His comments about the competition were not misplaced, either. Because, now, who were the really bonkers minor teams? The start of the twenty-first century still saw Arrows, Minardi, Sauber, Prost (the old, successful, Ligier team given a makeover) fumbling around in the lower orders, getting by without the budgets or personnel of the big teams. But there were also these immense, blue-chip names – Honda, Toyota, Jaguar, BAR – commanding vast resources and yet, somehow, not doing much better than Fondmetal or Onyx, a generation earlier.
Which was sad and unsettling in its own right. The first division of motor sport now had its own tiny Premier League – three, four teams, inaccessible and aptly protective of their splendid isolation. Back in 1982, eight different Grand Prix teams won races in that Championship season. Only the brave would wager on that happening again, any time soon.
23
MANSELL - YOU ALWAYS HURT THE ONES WHO SUPPORT YOU MOST
Let us cast our minds back to the Dallas Grand Prix, July 1984. This was hosted by the City of Dallas, Texas, in order to demonstrate to the world that here was a genuinely great city, internationally minded, capable of hosting a top-flight sporting event, and not, contrary to popular belief, just a concrete dump full of oilmen which happened to give its name to a TV series.
Unfortunately, things didn’t work out quite as the organisers had anticipated. The track was laid out in the Texas State Fair Grounds, 90,000 fans turned up, the temperatures hit over 100°F, and, as practice and qualifying went on, the track tarmac fell apart under the strain. It was generally thought to be the roughest circuit anyone had ever driven on. Alain Prost called the whole event ‘at best a parody of a Grand Prix’, noting that ‘the circuit simply disintegrated’, and that ‘attempting to put on a Grand Prix in those conditions was absolutely scandalous. And the hit-or-miss organisation was also a disgrace.’
Still. Dallas had promised, so Dallas would deliver. With all those fans there, waiting, steaming in the sun, what else could anyone do? Despite loud complaints from teams and drivers, Larry Hagman dropped the green flag for the parade lap, the race went ahead and was won by Keke Rosberg in a Williams, with René Arnoux second in a Ferrari, after the majority of the field had spun excitingly off the loose-gravel track.
But the hero of the day – at least so far as the cheering Texans in the crowd were concerned – was Nigel Mansell. Having led for almost half the race, he found that his tyres were starting to fade. He pitted and came out again, trying to get back into contention, but, just before the end, bumped into the concrete wall and broke a half-shaft on his Lotus. So he got out of the car, and, in the appalling heat, started to push the damn thing towards the finish line. He never quite got there, collapsing like a landed fish on what was left of the tarmac, but was awarded sixth place, all the same. That was Mansell for you. The guy just never quit. And he was over thirty: quite a veteran by the standards of the time.
If there was an easy way to do things, Mansell didn’t know it. And even if he did know it, he wouldn’t have used it. Significantly, the contrarian-and-proud-of-it playwright Howard Brenton described Mansell as ‘just a beautiful man. The quality that is most truly British is his bloody-mindedness.’ And in that statement, a whole nest of complications resides.
He was astonishingly committed to his craft, no question. At the very start of his career, he cleaned windows just to make enough money to keep going. In 1980 he raced, sitting in an agonising puddle of petrol, refusing to stop, when his Lotus sprang a leak. He pushed his car in the boiling heat of Dallas. He went toe-to-toe, wheel-to-wheel, at 200 mph with Ayrton Senna in Spain, 1991, which is pretty much at the top end of brave. The fans adored him. The Italians called him ‘Il Leone’; and when he won at Silverstone, 1987, a fabulous victory over Piquet, the crowd went bonkers and mobbed him. He was twice voted BBC Sports Personality of the Year. He became world champion, in 1994, eighteen years after James Hunt, setting records in that season for greatest number of pole positions and greatest number of wins. And when he quit Formula One, he went straight off and became Indy Car champ in the US, thus managing to be the first person ever to hold both titles simultaneously – a prodigious feat, given the world of difference between the two types of racing, and the fact that he was forty years old. What a man!
