Nigel Mansell Autobiography

by Nigel Mansell

  We all had to find a way to process and work through our psychological wellbeing when there was a serious or fatal accident. All the drivers had to do this – we couldn’t just say, ‘Oh, I am really upset by what’s happened. I will take this week off and not race.’ It was our job; we had to go racing. That said, we are all human and seeing your friends and colleagues badly injured or even killed doing the same job, then having to go out and perform at the highest level – or even at all – is a big challenge. Let me take the terrible loss of the great Gilles Villeneuve as a case in point.

  Gilles was a dear friend of mine; I loved Gilles, what a guy. He befriended me as soon as we met and I loved his company. We always ended up talking to one another for whatever reason, in the pits and away from the track. Gilles was always an excellent source of wisdom and friendship. He was the epitome of a great racer, a proper racing driver, everything that any driver should aspire to be. He was full of energy, full of life and mischievous behaviour at times, and not slow at coming forward and making himself heard if he had a view on something. For me, at that age, when Gilles came into my world of F1, he was a total breath of fresh air. I don’t know why he took a liking to me but I certainly took a liking to him. We sat and chatted for hours and just got on really well. I admired the way he drove and I loved his passion for driving and for life. He was a real fun guy.

  Gilles was killed in qualifying for the Belgian Grand Prix, again at Zolder. Seeing Gilles die is just the most awful memory. I was following him and therefore right behind the accident; I saw the whole incident play out before me. Gilles struck the rear of a slower car, an impact that launched his own car into the air for approximately ten metres before slamming nose-first into the floor and somersaulting along the edge of the track. The subsequent impact threw Gilles out of his car and into the catch fencing, a full 50 metres away from his car. Seeing a close friend smash into fencing like that, knowing inside that there was no way he could possibly survive the impact, was the most sickening, dreadful feeling. I drove past and returned to the pits in a daze; I was just numb. Total disbelief, shock, horror, all of the above.

  The first doctor arrived within half a minute of the incident, but there was nothing anyone could do. We were all in the pits waiting on news when it was relayed to us that there was no hope at all, his injuries were too severe. When I heard that, I felt sick, physically sick. In my distress, I somehow found myself between the pits and the medical centre. I was adrift in my own mind and body. I didn’t know where I was or what I was doing, to be perfectly frank with you. I eventually found my way back to the pit entrance, but as I went to enter the garages an official stopped me and said, ‘I need to see your pass, please.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I need to see your pass. You can’t come through into the pits without showing a pass.’

  ‘My pass is in the pits!’

  I simply couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I was wearing my racing overalls and had obviously been on track. I was sweating and dirty, plus I would imagine I looked pretty distressed and troubled. I tried to explain what had happened, but he insisted on seeing some ID. In my shocked and distressed state, I got very confused and in my mind, which clearly wasn’t operating correctly, I thought maybe he was trying to grab me by the neck to throw me out. I educated him very quickly in the strength and power of a Formula 1 driver, and he got out of my way at 200mph!

  When I arrived back at my garage, I do remember feeling very strange. I think on reflection that is when the shock had really started to kick in. I didn’t know at the time that I was suffering from shock, but that’s clearly what it was. I have had this situation a number of times in my life, and each time is different but equally difficult. Shock is an extremely toxic condition; it does very strange things to people. You are able to function in terms of walking, talking, being around your daily life or job, but at the same time you are not really there. Everything is a haze. It is the most peculiar experience. Nothing registers. You hear what people are saying but it doesn’t compute. You observe things with your own eyes, but then somehow you haven’t really seen them. You are just disassociated from the world around you, even though you are engaging with it. It is essentially an out-of-body experience, where the vessel of your body is there and your mind is obviously in that body, but it’s not functioning. Your mind is paralysed; it has seen something that it doesn’t understand, that it didn’t want to see, and it spirals into a crisis mode. In my opinion, that’s why your memory can be lost after a trauma, because your brain just doesn’t know how to function normally. It’s almost like there’s a self-preservation chip in every human being which, when events are too painful, has to react. I don’t think it distorts the truth, but sometimes when it is so bad the brain will not accept the visual input it is seeing and it shuts down. Shock is a known clinical condition, of course, with recognised symptoms of numbness, detachment from your surroundings, episodic amnesia and chronic anxiety. Medics will tell you that clinical shock lasts a minimum of 48 hours, but can actually linger as long as a month or so after a traumatic event. Well, in Formula 1, you have to get straight back in the car either that day or the next.

  For me, Zolder in Belgium was ill-fated. I’d had that fabulous battle at the last (also tragically tainted) race at Zolder – and remember who I had been very proud to have beaten to third place and my first podium? Gilles. Now he was on life-support at the edge of death.

  I was all over the place, absolutely bereft. I don’t remember a thing for the rest of the day, absolutely nothing. I put that down to the stress of what I had seen and who had been so seriously injured.

