Nigel Mansell Autobiography

by Nigel Mansell

  I took all this in and said, ‘Right, this operation . . . first thing tomorrow then!’

  I walked out of that consultation in a state of shock, extremely upset, so I immediately went and phoned Rosanne. Before this appointment, I hadn’t told her how ill I’d been feeling, so of course she was taken aback when I broke the news that I was being operated on immediately. I had some more tests and then was taken in for surgery. Despite the shock of the day before, I felt quite positive going into surgery and I had confidence in the experts around me. By way of reassurance, I did ask one of them about how routine this procedure was and kind of led him towards confirming it was all pretty straightforward – right?

  ‘Yes, in theory. Although there are a number of complications that can happen.’

  Right, okay! Thanks for sweetening the pill.

  Luckily, the operation was a success, although they weren’t especially impressed by what they found – thanks! – given how mangled much of my body is, and some elements of the surgery were trickier than normal. However, these guys were complete experts so I was cleaned out, stitched up and sent back to the ward. I was told I’d have to stay in hospital for about four days before being allowed home.

  Sadly, some complications did set in, which started to put a strain on my heart. Thankfully, the medical staff were on the ball and had some very powerful drugs to combat the problem, so I was doped up on those. Sadly for me, I had to take them for six weeks. Now, bearing in mind I am the world’s cheapest date – I don’t drink and if I ever have a tipple, I am drunk after about half a whisky – these powerful drugs played absolute havoc with me (but were entirely necessary).

  Eventually, I was given the all-clear to go home and headed to Gatwick with Rosanne. As I walked through the airport I felt really strange; my head was swimming and my eyesight seemed peculiar. I said to Rosanne, ‘Please hold my hand, don’t let go of me . . .’ I looked out of the window where there was a 747 being boarded and, to my amazement, I could swear that the plane’s wings were flapping like a bird. The hallucinations were horrendous, really unsettling.

  After two weeks on these strong drugs I felt like I didn’t want to live anymore. The medication was so powerful, the side effects were so distressing at times, that it just sucked the life out of me. Just horrible. I actually thought to myself, If this is what life is going to be like, I don’t want to live anymore.

  I had to stay on this medication for six weeks and thankfully the team managed to get matters under control, so in retrospect hitting the bug hard with those extreme drugs had worked.

  I did suffer a relapse a year later when the infection reappeared, but luckily it was quickly dealt with. Obviously, they monitored me for a while after, but I was, in theory, out of the woods. Both in medical terms and the next time I’d go on the golf course.

  CHAPTER 26

  EXCITING TIMES AHEAD

  As well as the wonderful Woodbury Park, we have had other business interests since my retirement from motorsport. One is a karting track in Honiton, Devon, known as Mansell Raceway. The site came up for sale and it was a lovely spot which needed preserving for the benefit of karting going forward. The track is in a rural location right next to the airfield at Dunkeswell. It is 1000 metres long and has been designed and evolved so that it offers a very exciting and safe place to race karts. We have made it one of the safest tracks in England: the surface is very rewarding in that it is not bumpy, so it doesn’t damage the expensive karts or promote people-banging; and we have a strict regime down there that encourages very fast but clean racing.

  The clerk of the course and the RAC have a very good view of that etiquette and we stamp down on reckless driving straight away. In my opinion, over the years karting has got out of hand, so we pride ourselves on stopping racers being too aggressive. Not only is there the danger of someone getting hurt, but it’s also a question of the amount of damage they can do to very costly machinery, which is prohibitively expensive for most of the parents trying to encourage their children. They rightly don’t want to go racing and see their children exposed to unnecessary risk and, secondly, nobody wants to have hundreds if not thousands of pounds of crash damage when it is avoidable.

