Nigel Mansell Autobiography

by Nigel Mansell

  Another crucial development that ground effect created was the need for far harder suspensions. The reason for this was simple: given that ground effect worked by precisely controlling the gap and airflow under a car, you could no longer have nice, soft suspensions that absorbed all the bumps and lumps in a track, cushioning you as you drove. That movement up and down would, of course, dramatically alter the air pressure under the car and either dilute or possibly completely destroy the ground effect. Therefore, the optimum aim was to maintain a specific ride height where ground effect could operate consistently. Consequently, the ground-effect cars were fitted with much harder suspensions. In terms of ride quality, you went from the soft springs that provided a not unpleasant ride to what was essentially a rock-hard, super-powerful go-kart travelling at lunatic speeds around corners. In terms of your day-to-day experience out on the track, the enormous change in ride quality was really quite dramatic. And I can tell you from very painful experience over thousands and thousands of laps of having my arse and pretty much every bone in my body completely battered that ground-effect suspensions were much harder.

  There were many cost implications of ground effect, too. For example, the soft springs on cars cost several hundred pounds, but the much firmer and more precise ground-effect springs cost thousands of pounds. For other teams playing catch-up with Lotus, it was far worse, because the cost of developing ground effect from scratch was potentially enormous.

  As a driver, you could learn to live with the severe lateral G created. You could train your body to absorb those new extreme forces. You could relearn tracks and understand where the ground effect worked and where it was less powerful. You could get used to the harsher ride. However, the most chronic downside of ground effect was the fact that at times it was inconsistent. When you are travelling into a corner at speeds in the region of 200mph, inconsistency can be lethal. Literally. This was the ultimate price you risked having to pay for using ground effect – if a car bottomed out for some reason and that crucial ride height altered, the ground-effect system could fail and if that happened then you were nothing more than a helpless passenger in the lap of a monster.

  Why was ground effect inconsistent and therefore at times highly dangerous? Well, let me explain. If you were able to maintain a consistent ride height and the skirts at the side of the car stayed in their correct position, with the predicted airflow under the car precisely as expected, then it was just the most beautifully powerful, savagely exhilarating system. There was a perfect window of ride height whereby the car was amazingly driveable, incredibly so. The tremendous downforce was just a joy when it was there. But then suddenly . . . BOOM! . . . it could be gone. At that instant, if you are halfway through a corner at 160mph, then you are in big, big trouble.

  Usable ground effect could literally disappear in an instant. This could happen if one or both of the side skirts moved or became stuck, and also if the ride height altered for some reason. In those situations, the positive air pressure you had generated would stall and that incredible suction would dissipate instantly. You could go from having several thousand pounds of downforce to almost nothing in a heartbeat. To use the technical terms, the ground effect could ‘attach’ and ‘detach’ at times very unpredictably.

  When ground effect disappears, the car becomes almost undriveable. If you were in the middle of a corner when that happened, there would be absolutely nothing you could do to save the car, and more than likely you would fly straight off and have a massive accident because, by definition, you are cornering at high speed. If that happened . . . you’d better hold on tight. Certain corners you would enter and be thinking, I might not actually come out of this corner at all, finito.

  The scariest part of ground effect was that you didn’t know when it was going to fail. That’s not strictly true; there were times when the car would start to do what was termed ‘porpoising’ – that is, bouncing up and down. This happened when the ground effect was detaching, reattaching, detaching, reattaching and so on. Maybe the skirt was partially stuck; there were a number of other possibilities, too, but the manifestation of the problem was this porpoising – which, I can tell you from personal experience, when it happens at nearly 200mph is very unsettling indeed.

  The window of operation was so small, and the consequences of failure so vast. Ground effect was such a poisoned chalice. If you can imagine a car’s performance is like the tip of a needle, and balancing perfectly on that tip is the optimum performance. The danger of going off line even a tiny fraction spells disaster. The aim was to make a ground-effect car’s optimum performance more akin to an oblique curve, so that in the event of a failure you would still have a bigger window of working opportunity for that car before it flew off the track. However, at times, ground effect was all or nothing. It was very hard to harness the incredible energy and downforce and maintain it in a stable fashion. Everybody could get massive downforce using this idea; the trick was creating usable massive downforce.

  The engineers, aerodynamicists and brains behind the system worked tirelessly for months and indeed years on end to try to solve the problem. They battled to try to regulate the ground effect, to make it ‘solid’ so that it did not compress – this prevented the centre of pressure under the car moving about unpredictably and therefore made the system consistent. They tried fixed skirts and other ideas to try to control the beast.

  Ground effect suited my driving style. It suited a strong racer, a driver who would go into a corner and hang on for dear life. You almost had to have a suicidal trait, where you were willing to risk everything to try to do the job. Ultimately, the limitation of ground-effect technology (if it was working perfectly) was the human being driving the car. It was a case of how brave, how stupid, how talented are you? And how prepared are you to put it out there and risk everything? Literally everything.