  Colin Chapman, wonderful man that he was, understood the destructive power of shock and how it could affect drivers and the people around them very badly. I will never forget when Riccardo Paletti was killed in a terrible accident in Montreal just two months later, after smashing into the back of a stalled Ferrari on the grid. There was smoke pluming up from the circuit and we all knew it was bad. I wanted to go to see the incident, to see if I could help, to see what had happened. However, Colin wouldn’t let me. I was distressed and tried to push past him, but he actually got me in a headlock and wrestled me away, all the time saying, ‘Nigel, you are not seeing this, I will not let you see this.’ He manhandled me away and would not let me look because he knew that, if I did, my mind would be plagued by what my eyes had seen. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Colin all these years later for saving me from the emotional turmoil of remembering something that I didn’t have to see. I knew the outcome for that lovely young man Paletti, but I didn’t have to see it in graphic detail. Colin was being a dad to me; he was being caring and loving, ‘You cannot see this, Nigel!’ I knew instantly that if I saw it, it would affect me. So he said enough and did enough to prevent that. Thank you, Colin.

  After Riccardo Paletti had been killed at the start line in Canada, we restarted the race. His best friend had qualified just in front of me and, unbeknown to me, was crying in the cockpit, for obvious reasons following the devastating loss of his friend. On the second lap he decided halfway down the straight to lift off at 185mph at the precise moment I was slipstreaming him, then I smashed into the back of his car. As my car went airborne my hand was jolted through the steering wheel, then when the car landed the wheel rotated sharply, taking my hand with it, fracturing the wrist and arm. I missed the next race and then at Brands Hatch I did my best to race in extreme pain, but ultimately I had to retire when it became too much to bear. At least I had tried.

  Back at Zolder, that day when Gilles crashed was one of the worst in my life. I eventually fell asleep very late at night through total and utter exhaustion. What I have found over the years of racing, and life in general, is that when you do finally sleep – which is not always easy, of course – your mind at least starts to try to compute and process what it has witnessed. The body is at rest but the mind is busy trying to reprogramme itself and come to terms with the new situatio
n. This applies to good events as well as bad ones: your mind reassesses your injury, reassesses the damage, reassesses the joy, the victory, and so on. This all happens in your subconscious, you can’t encourage or control it, and for some people this process is easier than for others. Some people who are not used to any kind of stress or traumatic situations can, in an instant, have their world rocked to such a degree that they never recover. Of course, it may take several days, weeks, months and sometimes years, to fully come to terms with your loss emotionally, but in the case of the brain, it sets to work immediately trying to process what has happened. As for Formula 1 drivers, we have to recover and we have to do so very quickly.

  Having said that, for me the entire weekend at Zolder was a haze. Knowing what I now know about the effects of shock, I find it all the more remarkable when racing drivers experience something like I did that weekend in Belgium, and then go out either later that day or the next and race, and often race very well. Which is some feat when you consider the complexity of a Formula 1 car, the skill required to race at the top level and the guts to throw that car into every corner, and all this after having been in shock. You function in a very sombre disposition, but you do find a way.

  In part it’s because you know as a racer that you have a job to do, and that discipline kicks in. Also you know that if you don’t do that job then someone else will. Being injured or even killed comes with the territory, especially so in years gone by, so you can’t complain – you knew what the parameters were before you joined up. So you just have to get on with it.

  Whenever there was a big incident, I would find a quiet corner to sit alone and try to gather my thoughts. I would never talk to other drivers and rarely spoke to anyone else either. I wasn’t alone in that. The entire pit lane, from drivers to team owners to mechanics to tea ladies to cleaners to engineers, everyone is shell-shocked after an incident like Gilles’s, the whole mood is sombre. Unfortunately, during my era we did see a lot of injury and, sadly, death; we all lived through that happening many times. The weird thing was, it never got any easier. It never got any better. You almost think, Next time there is an injury or a big crash, I will be able to cope better. I never found that to be the case. The circumstances of each crash are always unique, different, so there are always new questions in your mind. It is always horrendous. And you don’t want to be the next person it happens to. Year on year, that was the reality.

  I tried to mitigate the psychological and emotional stress and trauma of a big accident by trying to be logical and meticulous. I would always try to find out what had happened, to see if I could learn anything from that and take it with me going forward. You had to try to take positives from these very sad situations, otherwise the distress would simply overwhelm you. I always wanted to know why the accident happened, what caused it; I needed to know. The easiest thing for me to hear was that it was driver error. If that was the case, then you could look at the error, make sure you never did the same and learn from it. It was a quantifiable incident. If you know what mistake has been made then you can log it, programme it into your brain and say to yourself, In those circumstances be very wary, don’t repeat this mistake because last time it happened this mistake was fatal. There will be no second chances.

  However, if it was mechanical failure, some random part causing the incident which could never have been foreseen, that was harder to compute. I would try to find out why the part failed, where it failed – was it faulty, what stresses on that part might have caused the failure? Sometimes the information was very sketchy and often, if a car had been almost completely destroyed, there was very little left to examine. In the modern era, they are able to analyse the minutes, seconds and even microseconds leading up to a failure, it’s all there in the telemetry, but back then we didn’t have data-logging technology. If a car was destroyed, it was often exceptionally difficult to figure out for certain which part had failed.