  I have to say it hasn’t been the easiest of businesses at times, though, because we have encountered opposition locally to some of our plans and ideas. We have had many difficulties over the years with planning and restrictions on noise and noise abatement orders. For me that is rather bizarre considering we are located on the side of an airport! We have worked in collaboration with the planners and hope to ensure it is a business that provides employment and gives people a lot of pleasure. I think it is a great facility and I am very proud of what we have done there. The business is holding its own and will hopefully continue to move forward.

  Over the years I have collected some fabulous mementoes of my career – helmets, overalls, trophies, my awards, medals, even cars. There is also a photograph dedicated to me by Juan Manuel Fangio, which is something that I cherish very much. Originally, we kept everything at Woodbury and it was very popular with guests and also fans who travelled to see it. Obviously, when we sold Woodbury we needed to find a new home for this collection of memorabilia, although for some time they kept it at the hotel because it was bringing in some business. There were interested parties we talked to about housing the memorabilia, but the investment and security around the collection wasn’t right so we decided to go it alone.

  Eventually, the plan was to house the collection in our own permanent location. It was actually Leo who came up with the idea when he found a building in Jersey that would be perfect. He’d discovered this old art-deco building that was in need of some TLC and it was clear that, with the right restoration, it could be perfect. Better still, there was room downstairs for a sizeable car showroom. In the past, I have run a Ferrari dealership and suchlike, so this was already a business model we were comfortable with.

  So we bought the building and the plan was to have a dealership downstairs and the Mansell Collection exhibited above. We spent a lot of time and a huge amount of money restoring the listed building to its former glory and now it looks wonderful. Then we were approached by Mitsubishi about opening a franchise dealership and I was really intrigued. The obvious angle given my background would have been to open a Ferrari or Aston Martin dealership, something high-end, but we wanted to buy and sell cars that pretty much anybody could afford. Mitsubishi have a great reputation and their products are fantastic, so we were delighted.

  Part of the franchise dictates that we have to have our own workshops, so we joined forces with a local full-service centre. We have a pristine workshop, state of the art, where we can service and repair cars. We also acquired a petrol station just across the road, that needed extensive modernising. However, despite all the delays and growing pains, we now have an excellent site down there; all the different elements are up and running. Over these past few years, Leo has grown in business acumen and matured into a first-class businessman, something I am extremely proud of. He has really come into his own and done a brilliant job. I have total trust in him with the business, which is marvellous.

  These days, I like to have more leisure time every now and then. One part of my life that I couldn’t have written about when I wrote my first book over two decades ago was the notion of getting older. Of course, back then I was in my forties so I wasn’t exactly in the first flush of youth, but I was extremely fit from racing and, although I was carrying injuries, I was as strong as a bull.

  As I write this, my next birthday will see me turn 63 years young. Let me offer you some advice: getting old is not for weenies! Getting old can be one of the most frightening things in the world. I made my name in a supremely alpha-male job; being a racing driver is a very physical, male-orientated, adrenaline- and testosterone-filled world to inhabit. There is a paddock full of men absolutely obsessed with winning – drivers who will do anything to be champion, and team owners who want to smash th
e competition into the tarmac.

  When you retire from a career like that, the transition from chasing pole position all around the world to not racing anymore can be a shock. I was playing competitive golf and running various business interests, so for a lot of the time I was too busy to feel any void. As you have seen, I raced touring cars, sports cars and, of course, Le Mans, so it wasn’t that I stopped racing overnight, but after the biggie at Le Mans in 2010, that was me done, all over. It’s a strange feeling. I don’t miss the danger, or the politics or the travel. I do miss the excitement, and the feeling of stepping up on top of the podium, of course.