And yet, and yet. The sport had changed so much in the years since Hunt’s Championship. Formula One had got vastly richer, more complex, more international in its scope. The new champions were cunning (Lauda; Prost); exotic (Fittipaldi; Piquet); exotic and cunning (Senna); but above all, not British. Grit and ability were not enough on their own. Britain needed someone cool, supercompetent, mediagenic, multinational in appeal, to make any impression against the current stars.
What it got was someone who looked like a policeman sounded like a policeman, and indeed was a policeman from time to time, on the Isle of Man. Had Mansell been enjoying his success in a quieter, less invasive age – 1957, say – none of this would have mattered. By the end of the twentieth century, however, it did. His turgid Upton-on-Severn vowels combined with a personality that seemed to alternate between stolid amiability and a drab pessimism. On-track, he managed to alienate people from all walks of life. Off-track, his detractors reckoned he came across as a bit of a pillock.
Was it entirely his fault, though, that Nelson Piquet so despised him, when they were both at Williams?
Mansell, having endured years of struggle, was now, in the mid-1980s, at last up among the big boys at a top team and was proving his gritty worth. He took his first Grand Prix win in 1985 at the European GP, consolidating this with a second win, in South Africa, at the end of the season. In 1986, he was better yet: five wins, plus a pole position and four fastest laps. Murray Walker, the BBC’s hypervocal Grand Prix commentator, loved him. The fans took him as one of their own.
The big snag was his team-mate. In ’85, he’d been paired with Keke Rosberg, whom he liked. For ’86, of course, it was Piquet. And stolid Midlander became a walking target for Brazilian trickster, who, among other things, jeered in a notorious interview for the Brazilian edition of Playboy (well, of course) that ‘The Englishman knows absolutely nothing about setting up a car,’ explained how he went out of his way to hide from Mansell any improvements he’d managed to make to his own car, claimed that Mansell was argumentative and rude, and, as a Parthian shot, was thoroughly ungentlemanly by being rude about his wife.
Added to which was Piquet’s gloating recollection of the ’86 Australian GP at Adelaide. Mansell’s talent for pissing people off was well attested by now (James Hunt had gone on record with the comment that ‘at least 1,000 of the sport’s insiders would be less than delighted’ if Mansell won the 1986 title), but you still have to spare a thought for the poor guy when you read how ‘Nigel,’ as Nelson giggled, ‘just needed third place to be champion. So I called the pits by radio and said, “Hey, get on to Nigel and ask him how much he will pay to let him pass. Tell him it’s $250,000 to win the Championship.” I would have negotiated for sure.’ And he hid Mansell’s toilet paper.
Williams, naturally, did nothing to disentangle the two (although 1986 was the year of Frank Williams’ road accident, so he did have other things to attend to), so Mansell and Piquet were left to squander the title in a long summer of squabbling, letting Prost thieve the prize at the end. But – and this is significant – while it may be perfectly acceptable to get on the wrong side of Nelson Piquet (or Alain Prost, or Ayrton Senna, or Frank Williams, or any of the other F1 prima donnas), how did Mansell manage to infuriate somone as affable as Mario Andretti, when he was over in the States racing indy cars in 1994? Andretti drove alongside Mansell in the Newman/Haas team and, while he managed to get on with the Brit for a while, ended up admitting, between clenched teeth, that he ‘had a lot of respect for him as a driver, but not as a man’. The relationship between the two drivers started well, got worse, ended in acrimony. The sponsors took offence, race fans were disappointed, the press turned against him, Mansell quit
Newman/Haas prematurely and stomped back to F1, his once-glowing reputation in America as a racer and title-winner now tarnished. How difficult do you have to be, to get on?
