Nigel Mansell Autobiography

by Nigel Mansell

  I recognise that the sound of these new turbo engines isn’t to everyone’s taste. It’s not to mine, if I am being honest. However, this is the way the sport needs to go at this moment in time. For me, the best noise – and it is personal taste – was the DFV or the flat V12 Ferrari going past at high speed in the 1980s – just wonderful! The good old DFV singing at the top of its voice was the most beautifully savage sound. The V10 Renault was pretty impressive as well. We are never going to hear the likes of that again, but times move on. We all have to move on, too, fans, drivers, teams alike. The different sound is not necessarily a bad development either. You might be interested to know that I sometimes struggle with my hearing, to the point where it can be quite hard for me to follow day-to-day conversations in a noisy room. This could have been caused in part by years of having these massive monster engines screaming at the top of their lungs inches from the back of my head.

  There will no doubt be endless evolutions of the turbo engine and it will change again, that is for sure. I personally find it all very fascinating watching what will happen next. That is part of Formula 1’s uniqueness, the constant and incredible evolution of technology, so there’s no point denigrating the sport for that – just embrace it.

  Rather excitingly, as I write this chapter there are rumours that increased horsepower might be something that could make a comeback. I don’t know how true that is, but I would be thrilled to see a return to the days when cars had between 1000bhp and up to 1350bhp. Obviously, not at the expense of drivers’ safety, of course, but just in terms of the pure spectacle. Let’s get back to having wheel spin coming out of corners at 150mph – then the tyre manufacturers really will have a challenge on their hands!

  That first season racing at Williams alongside Keke Rosberg in 1985 was exhilarating, with some fantastic successes, including my first grand prix win, and some disappointments too. Although I was clearly a number two driver, I had no problem with that status, given Keke’s experience and the fact he was such a lovely team-mate. Besides, as a team, Williams had a very proud philosophy of always allowing their drivers to race; therefore, their cars were always produced to be as equal as possible, and if I was able to overhaul Keke, then so be it. I managed to out-qualify Keke seven times, which made me very proud as he was such an outstanding racer.

  The season didn’t begin well, though. After some awkward testing with the old FW09, I qualified fifth at the season opener in Brazil, but then was clipped by Michele Alboreto, which sent me off the track. Not a great start to the first lap of my first race with a new team. Although I was able to rejoin, exhaust problems eventually forced me to retire on only the eighth lap. It was a hugely disappointing start to my time with Williams, but just as they would be when I spun off on the parade lap in Estoril two weeks later, Frank and the team were hugely supportive.

  Keke had proved the car could be a winner after taking the chequered flag in Detroit (after I crashed out with brake problems, suffering concussion and a jarred thumb). Nonetheless, all the signs were promising. I had not yet won a grand prix, but I felt like my moment might be approaching. However, when we got to Paul Ricard for the French Grand Prix I suffered a massive accident on the Mistral Straight. The turbo cars were just so fast, and by this point speeds in excess of 200mph were commonplace. I have previously said that at Paul Ricard in a turbo car the speeds were ‘more like a land-speed record attempt than a motor race’ and I think that sums up the sheer insane velocity of these machines.

  I was travelling at over 200mph down the Mistral Straight when my left rear tyre exploded, ripped up the suspension on that side and the rear wing disintegrated too. When I hit the guardrail, the front left tyre exploded then the wheel snapped back and hit me on the head, instantly switching my lights out with a massive concussion. Thankfully, the brilliant but sadly late Professor Sid Watkins was on hand to care for me, and I was shipped unconscious by helicopter to hospital (in 1968, Mike Spence had been killed by a similar crash at Indianapolis). I actually woke up on the gurney attached to the outside of the helicopter and for a fleeting moment, as I headed through the sky, I thought I was on my way to heaven. That was a terrifying experience to have, semi-conscious and confused, so I was very grateful to pass out again quickly afterwards. A few days later I was able to go home and recuperate for the forthcoming British Grand Prix.