  Tragically, there were fatalities that some experts speculated ground effect may have contributed to. Patrick Depailler lost his life testing in Hockenheim in 1980. To be absolutely accurate, it was never actually certain if ground effect contributed to his fatal accident, which was attributed to a suspension failure. He went into a corner and the car appeared to simply fly off the track. Even if that fatality was not related to ground effect, there was much conjecture that the system could be very dangerous.

  Ground effect was used between 1977 and 1982. As I mentioned, there were efforts to tame the idea to a degree, but it remained an essentially risky science. The F1 authorities eventually banned ground effect due to very justifiable safety concerns. I think if it had been left to continue and evolve unfettered, it could easily have killed many drivers. So they banned it, for all the correct reasons.

  Despite all the negatives I have detailed, from a purely technical point of view ground effect was a truly phenomenal invention, and it was simply amazing to be involved right at the point when it was introduced into Formula 1 with Colin and then to see the evolution of that dark art.

  From a driver’s perspective, perhaps the single most damaging consequence of ground effect was the shattering of your confidence if it failed in a corner and you flew off the track. As a wider topic, this is the most crucial element of a driver’s psyche. Specifically, during the era when I raced, the issue of how much you pushed your car was not just a question of how many race wins or podiums you might or might not get – it was potentially a matter of life or death. I am not being overly dramatic here. The harsh reality was that you had to have an abundance of confidence to win races at the top level at a time when serious injury and death were regularly witnessed. However, if that confidence started to crumble, you were in big trouble. Let me explain.

  Formula 1 cars can be very unpredictable. Some are extremely quick in fast corners, but terrible in medium corners and vice versa. Part of the challenge of being a top driver is to understand your car’s idiosyncrasies, learn to accommodate them, work with them. I called it the window of operation and you needed to learn to apply what you k
new at the right moment.

  The correct word to describe the best Formula 1 car is ‘consistent’. That is what you crave in a racing car. Those cars are easier to set up and easier to drive. The more consistency, the greater the trust you could have in the car. A lack of trust in a car is the biggest problem that racing drivers face in the cockpit. Certainly for me it was anyway. Having the belief that you can go into a corner as fast as possible and still come out the other end alive. As much as Formula 1 drivers are very determined individuals, at the same time we are not fools, and in my era we were all petrified that we might go barrelling into a corner on some of the circuits knowing that if something happened it would most likely result in a massive accident. At times, the potential for injury was so severe you knew you could lose your life. Remember, there were certain corners, deathtraps essentially, that we knew had already taken people’s lives.

  Those corners were ready to bite you and it wasn’t going to be a small accident if they did. So you respected that corner, you had to. I will never forget going round the Bosch Curve in the early 1980s Austrian Grand Prix, where you’d go in flat out and you’d come out flat out. If you had a car set out really well then you were flat out all the way round. In the middle of the corner you would be doing in the region of 180–190mph, so you knew if something broke in the middle or the exit of that corner, the chances of your survival were very remote. Factor in the necessity of lapping over 50 times and you were potentially facing death four or five dozen times in two hours. ‘Petrified’ seems like an extreme word, but actually I think it is the right term. We were all acutely conscious of that threat.

  In my experience, this made the psychology of racing Formula 1 cars in my era very complex. When you were in a high-speed corner, the biggest fight was never with your rivals, nor your reliability or tyre wear or strategy – it was with yourself. I know that maybe I have a reputation for being very sure of myself on the track, confident, certain, determined. That is true, I felt like that, but let me tell you I also had never-ending battles with self-doubt, which at times were chronic. However, it was how I – and all the other drivers – dealt with that self-doubt that made the difference between a mid-grid finish and the fastest lap or even a win.

  So if you would like to sit with me in my ground-effect Lotus and head into a super-fast corner, this is what would have been in my head at that exact moment: an intense battle raging in microseconds each time. You go into the corner, you know you are doing perhaps 180mph or more, you know there are no run-offs nearby; in fact, there might be a barrier or in the earlier days even mesh catch fencing. Remember, it’s not how fast you go in a Formula 1 car that injures or kills you – it is how quickly you stop. So you drive through the corner on this knife edge, trying to feel and sense if you are absolutely as fast as that corner allows, then you come out of the other side and that fear is gone, but then instantly you think, Damn! I can go through there faster!

  So when that corner arrives again a couple of minutes later, you go in faster, you take a greater risk, you push the boundaries again, but all the time you know you are playing Russian roulette with your own safety. The mental fight never ends: Push harder, go deeper, carry more speed, you can go faster through this corner, while also thinking, If this goes wrong I am in big trouble – you can’t go that fast through here. Fear versus performance. Self-preservation versus aggressive competitiveness. Of course, throw into the mix the fact that a rival driver might be on your tail or there might be backmarkers cluttering your path or oil on the track or maybe tyre degradation, and it can get pretty hair-raising. The mental battle is so tough, it’s exhausting.

