So I made the decision to stand down from McLaren and I departed from F1. I walked away and by that point, I have to be really honest with you here, disillusionment had totally set in. I felt like I had been pushed pillar to post on more than one occasion in my career, and been given possible opportunities to win World Championships only for them to evaporate.
By 1995, I felt, rightly or wrongly, that the whole world was on my shoulders. I felt that some people were taking from me and not giving any support, but I didn’t show anything of what I was feeling. I guess I reacted just as I did when I lost my mother. I was very private with my feelings. Again, I didn’t want any emotion to be perceived as a weakness. Looking back, I really needed some understanding, some support and some encouragement; it would’ve helped enormously. However, I didn’t open up to people, so how could they know I needed their help and support? Not opening up to Ron about my feelings is something I regret. I should’ve maybe said to him, ‘Look, I am going through this challenge at the moment and I would welcome your support.’ However, I didn’t, so Ron never knew how I was feeling. In the press release at the time, he respectfully said I had been ‘entirely straightforward and totally professional’ in my business conduct.
I have been very frank with you in this book and I have to tell you about something that I never realised until recently. I can see now that my whole life I have suffered anxiety attacks. No one knew, I hid it all, during my Formula 1 career and also since. I have learned to spot the onset of an attack and have become pretty good at thinking my way through each episode. When the anxiety levels are about to hit me hard, my heart starts pounding, the adrenaline floods into my body and makes everything even worse – it’s like someone jumping out of the dark and scaring you suddenly. A chronic anxiety attack can last for quite some time. It is really pretty unpleasant.
I have learned that a lot of life’s anxieties can be avoided by better planning and preparation. Remember that morning I was late for a meeting with Colin Chapman? I had thought a four-hour fudge factor was enough but clearly it wasn’t. If you are going for a meeting, allow enough time. If you need to prepare notes, don’t do them the night before. Put the meeting in context: how important is it? Should you be this anxious? Try to control the anxiety by not sabotaging yourself.
I think the vast majority of people feel this way at times, anxious, uncertain, worried, even frightened. Maybe to different degrees, but they all do. I know some very successful and accomplished people who suffer terrible anxiety. We are all guilty of it – you put yourself under the cosh when you don’t have to. In moderation and when it is justified, it can be a good thing, because that’s how we motivate ourselves. But when it is not justified and you don’t need to do it, it can be very damaging. The biggest single person who gets in your way is often yourself; so if you are reading this and relating to any small part of what I have said, then just get out of your own way. Then you start to breathe a bit more.
Looking back, in 1995 I regret not going to good people, such as Ron, and explaining myself. I’d had to move my family back from America, find a place in new schools for the children, settle into a UK life all over again; then I didn’t get my Williams drive, followed by the McLaren problems – it was all so much to process and deal with.
Being older and wiser, I think talking to a few close people would have been a good course of action. They may well not have seen it as a weakness, but possibly seen it even as a strength and a mark of honesty. Who knows, my career may have come to a close in a different manner. Anyway, destiny took me on a different path once more. Besides, with a whole new life in front of me outside of Formula 1, I would soon bounce back.
After I retired from Formula 1, my life would have, at times, even more drama, happiness, some sadness, and certainly challenges that were more demanding than anything I had ever faced on track. In many ways, my story was only just beginning.
PART II:
FORMULA 1 – THEN AND NOW
CHAPTER 18
PAST AND PRESENT
In terms of motorsport, Formula 1 will always be my first and greatest love. As a fan, I watch the races and love to see the evolution of the cars, the drivers’ battles, the stories, the whole drama; it’s so enthralling. Specifically, though, I am very proud and enthused to be an FIA steward, a job I love and take very seriously (I also sit on the drivers’ commission). My role as a steward has an added benefit: it gives me the very privileged position of being able to compare and contrast the era that I raced in with the modern sport of Formula 1 in the 21st century. It is always a fascinating and stimulating discussion.
I am delighted to say that in the modern era, the stewards in F1 do an absolutely exceptional job. This is one area of the modern F1’s development that I don’t think is always given enough credit. It was a brilliant idea to put ex-drivers on the stewards’ panel. I believe that the current drivers find this immensely reassuring, because unless you have sat in that cockpit and felt the emotional white heat and sheer intensity of a battle on track, unless you have had to make those split-second decisions and been through the same high-speed dilemmas, it’s not possible to fully empathise with the drivers’ view.
I have seen a few instances where at first glance an incident seems very clear cut but actually, as a driver, you know there were complex and extenuating circumstances. I think the current crop of drivers like having ex-racers around, for that reason. The non-racing stewards on the panel are amazing too; they have such a level of experience and objectivity that they add an immense amount to the decision-making process. In my opinion, that blend is an excellent balance.