  I am relatively comfortable with that part of getting older, if I am honest. What does unsettle me is the physical change. As race drivers, we were all proud to be very fit, training most days, eating well, working hard in the gym. We felt almost invincible at times; not just me, we all were very fit indeed. However, you cannot fight Mother Nature. You will get older and your body will not work as well as it did when you were 20, 30 or 40. We are all fighting this constant dynamic of realising that the mind might be young but the body is inexorably getting older. Sometimes it catches you off-guard: you might do something as simple as jumping over a fence to retrieve the dog’s ball, thinking nothing of it, but when you land your knees or ankles crunch under the impact. You might feel your joints ache more if it is wet or cold. So you adapt and become more careful, and constantly remind yourself how easy it is now to get hurt. I broke my neck in ’77 at Brands Hatch and even to this day, when I move my head and neck in a certain way, I am very wary of a recurrence of that injury. When you have broken your neck in a serious place you can become very fretful and worried that something is going to go wrong again.

  More recently, I have also had some problems with my teeth. When you suffer big accidents in a racing car and maybe hit a wall, your teeth and gums come together and it damages the nerves and kills them off so they have to be drilled out. A few years ago, I had to have a tremendous amount of work done on the root canals of many teeth. Like the Mansell Lesion, the doctors and dentists raised more than a few eyebrows because at first they said they would all have to come out, the damage was irreparable. I found a dentist doing very experimental work, who was able to operate and save the teeth, which has been noted anonymously as another test case. It’s that Mansell guinea pig again!

  Not long before I started work on this book, I had a very scary episode when I fell down the stairs in the middle of the night. I was suffering sleep deprivation through pain from some of my old injuries and so the doctor recommended I take sleeping pills. We still don’t know exactly how it happened, but I was evidently trying to come downstairs when I just fell headfirst down the staircase. I sustained severe bruising and carpet burns on the way down; I was a right mess. The funny thing is, I can remember the whole thing as though I was dreaming. I felt as if I was in a dream and I remember gambolling down the stairs and shouting in pain. It was really weird. How I didn’t break my neck or end up killing myself, I don’t know. I was very lucky. The bruising and cuts healed, of course, but it really unsettled me because I realised how vulnerable I felt. I am paying a very high price for the world I worked and lived in, and the way I used to drive cars, because when I was on track, I didn’t have any reserves left – I gave it everything, all the time, every race.

  What I have learned is that you just have to reprogramme your mind and accept your limitations, then work out how to get through your daily business with these new parameters. It’s no use moaning about it; some of your ailments will be there for good, so get on with it. You have to manage your body because your mind wants to do all sorts of things, as it can still remember when you were 20. Each morning I get up (slowly!) and take a concoction of pills and potions for my various war wounds. Spending several winter months in Florida helps, as the cold won’t bite into my joints there. Everything is relative. Recently they cancelled a golf tournament over in Belleair because the temperature was only going to reach 50 degrees Fahrenheit and it was considered too cold! The warm Florida sun and easy lifestyle really help with the aches and pains.

  The doctors sometimes revisit my old injuries and suggest new plans of action. I can’t bend my big toe and I have to have implants in every single shoe I possess because of how my foot was all busted up in 1991. At one point recently they wanted to put 16 screws, two plates and a steel bar in my foot to work around the damage that still troubles me. I asked them what the percentages of success for this type of operation were, and in my opinion they weren’t that good, so I decided to leave that one.

  Some of my ailments are peculiar to an ex-racing driver. When you are pulling high Gs for years, as well as the consequences of specific accidents, your body has an unusual amount of wear and tear for its age. I am not alone in this; it is common for all ex-racing drivers to suffer in a variety of ways and it can put us at an increased risk of problems such as arthritis and osteoporosis, all sorts of complications. As I’ve mentioned, back in my early days, we didn’t have proper seats to support us, so that didn’t help. Both my shoulders dislocate very easily because I was squashed into steel cockpits for so many years that the joints have too much wear and tear in them. Same goes for my knees. I have had to have many operations since I retired for complications arising from racing injuries and wear and tear – hence the bolt and titanium anchor in my shoulder for life (my left shoulder is far worse then my right because we predominantly went round right-hand corners on clockwise tracks). It is maintenance, a consequence of the profession.