  This meant that at times you were going back out on the circuit knowing that the failure could, in theory, be repeated. A failure is a failure and it often seems to happen at the worst possible time. I always found great reassurance in the meticulous nature of the team and their engineers. Certainly in the 1980s it was a bit ‘finger in the air’ at times, not from any lack of expertise or diligence, but because we simply didn’t have the technology at our disposal that the teams do today. However, we had some very ingenious people in our teams and they were able to gather an amazing amount of information from a damaged car – their forensic skill was incredible to witness. This is why I have been very fortunate racing for great teams like Lotus, Williams and Ferrari; they have systems in place for these eventualities. They can crack test their suspension after every race; they change the rose joints on a regular basis, because they can be damaged almost imperceptibly; these things cost money but they do everything they can within the realms of possibility to eliminate the chances of a failure being repeated. They basically exercise the best possible prevention strategy they can.

  The teams are there to race, that is why they exist. I have seen teams after a big crash putting the new race numbers of the next driver on a spare car within a few hours. That can make you feel pretty dispensable, and I know it sounds brutal but that’s just the reality of motor racing. The teams are there to win and to go racing. You come to realise that life continues and you have a job to do. However, these big crashes were always a painful reminder that motor racing can be very dangerous and is potentially lethal.

  Gilles was kept alive on life-support in the hospital until his wife could get there to see him. He died just after 9pm that evening. That was my dear, dear friend, taken right in front of my eyes. He was just the most wonderful man and an astonishing racer. And with Colin Chapman’s passing in December, a very dark year ended in the most terrible way.

  My last two years at Lotus were extremely difficult. With Colin no longer there, tensions surfaced with certain individuals in the team management and my sense of self-confidence was eroded. Looking back, I have said I ‘overdrove’ during this period and that is a fair comment. I was very much the number two driver to my great friend Elio in terms of engines, technology, developments, everything, so the entire time was a struggle. The 1983 season was very difficult; I had a poor car and no points until the seventh race in Detroit. A newly designed turbo Lotus was encouraging and stunned me with the power advantage this type of engine offered (I will come back to this topic later, during my time at Williams, a team that produced just the most sublime turbo cars). I would end the season with another podium (at Brands Hatch for the European Grand Prix); four other top-ten finishes, including a very pleasing fourth place at Silverstone; too many reliability failures to detail, but ironically my best points tally thus far – ten – finishing 12th in the championship. I stayed at Lotus for one more year, the final one of that three-year contract Colin had given me, but the writing was on the wall. The 1984 season would be my last with his team.

  Just before I flew out to Dijon for the 1984 French Grand Prix, my mom died of cancer. She had been ill for some years and had had to go through some lengthy and traumatic radiation therapy and other treatments. Sadly, she could not beat the disease and eventually the illness took her at the age of just 60.

  I was completely devastated. This was compounded by the fact that I knew nothing of her illness, as she’d hidden it from me for two years. So from finding out that she was so ill to her actually dying was a very short period of time.

  If I am being completely honest with you, as I write this book sitting in my study in Florida 31 years later, I still am devastated.

  As a racing driver, you face many challenges every week – that might be on the track, in testing, after or during an accident, the politics, the relationships with teams, sponsors, other drivers, the media. It is a very demanding environment. However, by far the biggest and hardest challenge I have ever had in my life was when my mother died.

  Within 24 hours of seeing my mom in the h
ospital mortuary, I had to fly off to race at Dijon. I was in pieces inside, but I didn’t show anything outside. That was incredibly difficult. I programmed myself to have a quiet weekend. I spoke to the team and said, ‘Look, I don’t feel great this weekend.’ I didn’t tell them why; no one knew that my mom had died the night before. I hardly spoke to anybody; they just thought I was being a bit moody and insular. I didn’t speak to anyone because, if I had, I would’ve fallen apart.

  I decided it was best to really focus on my racing, but my appetite for doing the job and being there that weekend . . . Well, I honestly don’t know how I found the concentration levels to drive at all. In hindsight, I suppose when you are on a mission you just do your job but, boy, that was a tough weekend. I didn’t sleep properly, I barely ate. I was wandering around in my own little world. I actually have very few memories of being there.

  I’ve touched on the effects of shock on a racing driver, but the worst experience of shock I have suffered is when I lost my mother. I went through the whole weekend as a zombie, functioning but not functioning. I needed to do a job and somehow – don’t ask me how – I came away with a podium finish and was handed a trophy and the traditional garland. I often look back on that time and ask myself, What can I remember of that whole weekend?

  Honestly?

  I can’t remember anything.

  I can’t remember how I got to the track, I can’t recall qualifying, I have no recollection of practice. Nothing. I include the actual race itself in that statement. I have no recall whatsoever of what went on during the grand prix. I know I got a podium and I can read the history books or watch footage to tell me how I raced and against who, but I don’t remember any of it myself. And I don’t remember leaving the circuit and travelling home. Given my fractured mental state, it’s almost bizarre to think that I actually had a good race.