What is absolutely fantastic is the assistance the FIA give the stewards in being able to make the right decision. The FIA governing body and the policing of the sport is done in such a way now that there is no place to hide. They are incredibly fair and very good people; there is meticulous discipline but also great camaraderie. In many ways, it is also a thankless task, but the FIA provide the stewards with so much amazing footage that we are able to see exactly what happened. The digital information available is just sensational, too. The stewards are allowed to call on footage from on-board cameras, from other cars, front, back, it’s absolutely brilliant. Sometimes you see an incident on TV as a viewer and you think it is pretty clear cut, but the stewards may get to see alternative angles and read digital feedback which reveals that, in fact, the initial opinion was totally wrong. The FIA family are second to none; it is a very well-oiled machine.
I enjoy my work as a steward very much, just as I do being a special constable (which I will come to later in this book). You are there as part of a governing body and what you have to do at all times is be very fair and even. When I am a steward, it doesn’t matter who the driver in front of me is, what team they work for; I judge the situation on its own terms. It has to be like that, a level playing field. You can’t penalise one team or driver but not another. No matter what sport you are talking about, you have to interpret the rules for the incident that has just happened, regardless of the personalities or context of the championship and so on. So I pride myself on objectivity and take the job very seriously.
Of course, as a steward you can’t win! It is an impossible task. Someone will always be upset with the panel. Drivers sometimes become very agitated if they don’t get the outcome that they want. I understand that; I have been there and, like I did, they all want to win. I have also seen times when teams and drivers know they have done something wrong but still push for a favourable decision. In those cases, you have to be very firm and say, ‘It is not our mistake, it is yours – you are in the wrong.’ Rules are there for everyone to abide by. The current crop of stewards do a brilliant job of making sure that happens, to the great benefit and credit of the sport.
So, getting back to the comparisons between my era and the modern generation of Formula 1: let’s start with the cars. I’ve already touched on the physicality of the cars from earlier in my career compared to the mo
dern generation of F1 machines. Driving a Formula 1 car has been made exponentially less physical, in my opinion. That is not to denigrate the modern era of drivers at all; it is just my observation about how it has changed since I started driving.
The brute forces and physical demands that yesteryear drivers had to withstand were more rigorous than those the present-day drivers have to contend with. The most obvious difference physically between the two eras is the introduction of power steering. In the past, when there was no power steering on the cars, it was the man and the beast; the race car could bite you on the ass at any time. When you were in a corner pulling upwards of 5G and the car twitched on you, it was your physical strength hanging on to that steering wheel that kept the car from spinning. It’s hard to put in words just how very violent it felt on the steering wheel; it was a brutal moment, something you might experience many times a race, all the time knowing that if you went off at extremely high speed then there was a strong possibility of a massive accident that could be potentially very serious or even fatal.
When power steering came into F1 it really was a revolution. The arrival and then rapid evolution of power steering has allowed a lot of younger drivers to come through into F1, young men who do not necessarily have incredible upper-body strength yet. So the demographics of the drivers’ physiques have changed now: smaller is better aerodynamically, better from a weight limit point of view, better from a cockpit point of view, just better all round. This is partially why drivers as young as Max Verstappen are able to enter the grid aged just 17. In yesteryear, that would have been impossible; a driver of that age – when not yet fully physically developed – could never have controlled the cars from a physical point of view. (I will come back to the age of modern F1 drivers later.)
Cornering at speed was one challenge, but in fact just to drive the cars competitively at all was a physical challenge. Your upper-body strength and leg power had to be immense to sustain competitiveness. For example, to depress the heavy clutch thousands and thousands of times a race (4000 times in Monaco, for example), change the manual gearbox, hang on to that violent steering wheel, deal with the G load. It was so demanding on the racer’s body and fitness that we had to monitor when to go flat out and when not to, because we couldn’t physically sustain the former all the time. You had to pick your moments; that was all part of the strategy and race craft.
In a modern-era Formula 1 car, the drivers are exceptionally fit, absolutely. However, the physical demands placed on them are very different. For example, apart from power steering, you have elements such as the semi-automatic clutch (which I was fortunate enough to enjoy also). Their seats are individually formed around their unique shape using digital scanning and bespoke moulds in order to be ergonomically perfect. Well, in the earlier years of my career, we didn’t even have seats! As I mentioned, in earlier cars we sat on the sheet-metal floor. You’d sit on the flat floor with just a two-piece foam set-up, which would be expanded around certain contours of your backside. But you always had to sit on the floor to get low enough to conform to the height regulation once in the car, so you pretty much had nothing under your backside. That was fine; it wasn’t exactly a comfortable ride but you got used to it. However, as I found out to my cost, if you went airborne and had a shock wave for some reason – typically if you hit a kerb – that force shot straight up your spine.
Modern-day cockpits are still very tight, of course, but compared to the piece of foam under my butt back in the day, they are relatively luxurious. In many ways, the cars are actually built and designed around the driver, with their size and shape in mind. That is logical; if you make the cockpit an uncomfortable and difficult place to work, how can you expect the driver to get the best out of the car?