  I lost a friend recently who was only 59. It’s tough when that happens; it really makes you question yourself. I try to find a positive in everything and in this case you have to say you need to live each day to the full – it’s a cliché but it’s true. Plan your next trip, your next idea, your next business, your next adventure. Make the most of the fact that it wasn’t you whose time was up.

  The thing that frightens me most about getting older is not dying – it is not being able to live. I dread the possibility of no longer being mobile, of not being physically capable of enjoying life. I don’t expect to race cars at 200mph anymore, but I just want to be able to do simple stuff, like playing with the grandkids, a round of golf, walking the dog, strolling on the beach with Rosanne.

  I think all of us can be guilty of not making the most of the good times. Every day that you are healthy is a blessing. I know that sounds like a platitude but I truly believe it. We are all guilty of taking things for granted, especially our health. If you have that taken away from you, you realise you need to embrace life. When you have your mortality touched in the most incredible, intense way, such as when Rosanne was so ill for so long, it is ultimately a good lesson, because it makes you realise what goes on in life. It fascinates me that a near-death experience can make you appreciate life so much more. Never take your health for granted and enjoy every moment when you are well, because it is a blessing.

  As you know, I like to have fun. So I try to find humour in getting old as much as I can. It’s not always possible when my body is creaking under the strain of a particularly cold or wet day and yet my mind tells me I am still the same as that driver taking the world title in 1992. However, you can find some very funny moments if you have the right mental attitude. I played in a fourball the other day and on the first tee the conversation kicked off when someone said, ‘Right, well, how old are you guys?’ They went round and one was 78, one was 76, another just 50 and then me, 62. Then the 50-year-old turned to the 78-year-old and said, ‘Can you still get it up?’ I’ve never had such a laugh and the old boy was giggling away as well. What can you say to that?

  Apart from good humour, another obvious way to fight the ageing process is to keep fit. Sounds self-evident, of course, but it is important. If you can keep your body in good shape through your twenties, thirties and forties, then you will have a much better life expectancy and better quality of life in your fifties, sixties, seventies and beyond.

/>   There is one massive benefit of getting older and it is by far the most joyful: becoming a grandparent. In 2008, Rosanne and I became grandparents when our daughter Chloe gave birth to a wonderful little boy. Becoming a grandparent is just the most fantastic feeling in the world. I am incredibly proud of Chloe and her son is just a joy. In my opinion, the mother is the key to the grandchildren, because she knows what the daughter or son is going through having a child. The bond that Chloe has with Rosanne is truly fantastic now.

  In principle, the responsibility is supposed to be less when you look after a grandchild rather than your own child, but as Chloe and her son lived with us for a period of time, we felt like we were more than just grandparents to him. It is a very special relationship. I would say this little lad is probably my soulmate, because he confides in me and he tells me things that are so enlightening and wonderful. At the time of writing, he is still only seven, but he is a wise young man who listens intently and learns voraciously.

  We play a lot of golf together! We have started playing tournaments and, in late 2014, I am very proud to say that we won the ‘Best Gross Score’ at the adult/junior stroke-play competition at Belleair Country Club in Florida. He is a very special little boy. He told me that when he is older and is a golf pro, he wants me to be his caddy. What a joy that would be! I am now proud to say I have two other grandchildren as well, one each for Greg and Leo. Greg has a dear little son, so he is very happy, and Leo gave us our first granddaughter and she is delightful.

  I am also really enjoying watching how people change when they become a parent; it’s wonderful to see. What is also pleasing is noticing how your children start to acknowledge that maybe their parents did know a few things after all. You try to instil in them advice and ideas, but often you don’t think any of it is going in, especially as they’re growing up, when they don’t always want to hear: ‘Oh yeah, we know Dad, you cycled uphill to work and uphill back home as well.’ Family joke. However, Chloe has recently said to me that she’s been thinking about quite a few things we’ve said to her over the years and it’s really starting to make sense. She was praising us for our advice, which was just lovely.