Nigel Mansell Autobiography

by Nigel Mansell

  When the tables were turned and I was racing in Brazil, it wasn’t always easy. Remember when I had been racing at Ferrari and there were even bottles thrown at me on the grid when I broke down in Rio? It wasn’t pleasant. That reaction in Rio wasn’t entirely a surprise, because the two main people I was fighting all the time – Nelson Piquet and Ayrton – were Brazilian, but it was still very uncomfortable. Obviously, throwing stuff isn’t acceptable but, to be fair, all great fans of any nationality will be rooting for their home boys. The proper fan will appreciate good sportsmanship; if their home driver’s rival comes through and wins in the right way, they will applaud it. At Silverstone that day, no one was throwing things at Ayrton, but I really did feel for him.

  So I picked him up. It was just a simple gesture of empathy. He walked over to the car, climbed half-aboard and patted me on the head by way of thanks. An official tried to pull him off, but Senna waved him away and off we went. The crowd was spilling on to the track and it was just a great moment. I was criticised afterwards by some of the media for allowing him the chance to look into my cockpit and potentially see if my Williams car had any secrets he could utilise, which was, of course, complete nonsense. When we reached the pits he just got off, patted my head again and gave me a thumbs-up. It was a nice moment and the images are regarded by many as among the most iconic in Formula 1 history, which is also very pleasing.

  After Silverstone, we kept pressing even though Ayrton’s lead meant there was very little room for error. The Williams team was just wonderful – so focused, so determined; we were a mighty force to be reckoned with. There was quite a degree of racing tension between myself and Ayrton at times, and let’s just say the drivers’ briefings before races occasionally got quite heated . . .

  Then, despite all the team’s efforts, in Portugal I suffered one of the most unfortunate retirements of my entire career (only two years after a pit stop problem and missing my box in the same grand prix for Ferrari). Coming in for a pit stop, the right rear wheel did not get fixed on the car properly and within yards of leaving my box it span off, leaving me stranded on three wheels in the pit lane. The team ran over, lifted my car up physically and put a wheel on, but that was against regulations and inevitably I was later black-flagged. This was a very serious blow to my title hopes.

  My intense rivalry with Ayrton continued in Barcelona. Our famous wheel-to-wheel battle in the Spanish Grand Prix, where our two cars were centimetres away from each other at speeds approaching 200mph, perhaps sums up more than any other moment the intense rivalry between myself and Ayrton. That level of competition and sheer will to win is what grand prix racing is all about, surely? On this occasion, the victory was mine. In Suzuka, at the next race, I was hunting Ayrton down but a spin into a sand trap meant that Senna was the champion. Ultimately, Ayrton’s early-season points advantage was too great to overhaul, and he took the title by 24 points, with me coming in as bridesmaid for the third time with 72.

  Despite being disappointed to lose again, I congratulated Ayrton on his title win. I just thought it was the right thing to do. At the end of the day, I am a thoroughbred sportsman and, win or lose, I will congratulate those who have done a better job and have won the day. You should always be what I call a courageous loser, never a bad loser. Congratulate your adversary, learn your lessons and make sure you do the best job you can next time to beat them. I think Ayrton really appreciated that gesture. When you are fighting tooth and nail for a championship, you are very focused on one another but I had to hand it to him. Fair play.

  At the end of 1991 we raced in Adelaide in a monsoon. I am not exaggerating; this wasn’t a ‘bit of rain’, this was a monsoon. The weather leading up to the race had been lovely and sunny, but that all changed for race day itself (two years previously Adelaide had also seen a very wet race). The deluge was so severe that they stopped us after just 16 of the scheduled 81 laps, and with the result being declared from lap 14, this still stands as the shortest grand prix race ever. For me personally, it was a rather painful one.

  The track was carnage; cars were sliding all over the place. It was raining heavily at the start but we all got away reasonably well. I started on the second row and before long there were cars smashed into walls all round the circuit. I made ground up to second but both Ayrton and myself had to take evasive action with cars littering the track in several places (back then, they didn’t always take the debris away). There were no safety cars either and the potential for aquaplaning was horrendous.