  I made it to Silverstone and the team brilliantly built me a new car, but I wasn’t fully fit in my opinion. I qualified well, but the real star of the show was Keke, who did an astonishing qualifying lap which proved to be the fastest average speed ever by a Formula 1 car, clocking in at an average of over 160mph (a record that stood for 17 years). Astonishing. What’s more, my team-mate personally found me in my motorhome to congratulate me on my qualifying efforts, and then proceeded to tell the press how brave and skilful I had been. To prove the point about my concussion, I have no recollection of that motorhome conversation with Keke; I only found out about it when he told me a few days later. I retired from the actual race in third with clutch problems, and there was a sense of relief, to be honest.

  The most obvious highlight of the 1985 season was my first ever grand prix win, which came in the European Grand Prix at Brands Hatch in early October. When we got to Brands Hatch I was still having to take painkillers for my wrist but, with improvements having been made on the car’s suspension and transmission, I felt we could be very strong. Patrick Head had designed a new rear suspension with his team, which was fabulous. For me, Patrick is a fantastic engineer, designer and entrepreneur. I like Patrick, I love his manner; he is robust and he doesn’t suffer fools gladly so we were quite like-minded, but he is great. He knew that he never needed to ask me to push; I would always give my best for him, and he liked that and embraced it, and I liked that too.

  Anyway, before Brands that year, he put a new suspension on the car and in testing I went straight out and drove three-quarters of a second quicker. It was immense. He’d altered elements of the suspension, which allowed us to get more of that brutal turbo power down on the track. When anybody designs something that makes a car easier to drive, it is an absolute godsend, because a thoroughbred race car is always on its tippy-toes. If a designer can add something to the car that makes it quicker and yet consistent, then as a driver you are elated. The Williams team and Patrick were especially good at being able to do this.

  So I went to Brands with a bigger comfort zone than usual, knowing we were going to be competitive. I made a good start and had a tussle with Ayrton, Nelson Piquet and Keke along the way. After Keke and Nelson had a coming together, the latter retired and I was up to second behind Senna. When Keke came out of the pits, I managed to get past Ayrton in the ensuing battle and into the lead. I stretched that lead and it was then just a case of nursing the car home, keeping a safe distance between me and the chasing pack and getting that first grand prix win. The 75,000 fans whooped with joy as I crossed to take the chequered flag, and in the car I was crying with elation and wonder. I had won my first grand prix. I was 32 and this was my 72nd race in Formula 1. When I got out of the car I was spent, totally spent. I remember almost passing out on the podium, I could hardly stand. I was shaking, I was excited. It was definitely a ‘pinch yourself’ moment. Have I really just done that? In a post-race interview I said, ‘If anybody has won the race for me today, it’s the people out there . . . the best feeling I have ever had in my life.’ The British fans are just unbelievable, still to this day.

  We stayed overnight at a hotel nearby and the morning after a helicopter picked us up. I remember one particular driver, who’d had, how can I put it, a late night with a female friend, wasn’t particularly happy about being woken up so early by this helicopter!

  That first win gave me such an injection of confidence. I trusted my car and now I was a grand prix winner; I knew what needed to be done. That win is still one of my favourites. Sometimes I get confused and say I have won five British Grands Prix, but that is because Brands Hatch
that day felt like a home race, the fans were so incredible – it was a massive moment in my life (to be precise, I have won four British Grands Prix, and once in England at this, the European Grand Prix).

  In the quiet calmness back at home, I started to understand and appreciate that maybe all the sacrifice had been worth it. You do question sometimes what you have missed in life. For instance, I have found out now, through having grandchildren, that some of the quality time I can spend with them, I never had with my own children. That’s not to say they didn’t have a wonderful upbringing or that we didn’t share some incredible quality time because we did, but you do realise that there was a price to pay to achieve what we did. Brands Hatch that day was the first win and it really felt like it had all been worthwhile.