In so many ways, of course, he was an indisputably top racer, and not just because of his win-or-die-trying mentality. Like all the best drivers (and despite appearances to the contrary), he was a thinker: according to David Brown, his race engineer at Williams, ‘He’d consider the race as the whole length of the race, and right from the beginning he’d try and plot his way through it.’ Unlike James Hunt, he wasn’t at the mercy of crippling nerves or existential waywardness, preserving, instead, an exemplary cool. Jonathan Palmer, one of his rivals in the 1980s, observed that Mansell ‘didn’t get tense on the grid. If anything, he was pretty relaxed.’ And even Frank Williams couldn’t ignore Mansell’s constant drive for self-improvement. When Mansell returned to the Williams team in 1991, after a brief and painful holiday with Ferrari (and Alain Prost), Frank found him ‘much more mature than he was, but at the same time he’s every bit as aggressive as before’.
And the record speaks volumes: thirty-one Grand Prix wins out of 187 starts; thirty-two pole positions; thirty fastest laps. It is a fantastic achievement.
And yet, and yet, and yet … Even when he was on form, even when he was with the best team on the grid, even when everything was working out for him, he would win races with consummate flair and determination, and then complain afterwards about the handling of the car, or the meteorological conditions at the track, or the state of his tyres. The British media, heavily conflicted, desperate to boost their first chance of a champion in over a decade but unable to overlook Mansell’s lapses, struggled to make sense of him. ‘During interviews,’ The Times complained, ‘he can alternate between flippant superficiality and morose paranoia.’ Elsewhere they said, ‘How can a man who drives a racing car like that come across as so, well, dull?’ James Hunt (jealous, perhaps, at the prospect of losing his position as Last Brit Champion) carried on being snippy on TV: ‘Nigel must make up his mind whether his priority is to win every race or win the Championship.’
Meanwhile, he put his fans through the wringer in 1986 (losing the Championship by two points, to Prost); in 1987 (losing the Championship by twelve points, to Piquet); and in 1991 (losing the Championship by twenty-five points, to Senna). His rear tyre blew spectacularly, in front of a TV audience of tens of millions, at Adelaide, 1986, costing him the title; he did his back in at Suzuka, 1987, and couldn’t drive for the rest of the season; he got chickenpox in 1988 and had to miss some vital races; he cheekily gave Ayrton Senna a lift back to the pits, having won the 1991 British Grand Prix, little suspecting that he was merely helping to conserve the strength of the man who would later pluck the title from his grasp.
He also scored some fantastic victories: 1987 British GP, carving off a twenty-second deficit in as many laps; debut win for Ferrari in Brazil, 1989, plus do-or-die victory over Senna in Hungary; first five Grands Prix of 1992, back to back, a new record. It was one damn thing after another, with Nigel. Triumph and disaster, hopelessly intertwined.
On his return to the Williams team in ’91, he at last found himself in a position of relative strength. Frank Williams had spent the previous two years employing Riccardo Patrese and Thierry Boutsen – both okay, neither absolutely special – and had come to the conclusion that only a driver with Mansell’s implacable desires would win another Championship for him. The negotiations were suitably crabby, but ended with Mansell getting the thick end of something between £5 and £12 million (depending on where you started counting) plus unconditional number one status within the team. ‘I can speak with Frank,’ said Nigel, comfortably, ‘tell him things which aren’t necessarily nice to hear without that affecting the confidence we have in one another. He knows he can tell me anything, too.’ And Mansell delivered: five wins in 1991, followed by an incredible (and record-breaking) nine wins in ’92, plus fourteen pole positions. And the Drivers’ and Constructors’ Championships.
Unfortunately for Mansell, Williams was still Williams, still thought the team was bigger than the driver (which it was), and stuck the knife into him in ’92, his Championship year, by legging him over and replacing him with Alain Prost. And in the most convoluted way possible.
Ayrton Senna was used as the bargaining chip. He announced halfway through the ’92 season that he was ‘prepared to drive for Williams for nothing’ – a extremely theoretical nothing, given that Senna could easily have kept himself comfortable with several millions’ worth of sponsorship money, but nothing in the sense that Williams F1 wouldn’t actually have to pay him. Shortly after the Hungarian GP in August – by which time Mansell had not only sewn up the Championship, but thought he was putting together a lucrative new deal with the team – Williams put the bite on him, telling him about Senna’s offer and demanding that he settled for a smaller paycheque. ‘Because Senna would drive for nothing,’ Mansell complained, perhaps with some justification, ‘I, the new world champion, had to accept a massive reduction in remuneration from the figure agreed in Hungary.’