  At one point the visibility was so bad that I asked my engineer if he could see from the TV pictures whether the track was safe to overtake on at a certain point. On lap 16 I was coming down the straight, pulling out to overtake Ayrton in his slipstream. Perhaps, in retrospect, we were racing too hard, but I obviously wanted to beat him and Ayrton was always super-competitive – we were racing like crazy! Anyway, I pulled out just at the wrong time and aquaplaned straight into the friggin’ wall, totally out of control, and hit it really hard. I knew I’d broken my left foot; the wall crushed the cockpit, which smashed the end two toes and splintered the bones in my foot. Oh my word, it hurt!

  The car came to a rest and I just sat there waiting. I was in agony and I was going, ‘Crap! Crap!’ I was really upset. I’ve broken my foot, I’m upset. I am out of the race, crap! I must’ve been dazed. I wouldn’t say I was concussed but I was dazed with the pain. It was excruciating. When pain is that severe it can cause you to pass out. I was trying to come to my senses, opening my eyes, and I saw the red flags and then the doctor’s car pulling up to where I was. The next thing I knew the brilliant F1 doctor, Sid Watkins – known as Professor Sid or sometimes just Prof – rushed up to the car and said, ‘Nigel, are you okay?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’

  Now, Sid was a brilliant man, a lovely guy and a legend in our sport. He’d previously given me a hard time when I had wanted to race with injuries that he felt were not safe to get in a car with. He always looked out for the drivers’ welfare and we all respected him enormously. In Adelaide, the rain was still teeming down on us both and Sid was obviously concerned.

  ‘Nigel, are you sure you’re okay?’

  ‘Sid, I’m fine, honest.’

  ‘Well, why haven’t you got out of the car, you’ve been sat there for a few minutes?’

  I looked up at him and it was pouring down; the rain was sliding off his face and I was drenched. I said, ‘I’ve been racing and I’m tired, Sid. It’s raining hard out there and it’s much nicer in here!’

  Luckily for me, there was some confusion about the race finish so, as I said, they backtracked to lap 14 and took the results from there, which meant even though I’d spun off I still finished second. Result! We only got half points due to the shortness of the race, but I was more than happy with that. There was talk of restarting the race, but this caused great consternation among the drivers, and to be fair the conditions really were atrocious. As it was, Ayrton’s race win and Gerhard’s third place gave McLaren the constructors’ title that year. Ayrton was pretty vocal about the difficulty of the wet weather. He said that, in future, he would not start a race in those conditions again, although he also said he understood the pressure the officials were under to start the race and made the point that the drivers chose to get in their cars of their own free will. He had a point. I just remarked on the amount of debris on the track and that I felt the race should have been stopped earlier.

  After the race, I headed back to our new home in Clearwater, Florida, and my foot was really quite swollen during and after the flight. I went straight to the hospital where the doctor said, ‘The foot is broken and needs operating on straight away.’

  Mindful of the need for winter training to get me ready for a season where I knew I had a crack at the world title, I said, ‘Woah! Hang on – what is the recovery time for that?’

  ‘Well, there is residual damage from a historic break, so it’s not straightforward. You will be on crutches for th
ree months.’

  ‘Three months? You gotta be kidding me!’

  ‘I am not kidding you, Mr Mansell. Three months.’

  ‘In that case, my foot is fine.’

  He looked at me and said, ‘Mr Mansell, your foot is not fine, it is broken!’

  I was three months away from a crack at the Formula 1 world title so I said, ‘I am sure I can work with it,’ shook his hand and hobbled out of the room.

  It wasn’t quite as simple as that. Initially, they wouldn’t let me out of the hospital so I had to wait for my good friend, Dr George Morris, to turn up and when he did I said, ‘George, I can’t be out for three months. Is there any way we can shorten the rehab time down?’

  George said, ‘No, it’s three months, Nigel. Period.’

  ‘George, I appreciate your expertise but I am not prepared to do that.’