  I won the next race at Kyalami in South Africa too, making me the only driver to win back-to-back that year. In that 1985 season I also had a front-row start in Monaco, some fastest laps along the way and ultimately picked up a solid 31 points (Prost won the title), taking me to sixth in the World Championship. Yes, we had some reliability problems, but aside from that and the accidents, it just felt like the team were building us both very fast cars, their work ethic was wonderful, my performances, experience and points-scoring were inexorably gathering momentum and I sensed real, genuine potential.

  Away from the track and all the intense demands on my time and energy that my F1 career entailed, the mid-1980s was a very special time for Rosanne and me because we became parents to three wonderful children. We were in our late twenties when Chloe was first to arrive in 1982, then Leo nearly three years later, followed by Greg in 1987. So at one point we had three children under the age of five. And some people say driving an F1 car is demanding!

  It was just wonderful to become a parent and I feel very blessed to have had three fabulous children. In terms of my career, I found the arrival of the children to be mostly a hugely positive development. Their presence felt like a stabilising influence in my hectic life. It’s nobody’s fault but doing a job like I had, it is all too easy to get carried away; you can lose yourself very easily. You can get carried away with the fans, the whole superstar treatment, the money, the VIP status – it is a very rarefied lifestyle even though you are working very hard.

  So, for me, after having a good day or, conversely, a really bad day at work, coming home to the children was very grounding. They were always the same to me; I was their dad first and foremost. Being so young, they didn’t even comprehend my job, so I was either at home or I was away working. I might come in through the door with my head full of a car’s problems, or maybe some frustrating politics, an argument perhaps, whatever, and there’d be Chloe wanting to play or the boys tumbling around the room. It instantly brought me down to earth and allowed me to recharge my batteries every night. Last or first on the grid? To my children when they were toddlers it didn’t matter and that rubbed off on me, which I found very soothing.

  Of course, the practicalities of touring the world on the F1 circuit as a father of three were not always the easiest. For starters, we had no parents of our own to help out (although Rosanne’s father was still alive he didn’t travel around the world with us). This meant that when I was away with work, Rosanne was all on her own, which was very hard for her. When we moved to the Isle of Man, we didn’t know anyone at first, so Rosanne was alone in the house with three very young children. We eventually employed nannies to help out, but it was still a lot of work for Rosanne.

  For my part, I missed the children very much. We calculated that during the 12 years we lived on the Isle of Man, I was travelling for nine and a half of those. For a young family, that is a pretty massive amount of time for a dad to be away from home. It was heart-rending to be away for so much time. We tried to alleviate this separation by taking the children to as many races as was practical. In fact, we were one of the driver families who did that as often as possible. I would hardly ever have seen them if we hadn’t made the effort to take them with us.

  Sometimes, taking the children with me worked really well; other times, you’d get home and think, That was really much more hassle than it was worth. Occasionally, the cost and energy that we put into taking the children to races was counterproductive to the end result. I remember flying to Australia with Leo when he was just ten months old in my first year at Williams, but that flight wiped us out – that was a mistake. We went to stay with my sister in Adelaide; it was an opportunity for us to be together, so we took the nanny as well as the children, but it was an expensive trip and very difficult from a practical point of view.

  Plus I was always conscious of having to do my job properly, too. I was there to win races, so it was an incredible balancing act. For example, I couldn’t afford to risk having the children keep me awake, so, to make sure I got a good night’s sleep before a race, it was planned very carefully that they would always be in a separate room from me. In truth, Rosanne was very good because she cherry-picked which races to go to. I have to say that if we hadn’t been privileged to have our own jet plane at times, we wouldn’t have been able to experience some of the things we did as a family.