  The solution is more complex than just ‘thinking confidently’. There is a physicality to this battle. When you are racing at that extreme edge, the correlation between your brain and your body’s reactions is absolutely fascinating. If you move your right foot off the pedal even a tiny amount, the performance of F1 cars is so staggering that your rivals will fly past as if you don’t exist. The physical precision in the foot pedal is very exact. So when you are having this battle, the risk that your fear will lift your foot off the accelerator – almost involuntarily – is very real. You almost have to think very deliberately to make that foot stay on the throttle and hang on, yet just as you go into that corner your foot comes off – you don’t want it to come off but it still comes off! There is a constant struggle between the brain and the body’s motor system. If the self-doubt wins, your foot will lift ever so slightly – we call it feathering – and, although it might only be a tiny shift, it can equate to a tenth of a second. In Formula 1, that can be a lifetime.

  It is the most amazing dynamic. If you have never fought with your own body and brain like that it is perhaps hard to imagine, but it is a fascinating exercise. It is like playing a really crazy game. I suppose the nearest thing to actually driving a Formula 1 car yourself would be – and don’t try this at home! – to put your hand on a table, spread your fingers out and then take a very sharp knife and try to quickly stab the gaps between your fingers, over and over again, for two hours.

  I think you can directly relate the movement of a driver’s foot to the level of confidence in their psyche. If you could draw a graph that registered their confidence around a circuit’s corners, it would largely correlate to the movement of their foot on the pedal. Some people call it a lack of confidence, some call it fear, some call it things like the ‘heebie-jeebies’. Call it what you will. Inside a Formula 1 cockpit, whatever name you give it, that feeling is toxic and highly destructive. Without confidence, a Formula 1 driver is ruined.

  CHAPTER 7

  CHALLENGES ON AND OFF THE CIRCUIT

  My confidence going into the 1982 season was pretty strong. My first full year in F1 had been a relative success in my opinion, although I knew there was plenty of room for improvement and I was very hungry to make those strides. In fact, if anything, I was more hungry than ever. However, by the end of the year Colin would be dead and my time at Lotus heading towards an end.

  The season started brilliantly, with Colin offering me a new three-year deal. In essence, after all the years of financial hardship, this contract would effectively make me a millionaire overnight. It was the most incredible offer from one of motorsport’s true legends.

  I couldn’t sign it.

  There was some wording in there which I felt made me sound like a commodity; it seemed very dehumanising and made me feel uncomfortable. I went to Colin and told him that I couldn’t sign the contract and, to be honest, he went ballistic. He was absolutely astounded, telling me that I was saying no to the most incredible deal, a fabulous pay packet, amazing opportunities – he was fuming. He said if I didn’t sign then I would never make it in Formula 1.

  I said, ‘Yes, Colin, I have to agree, you are absolutely right. One hundred per cent correct.’

  He just looked at me in shock, and said, ‘Well, what’s your problem then, Nigel?’

  I explained that some of the wording would paralyse me as a human being, that it described my role as a commodity and not as a person, which was very disconcerting. He just stared at me, bemused.

  ‘So, Nigel, is that the only thing you are upset with?’

  ‘Yes, the rest of it is fantastic, wonderful.’

  ‘So, if I alter that wording as you say, will you then sign the contract?’

  ‘Yes, everything else is absolutely fine.’

  He raised his eyebrows a little, ‘Well, in that case, I will change the wording,’ then, as he walked away with the hint of a smile on his face, he said, ‘You are a funny bugger, aren’t you?’

  We signed the contract shortly after and Colin very kindly bought some champagne to celebrate the deal together.

  That season saw me finish 14th in the championship again, with one less point at seven, but I still felt I was progressing as a driver. I’d secured my second career podium at the race in Brazil and enjoyed five other top-ten finishes. Again, there were reliability issues, causi
ng five retirements, and I crashed twice (what a contrast to the modern era, when reliability is so good). Due to an internal F1 dispute I didn’t race at Imola at all (two organisations, FISA and FOCA, were arguing about the direction of F1). The reliability issues were in part a result of the fact that the team had focused on the twin-chassis car and now had to abandon that set-up, so they were playing catch-up on the new Lotus. They worked so incredibly hard but it was always a struggle.

  However, despite my own battles and the challenges faced by the team, 1982 was far worse for other people: we lost both Gilles Villeneuve and Riccardo Paletti in horrific fatal accidents, as well as seeing Didier Pironi suffer career-ending injuries in a very nasty smash in his Ferrari during a wet practice for the German Grand Prix when visibility was severely restricted. By December, Colin Chapman would be taken from us too.

  I raced cars in an era when, tragically, many people lost their lives. Of course, the generations before me saw even more fatalities, so I have to acknowledge that huge leaps in terms of safety had been made by the time I sat in an F1 car, and we raced on circuits that, at that point in time, were utilising the best safety measures the sport was aware of. Unfortunately, it was still an incredibly dangerous way to make a living. Between 1980 and 1994, for example, six drivers were killed and many more suffered serious injury. Across motorsport as a whole the figure was much higher. I am incredibly blessed to have survived and, although I have sustained many serious injuries that are now manifesting themselves on an almost daily basis as I get older, I am still here.