  ‘Look, okay, I understand your position,’ he said. ‘We have to advise you to have the operation immediately. The bones are splintered. It is going to be incredibly painful if we do not operate, but there is no threat to life. I am warning you, though, you won’t be able to walk on that side at all.’ Reluctantly, George watched as I checked myself out without any surgery.

  Basically, through the winter of 1991 and into 1992, I had only one pair of boots I could wear because of the injury. What we did was make some bespoke carbon-fibre inserts to protect the damaged part of my foot. I walked funnily but those inserts kept the pressure off the broken bones. I also had implants made for my racing boots, whereby I could put pressure on the foot in the cockpit without it absolutely killing me. During 1992 I discovered that over the course of each race the foot would gradually become increasingly painful, because the fractured bones were chafing internally.

  Despite the broken foot, during that winter I trained really hard. In fact, I would say harder than I had ever done before. I lost a good deal of weight, so that at my pre-season weigh-in I was the lightest I had ever been in Formula 1.

  When the races started in 1992, I was immediately devastatingly quick; I was focused like there was no tomorrow. I won the first five races. I knew I was in with my best shot ever of winning the title, the one thing I had dreamed about all my life.

  CHAPTER 14

  1992 – THE CHAMPIONSHIP YEAR

  Most people get opportunities in life. Sadly, some people are guilty of not seizing those moments. Life is about grasping the opportunities that come your way, taking that chance and running with it. Some people think they will have more opportunities further down the line, so this one particular moment is not that important but, of course, they are often wrong. You have to embrace it now. When you get a moment – like the one I felt I had in 1992 – it is gold dust.

  Going into 1992 I was my lightest, fittest, most focused – I was ready to embrace the opportunity. I felt I had paid my dues, with all those years in inferior cars or as a number two driver. I’d surpassed the great Sir Stirling Moss for grand prix wins; I was closing in on Jim Clark and Jackie Stewart’s tallies; but above all I wanted the world title. Senna and McLaren were likely favourites, Ferrari were always hovering around, and Benetton-Ford were also a force to be reckoned with.

  The FW14B was a brilliant car, refined in the wind tunnel, and an improvement even on the brilliant car of 1991. It also had a more reliable active suspension system, which underwent over 7000 hours of testing. The electronics guy at Williams even called his experience of one particularly gruelling test at Estoril as ‘The Eight Days War’, because it was so intense and focused. The resulting car was over two seconds faster than the preceding passive car. It was also proving to be reliable. Now I was really excited.

  I dominated the first race at Kyalami, winning by 24 seconds from Patrese, and nearly 35 seconds ahead of Ayrton. As I’ve said, I won the first five grands prix in a row, also scooping pole at the first six races. A loose wheel nut scuppered me in Monaco (destiny again!), but generally I was feeling fantastic. I sensed that I was almost unstoppable.

  The fourth grand prix of the year was in Catalunya in Spain and it was very challenging. One aspect that yesteryear and modern drivers share is terrible visibility when it rains. I remember some dreadful conditions for a few stand-out races in my career, weather that really tests your skills and nerve. The tropical storm we raced in at Adelaide in ’91 was shocking. I think Monaco, when I crashed out in the lead, was shocking too – and very disappointing because I was leading on Casino Square. The monsoon race in 1994 in Japan was another incredible one – boy, that was unbelievable. Those are the three races that I can distinctly remember being severely challenging because of the weather.

  It is no exaggeration – if it rains when you are driving a Formula 1 car, you really can’t see much at all; it is very dangerous. The biggest problem when you have a really heavy downpour is not so much the rain; it is when you aquaplane. Wet-weather tyres work very well, so normally you do retain grip. However, if you then aquaplane your car goes from having some sort of grip and control to zero grip and zero control – you are a complete passenger. Aquaplaning is like being on ice. You just slide straight away and once it starts, until the car gets some grip again or adhesion to the circuit, you just speed up all the time, so it actually magnifies; it gets worse before it gets better. I can’t say hand on heart that you enjoy those races; you survive those races.