  When my children arrived, it did make me reassess my relationship with my own father a little bit. It has been well documented in a previous book that after my mother died he remarried quite quickly, and I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the situation. My father obviously needed some support and help, which I tried to give. I told him that, in my opinion, he was moving a bit faster than I thought was sensible to remarry, and to someone much younger. One time I was racing at Monaco, he called me the night before the grand prix, out of the blue, to wish me luck with the race and to say he was getting married in the morning. I just said, ‘Well, who to?’ because I had never met the person and didn’t know her. That was a shock. Three years later, he passed away. That was very sad. However, he did what he felt he wanted to do, which was his prerogative.

  Our children have fond memories of the races they did go to and, for the most part, I am glad we made the effort. In Austria one time, Bernie Ecclestone paid for a crèche for the drivers’ children, which was really nice. In some ways people think Bernie is very hard and tough which, of course, he is when he needs to be, but there is a very human side to him which that gesture illustrates very well. One year we took them to Hungary. They didn’t go to the track, but as a family we jumped on the tram to the city and went to the zoo, which was enjoyable. If you were to ask the children, the moments they would always remember would be playing with Frank and Ginny Williams’ children, who were similar ages. They loved that.

  We would always go to Monaco as a family. When we could afford to, we stayed at the Plaza hotel and walked along the promenade, and there was a little merry-go-round nearby that the children loved. Every year in Monaco, we would take a picture of them sitting on the same wall, so now we have a lovely photographic record of them getting bigger and bigger. They always remembered Monaco; Estoril too, which they adored because we stayed in a log cabin there.

  Nora Tyrrell tells a classic story about Chloe when she was a baby. We had a function to attend one evening and we took our baby daughter with us. We never had anyone available to look after her, so we would just take her along. We got her ready for bed, put her in the pushchair and wheeled her along to the do. She was asleep, happy as Larry in the corner of the room, not making a sound. Then, when the event was over, we went back to the hotel, lifted her out, put her in the cot and she went straight back to sleep. Very rare, I know, but this wasn’t unusual for Chloe – she was a very good little girl. Nora found this unbelievable and very kindly used to say, ‘What an amazing baby!’ Mind you, it wasn’t like that when the boys came along . . .

  The craziest trip I did during that time was coming back from Japan to the Isle of Man, which as you can imagine is not a straightforward journey. At that time, I had to travel economy everywhere but I wanted to get home for the birth of Leo. I made lots of flight connections and managed to get th
ere in time, but I was only in the Isle of Man for 17 hours before I had to get back on a flight to Australia. I really didn’t want to miss the birth – I am very proud, and not a little amazed given the transient nature of my job, to say that I was actually present at the birth of all three of my children.

  That particular trip was a bit much, to be fair. By the time I landed in Australia, the jetlag and tiredness were overwhelming and I didn’t really know where I was, who I was or what I was supposed to be doing. In less than three days I’d spent over 50 hours in the air. It’s funny looking back (although I don’t remember laughing at the time), but I recall getting in the car after a number of days in Australia and I really didn’t want to drive. I just wasn’t with it. That has happened to me twice – that time in Australia and also once in Japan. The latter was more to do with the food and the time zones.

  Like I’ve said, it helped that we often had our own plane. I have very much enjoyed being a pilot for over three decades and I’m glad to say I’ve had very few near misses. I’ve generally been lucky with incidents – I am meticulous with the preparation and safety of any flight – but there was one very hair-raising near miss one time we were flying transatlantic. I’ve always been very safety conscious and I don’t like flying in severe weather unless I really have to – you shouldn’t push the limits. On this particular occasion, we could’ve lost our lives when we were ferrying one of our new planes across the Atlantic. However, this wasn’t due to being reckless or unprepared. We’d done our homework; the weather forecast was pretty good, rain or even just drizzle at worst; the plane was in perfect condition, everything was working beautifully. However, what I learned that day was that your life can change on a sixpence – one minute everything is fine and you have done all your homework, you’ve done your weather reports and so on, but if Mother Nature wants to turn your life on its head, she can.