As if this wasn’t bad enough, it became clear that – for the time being, at least – the real target was less Ayrton Senna and more Alain Prost, kicking his heels in the middle of his sabbatical year, and still hungry for one more title. Prost was definitely up for it; while his thoughtful driving style, manic attention to detail and fondness for English teams made him a natural for Williams. In fact, a deal with the Frenchman had been on the cards since the very start of the season. More than that: he’d got Williams to agree not to offer the other seat to Senna, just to make sure that everything was as perfect as it could be.
When Mansell got wind of this, he went off the deep end, recalling his time with Prost at Ferrari, insisting that ‘I am a better and more courageous racer than he will ever be if he is in Formula One for a lifetime or another ten years. He will be more of a chauffeur, making sure the car does the work for him.’ Senna, too, was outraged. Although his McLaren-Honda MP4/6 had taken the ’91 Drivers’ and Constructors’ titles, it was clear to everyone, Senna especially, that the Williams-Renault FW14B was a terrific car, and that McLaren could only go down, rather than up. He urgently wanted the Williams drive, and when Prost thieved it from him, he naturally enough, threw a tantrum, arguing that ‘If Prost wants to come back and maybe win another title, he should be sporting. The way he is doing it, he is behaving like a coward.’ Senna and sporting was always an unnatural pairing, but no matter, because, so far as he was concerned, he should be in exactly the same car as Prost in order for there to be a fair fight. ‘He must be prepared to race anybody,’ said Senna, high-mindedly, ‘under any conditions, on equal terms.’
Frank Williams was at his most inscrutable, unpredictable and Dr Strangelove-like, throughout all this. The chances were that, in actual fact, he really did want Senna, and Prost was a chess move on the way to getting him. Equally, he didn’t want Mansell, who was ageing, awkward and expensive. So Prost was both a convenient lever with which to remove Mansell, as well as being a likely world champion, just as the Williams Grand Prix car was reaching a peak of perfection in the shape of the FW15C. ‘The bottom line,’ according to Peter Windsor, ‘is that Nigel was annoyed that Frank had signed Prost. The only way he was going to stay was if he got twice the amount of money Prost was getting.’
But that wasn’t the only thing. ‘No one appreciated where the team was when I joined them. The car was terrible,’ Mansell protested. ‘Prost has come to Williams to pick the fruit that I and the others in the team have sown and nurtured.’ It was a fair point. Mansell had worked hard to perfect the FW15C – an astoundingly complex and brilliant machine, probably the most sophisticated car of its time, possibly the most sophisticated (given the constantly changing nature of the F1 rulebook) there will ever be. It was his input that had helped get the computer-controlled active suspension, traction control, fly-by-wire systems, semiautomatic transmission, telemetry, and God k
nows what else working. The FW15C may not have had a turbo or ground-effects, but Alain Prost was so impressed by the gadgetry available, he called it ‘a little Airbus.’ And it was Mansell, partly, he had to thank for this prodigy on wheels.
Now, was there an irony in this – that if only Mansell had been a bit more like the car he helped develop (guileful, fascinating, packed with cutting-edge know-how) he could have driven it to another Championship? Was the car, on this occasion, smarter than the driver? Or, in seeking this irony, do we fall into the snobs’ commonplace; the commonplace of poking fun at Mansell, just because it’s easy? After all, Mansell was the one driver whom Ayrton Senna couldn’t intimidate. The Tifosi called him a Lion. The mainstream British fans cheered him every inch of the way. And, in the end, will it be Williams F1 and its brilliant cars which stay in the memory, or the fearless, incredibly annoying Mansell?
Burning Rubber: The Extraordinary Story of Formula One Page 19