  I won quite a few races in the wet. I think the outstanding race I had in the rain was when Michael Schumacher was in his Benetton-Ford catching me a few seconds a lap at Barcelona in 1992. I couldn’t figure out why he was catching me so quickly. I managed to catch a glimpse of him in my mirrors and I realised that he was taking totally different lines, in the process almost losing control of his car on the outside of the circuit at times, searching out these different lines. I thought, Well, I had 15 seconds on him, now it’s down to five. I’ve gotta push now, but surely he can’t sustain this? However, he did. So I started to push. I almost lost the car on a couple of corners – it slid out to the edge of the circuit and I thought I was going off, and then all of a sudden there was so much more grip out there! From having a few whoopsies, I then changed my line quite significantly and went two to three seconds a lap quicker myself. Then I even started to pull away from Michael. I didn’t get any credit for it; the press said I was playing with him. What a load of nonsense – he was driving fantastically. I had to relearn real quick where he had the advantage. Fortunately, I was able then to find the time and to go on to win the race. That was one of the best wins I had that season, because I felt extreme pressure from this young guy coming from nowhere and catching me quite quickly, and I was thinking, I am going pretty flat out here – what am I doing wrong? He’d found better grip in the corners and until I worked that out he was catching me. That shows you what a brilliant, intuitive racer Michael was and for those reasons I am very proud of that victory.

  I’d heard from Frank as early as Mexico back in March that Alain Prost might be a new team-mate for the next season. With my experiences of Prost at Ferrari this was not a prospect I was particularly enamoured with. I told Frank my opinion in no uncertain terms, making it clear that I was not happy about this possibility. Not happy at all.

  At the time, I didn’t allow these conversations about Prost to distract me from my mission. In Spain, I won my 25th grand prix, equalling Jim Clark’s record, a very proud moment indeed. By winning the next race in Imola, I became the first driver ever to win the first five races of a season, another record. I would win nine times that season, securing 14 pole positions out of 16 races in the process. Quite quickly, Senna was trailing me heavily in the points and he was pushing hard, not least during a very controversial incident when, in my opinion, he took me out of the race in Canada as I tried to pass him. He didn’t agree with my view, of course, but I was not a happy chap about that one!

  At the end of every single race in 1992, I basically went into a dark room and virtually cried because of the pain I was in from my broken foot. I did g
et hammered by certain elements of the press, who said I was overdramatising, which was ludicrous. I was driving with a broken foot! It was annoying at the time, of course, but looking back now I would only say that they had no idea of the physical demands of driving a car all year with an injury like that. I raced the entire year with that broken foot, and had no surgery until after the season had ended. I put that down to a dogged determination because I knew I was about to have the opportunity to win at the highest possible level and get to the top step of the World Championship. Like I said, those opportunities don’t come along that often – embrace them. Remember, I had already been the bridesmaid three times before and I had been number two driver for three world champions – Piquet, Rosberg and Prost. I had smelt it and almost tasted it for so many years but never got there. However, in 1992 I really felt like this was my time. My window of opportunity was there and I was not going to let anything get in the way, not even broken bones.

  I won another British Grand Prix that year and with the growing sense that I could be on my way to the title, it was a special weekend. I was extremely focused, very quick all weekend, and scooped pole position, fastest lap (in fact, 11 fastest laps) and another Silverstone win. And, yes, it is true that Ayrton Senna was stopped by police for speeding in his Porsche on the M25 and they asked him, ‘Who do you think you are? Nigel Mansell?’

  After my Silverstone win, fans poured on to the track and it was just the most euphoric moment. It also meant that I had secured my 28th grand prix win, which was the most for any British driver in F1 history, finally surpassing Sir Jackie Stewart. I was just so proud. The crowd reaction was spontaneous; it was really wonderful, a fantastic day. Apart from running over a couple of people’s toes . . .

  By the time I reached Hungary, there were several permutations that would mean I’d lift the world title, but there was really only one that mattered: I was one win away from the title that I had craved for so many years (in fact, second place would do). It was not a circuit famous for overtaking opportunities, so it was by no means a simple task. Nonetheless, I was just 77 laps from being world Formula 1 champion.