better, each day, each week, each season. On that second day of testing, my brain had made all these adjustments.
Essentially, it means that F1 drivers are bending time. We are travelling at the same speed, the corners are coming up just as fast, but, in terms of our perception, time is moving slower than in reality. When you are really on top of your game, it is almost like racing flat out but in slow motion. You have more time to do the job. Your brain processes the information much quicker than the average person could do. Only then can you become at one with the car and the track. As I mentioned earlier, the ability to process speed and time in that way, plus how your brain teaches itself to adapt to the faster speeds, is partly a gift, but it is also certainly learned over the many thousands of laps that top drivers do.
I have been very lucky to meet some highly intelligent people in my time, and the neuroscience of this phenomenon is absolutely fascinating. If an ordinary person with no racing experience jumped in a Formula 1 car and was able to drive it (at all!) around a circuit, their brain would be concentrating on moving their arms, legs, eyes, head, just to get the car around the track once. Each decision would need to be consciously made. Turn the wheel here; now the car is sliding so I need to correct that . . . and so on. The problem is that the conscious part of the brain is very slow; it is a big overhead in terms of energy consumption, so therefore it is quite sluggish. The conscious circuits in the brain are not very precise; they are coarse and quite laborious, which, when you are driving a car at 200mph, is not very helpful.
This is where practice comes in. Clinically, it has been proven that if you practise something often enough, that process does an amazing thing – it switches from conscious to unconscious. There is a section at the back of the brain called the cerebellum, and when you practise the same activity or action thousands of times, this part of the brain recognises that repetitive activity. Then, rather than consciously making a decision every time, it assumes that it would be far faster and more efficient to react subconsciously. When it makes that switch – from conscious to subconscious – the signals transmitted from your brain via your spinal cord to your arm to turn the steering wheel become an instantaneous, subconscious movement. You don’t need to work out what to do every time. That is when you get really fast. When a champion is driving a car, their brain subconsciously knows what to do – Here’s a certain type of oversteer I have seen 6000 times before – this is how to correct that. But this is all done instantaneously. A driver in the zone doesn’t even think about it.
What this means is that the conscious part of the driver’s brain is free and untaxed; it has lots of spare processing power because the subconscious part is doing the majority of the work. Therefore it can process the trees flying past; it can see faces in the crowd; it can see the pit lane as if it is going past at only 40mph. The brain has room to spare. It can make decisions in a race in a millisecond, yet almost leisurely. This is why champion drivers can seem to slow down time. To use an analogy: if you are walking along the street and you wave at a friend, you don’t need to think about what is involved – lifting your hand, saying hello and not falling over – because it is something your subconscious brain is processing. However, take that same situation but put you on a tightrope . . . Try waving then!
The role of sleep in processing the events of the day is tied into this as well. Sleep is when the transfer from conscious to unconscious occurs; this is when the brain decides to switch. That is why some days when you wake up it feels, as if by magic, that you have learned something when you were asleep, but this progression is actually because of the practice you’ve done when you were awake.
This is the known, recognised neuroscience of what I was doing that day at Paul Ricard. I have observed this conscious-to-subconscious transfer happen in myself and seen it in others many times, and it is truly fascinating.
Back to the reality of my ambition to be Formula 1 world champion: the impact of that process in terms of my future career in F1, my belief in my ability and my performance in front of the Lotus team during that second day testing at Paul Ricard was huge.
CHAPTER 4
THE LOTUS YEARS AND COLIN CHAPMAN
I must have made the right impression at the Paul Ricard test because, shortly afterwards, I was offered the role of test driver for the Lotus Formula 1 team. Stephen South had queried some details of a deal that was put to him, so Colin Chapman went with me instead. Elio de Angelis, who would become a close friend, got the F1 seat alongside the existing number one, former world champion Mario Andretti. There was even talk of me starting three grands prix in the forthcoming season.
I was on top of the world.
As it turned out, 1980 was a rather unsuccessful year for Lotus but, even so, my role as a test driver allowed me to learn so much. Just being around people like Colin and Mario was a massive learning curve. I felt very privileged. I knew I had worked extremely hard to get there, and I was determined to seize any tiny opportunity that came my way. I gradually got to know Colin and bided my time for a chance to show him what I could do. He had already given me such a massive confidence boost just by taking me on – I wasn’t exactly well funded, so I felt he had picked me purely because of his faith in my ability. In the first year of working with Colin, I found out that he’d said I was ‘the best natural talent’ he’d seen since Jim Clark, and he also told a television interviewer that I was ‘a future world champion’. Well, in my eyes, there were no higher compliments.
So, when it came to my first official track day as a Lotus test driver, I was totally focused on performing to my maximum – I had to justify Colin’s faith in me. It was at Silverstone and the other two drivers weren’t available, so it was just me and the mechanics, a few of whom were (perhaps understandably) unsure how this young F3 driver would cope with the spotlight of being the sole test driver of their F1 car. The conditions were beautiful but, even so, I took the first few laps cautiously, and only then started to find my rhythm before blasting out a few laps that I felt were pretty strong. There was no indication from the pit board about the times so I was unsure, nervous even, of how well I had done when I came back into the pits. So imagine my delight when the team told me I had lapped in 1 minute 12.5 seconds – the fastest time ever in a Lotus around Silverstone. That would have put me on the second row of the grid for the previous
year’s British Grand Prix.
I swapped fastest lap times with Elio in testing over the coming weeks and my efforts were rewarded when Colin announced I might get an actual race drive at the forthcoming Austrian Grand Prix in August 1980, shortly after my 27th birthday. That race weekend couldn’t come soon enough.
You do come across some strange people sometimes. A few weeks after I had just broken the track record for a Lotus at Silverstone, I’d been playing a round of golf in the most awful weather – it was more like an extreme sport, with gale-force winds and lashing rain. A group of us used to play together and, on this particular day, at the end of the round, we headed to a local pub for a hot toddy – a little bit of brandy, sugar and hot water – to warm us up after such bracing conditions.
We walked into the pub and I could immediately hear this guy inside talking rather loudly to a group of people, holding court. He was saying, ‘Yes, I am the outright track record holder at Silverstone,’ and he was really giving it some, going on and on about it very brashly. ‘It was fantastic. I couldn’t believe I broke the track record at Silverstone – what a brilliant day, I couldn’t have driven any better . . .’, this, that and the other. Everyone was listening so intently to this guy. I sat down and was thinking, Wow, I should know him, and I actually felt a bit silly for not recognising him. I was still very green in terms of Formula 1, so I chastised myself for not having done enough research to instantly recognise this fellow.
I listened some more and then, eventually, I went over and congratulated him. He didn’t recognise me, which wasn’t surprising as I was, after all, still in my early days at Lotus. I asked him what car he had been driving. I was thinking, I am a numpty, I should know this guy. Everything I was asking him was with the intention of triggering my brain, because I was really embarrassed that I didn’t know him. I could see he was getting a little bit agitated with my line of questioning when I asked how much horsepower his car had. Another couple of questions later and he snapped, ‘Well, who the hell are you anyway?’
Nigel Mansell Autobiography Page 4