Necessarily, because in my opinion drivers had to be stronger back then, some of us were quite a bit bigger than the modern drivers. Fortunately, at the time when I came into F1, I had an advantage over a lot of drivers because I was really quite powerful in terms of my upper-body strength, and I could do things with a car that physically smaller, less powerful drivers couldn’t. That was very important, because we didn’t have a combined weight limit back in the 1980s when drivers and car were weighed together.
Of course, being broader and physically bigger came at a price. All motor racing, not just Formula 1, is essentially about power-to-weight ratio. If you were a heavy driver then competing against the lighter guys could be difficult, because on some circuits when they went out of the pit lane they were already effectively half a second quicker. They used to say that ten pounds in weight was worth a tenth of a second a lap. Over the course of a 70-lap race, that’s a deficit of seven seconds. However, I was 40 to 50 pounds heavier than some drivers, which over the course of a race could equate to as much as 35 seconds. So that body weight was a plus in terms of strength and being able to manhandle the car, but it came at a cost.
In the paddock now you do see some very small drivers. Back in my day, myself and Derek Warwick were probably the biggest drivers. We are relatively tall, too, being around six foot. Many modern-day drivers are much more compact, shall we say, and they can be like that because of the incredible evolution in the driveability of the cars.
One really exciting aspect of this modern generation of F1 cars being physically lighter to drive is that, I hope, eventually female drivers will be on the grid. This is no slight on the women of the world, but back in the 1980s it was just too physically demanding for the vast majority of women to drive our cars. Now, however, I see no reason why that can’t change. I have known some fantastic female drivers in the past, women with incredible driving talent who would certainly have made it given the right opportunity in F1. There is now more of a chance than ever before of a woman lining up on an F1 grid and I would absolutely welcome that development when it comes.
All these observations about how much less physical it is for a modern-era F1 driver are only the result of spectacular progress, let me be clear on this. It is the result of hundreds of absolutely brilliant engineers, designers, very clever minds evolving and perfecting intricate parts of the cars year after year. There has been an incredible change. While saying that drivers in my era were more physical, I think there has been a marvellous breakthrough in technology, making it physically easier for the drivers to do their job, so how can that be a bad thing? You cannot determine when you are born and I think it is great for them that the progress has been made in this way.
I have to defend the drivers here. Over recent years, I have seen some drivers who have had quiet races get out of a car looking as though they’ve just come out of a hair salon, no trace of sweat. Yet in my era we were all dying when we got out of the cars. However, that’s not the fault of the modern-day driver. I would say to them: lap it up! Just think of me in my steel cockpit, with my arse aching from sitting on a slim piece of foam and being thrown around inside a hot, cramped metal box for two hours.
What about the actual car itself? I have spoken about the 1350bhp beasts and turbo missiles we used to drive compared to the engines of the current generation. Regardless of the power you have, though, getting that force down on to the track is the key, so an absolutely massive part of any car’s success and performance is the tyres. The wrong tyres, or ones that have degraded, can ruin your day, potentially even put you in a very serious accident. Remember my first day testing for Lotus when I was five or six seconds off the pace? Much of that was down to tyres. What you want is a set of tyres that will stay with you and keep the balance of the car consistent for a good period of time.
In yesteryear, we used to get through tens of sets of tyres in testing and practice, to get three or four sets for the race, because we would want to identify the best sets. Top drivers can sense the tiniest of vibrations when they are hammering down a straight at 200mph and will be able to pull into the pits and say, ‘The front right is no good.’ Even the most minuscule vibration can be picked up by a quality driver. Back in those days it was still
quite a challenge to balance the tyres correctly. Wheel weights could be crucial to your chances of winning or performing well; they were so crucial. Back then, it was very hard to balance the tyres and wheels to the proficiency that was required to have a really smooth car. Vibration is the enemy of a Formula 1 car and race driver because any kind of vibration is basically taking away grip, especially in the corners. The car is literally lifting off the track in minute amounts, but when you are running at that level of performance it can create very bad results.
If you want to get really detailed about this, it’s a fact that under braking the tyre can actually twist on the rim. If, for example, they haven’t fully wiped the soap suds clean off the wheels after they fitted them, there might be too much lubrication on the edge of the tyre. Then when you brake under intense load, the wheel rim stops in line with the brakes, but the tyre itself keeps turning. Then all of a sudden your car is totally out of balance. You haven’t actually lost any weights; it is just that the tyre has moved maybe two or three inches on the rim. On more than one occasion, I had tyres move halfway round the rim, especially on the back. For me, utopia was finding a wheel and tyre mounted where you had no weights on it at all – that was perfect. Technically, the wheel could slip a little bit and you’d still be in balance. So the fewer balance weights you had to have on the wheel the better. Going into a corner at 180mph braking under about 5G and knowing, or feeling, that your tyre is still rotating halfway around the rim is not the most reassuring feeling for a driver!
Nigel Mansell Autobiography Page 22