Nigel Mansell Autobiography

by Nigel Mansell

  I said, ‘I’m nobody. I’m just really interested – that is a big achievement. I know that it is really tough to beat the track record around there.’ I was polite and I decided to leave it there, so he turned away and resumed regaling people over and over again with his story. Eventually, I had to say something so I nudged him politely and said, ‘I’m sorry, I feel like I should know you . . . Would you mind telling me what time you did around Silverstone, please?’

  ‘I did a 1:24. Why?’ He was getting quite rude by now.

  ‘Oh, okay, that’s a very good time. Congratulations.’

  ‘Yes, it’s the outright track record. Why do you want to know? Who the hell are you?’

  ‘Well, since you asked, I am Nigel Mansell and I am the Formula 1 test driver for Lotus and Colin Chapman, and a few weeks ago I smashed the outright track record for a Lotus at Silverstone with a 1:12.5.’ He just looked completely stunned, got up and walked off. Everyone in the pub momentarily paused then clapped me. I had actually been reproaching myself for not knowing this guy, thinking I was not on top of my game because I thought I had the track record and yet here was a driver who said he was the record holder, and I didn’t know him. Isn’t it strange what people say sometimes?

  I also had a few races in Formula 2 that year, with mixed results, but the most exciting development was clearly the potential opening into Formula 1. Flying out to Austria ahead of my first grand prix start was just so exciting. This was everything I had ever dreamed of – all those years of hard work, the struggles, it was finally coming together. The grid was rammed with talent: there were four world champions in the field and 13 grand prix winners, names such as Jones, Villeneuve, Laffite, Pironi, Fittipaldi, Scheckter, Reutemann – all amazing drivers. Add to that the fact that the beautifully located Österreichring was the fastest circuit of the season (averaging around 140mph), and the cars were running the fantastic but at times highly unpredictable so-called ‘ground effect’ aerodynamic technology (more of which shortly), it felt like a real baptism of fire.

  I was in the team’s third car, which was seven inches longer than the two standard cars of Elio and Mario. Consequently, it was very lethargic when changing direction because the wheelbase was longer, plus it was heavier, but the team wanted to try it out. Unfortunately, there was no way I was going to qualify in that car, but luckily for me, with just a few laps to go, they squeezed me into Elio’s car and I managed to put in a good enough lap to scrape in at the very back of the grid. I would be back in the longer car for the race, but I didn’t care. I was about to start my first grand prix. It was a sensational feeling.

  However, that excitement soon started to fade on the grid when I began to sense a fair bit of pain in my buttocks. At first I thought, Wow, it’s hot in here, but then I realised it was actually a burning sensation. I called my engineer over and he put his hand down into the cockpit, where he found a pool of fuel was leaking around the top of my legs.

  ‘Nigel, you might have to put up with it.’

  ‘What’s the alternative?’ I asked.

  ‘Get out of the car and miss the race.’

  ‘I will put up with it.’

  Apart from being very dangerous, it was becoming really painful, so the mechanic went and got a bucket of cold water, which he threw into my cockpit to dilute the fuel I was sitting in. So the start of my first ever grand prix was coloured by physical discomfort and an all-pervading smell of racing fuel. Even so, I was mightily excited.

  At first, it wasn’t too bad, but after ten or so laps the water evaporated and the fuel started to burn me again. After about 40 laps the engine blew and my race was over. I can’t pretend I wasn’t relieved, to be honest, because by that point the pain was really quite unbearable. I’d sat in fuel for over an hour, causing second- and third-degree burns to my buttocks. Also, when I got out of the car, the fuel had shrunk my hamstrings so I couldn’t walk properly. I just hobbled back to the garage.

  My backside was raw and blistered; I felt really ill. The blisters were the size of my fist, huge. I’d thought I might be sitting with Rosanne in the hotel that evening, celebrating my first ever grand prix race, but as it turned out I spent the night at Birmingham Accident Hospital. At one point, a kindly nurse came in and said, ‘Mr Mansell, now we have to de-roof your blisters.’

  ‘What on earth does that mean?’

  I didn’t like the sound of that. Painfully, a few moments later I found out that what ‘de-roofing’ meant was bursting the pocket of fluid inside the blister then slicing off the dead skin. It was agony. Then I had to be dressed with heavy gauze for nearly a month before new skin formed. I didn’t complain to Colin – who had said he was impressed by my drive – and just took it on the chin. Besides, I was so keen to get back in a Formula 1 car and try again.

  Notwithstanding burning your bum, I will try to describe the cockpit of a Formula 1 car from early on in the era in which I raced, if only to attempt to illustrate how incredibly hostile and unwelcoming the environment could be at times. First of all, depending on the size of frame you were, you’d have a difficult job getting in the car and getting comfortable. In the very early cars, there were no special seats, maybe just a piece of foam, so your backside would effectively be on the bottom of a metal tub, your hips would be squashing into the sides so you’d be very uncomfortable, and you’d have instant backache in about two minutes. The cramped dimensions meant that your shoulders would also be hunched up around your neck because the cockpit was too narrow. Your knees would be bashing the dashboard because there was not enough leg room and your shins would be hitting the exposed steering column. This was just getting in.

  Once settled into the cockpit, you would get yourself as comfortable as possible, relatively speaking. You’d make sure the pedals were correctly aligned, so you could confidently and accurately slide your foot from the accelerator to the brake and vice versa. You had to be absolutely sure that your foot didn’t catch as it travelled across – the pedals had to be flush. Then you’d check that the clutch pedal had enough play in it to disengage the clutch properly. You also had a foot rest, which was absolutely vital because, when pulling the G-forces that F1 cars face, your foot needed to be on the foot rest and not the clutch, otherwise you risked riding the clutch and wearing it out. As you came to a corner that created a lot of G, you’d have to use the foot rest wisely because, when the G-forces hit, if you didn’t have your leg in the right place you could wear yourself out in a matter of minutes. This is because you can only support your leg and body under G-force for so long.

  When you were sitting in the car and ready to go, things didn’t get any easier. If you tried immediately to turn the steering wheel when the car wasn’t moving, you could hardly turn the wheels at all, because the steering was just so heavy. Back then, there was no power assist. It was all incredibly physical. When I’d got the Lotus test contract, I installed a mini-gym in my garage at home because I felt I needed to be in peak condition at all times. This was an approach I tried to carry with me throughout my career.

  Once you pulled away in the car, the reality of the claustrophobic environment was multiplied many times, because now you were in a very dynamic racing situation and nothing was static inside that cockpit for the best part of two hours. As soon as you turned the steering wheel, your knuckles might hit the sides of the cockpit. There wasn’t enough room to change gear freely because your elbow was restricted – you had to change gear with just your fingers. Don’t forget, in the early part of my career these were fully manual cars, so no semi-automatic gearshift. It was a very physical operation each time you changed gear – there was no assistance; it was all mechanical. However, all the cars were very similar; there wasn’t any one that was particularly more roomy than the next. So, we all had to devise our own methods of working in an incredibly cramped cockpit.

  Obviously, bear in mind that you would be wearing a helmet, so your visibility was limited by the size of the visor, the weather conditions, pe
rhaps by smoke on the track or oil being picked up by cars in front and thrown into the air and on to your helmet.

  Inside that cockpit, for me the rev counter was the most important dial. Nowadays, of course, the gear-shifting is all electronic, assisted by LED lights to pinpoint the optimum time to change gear (along with an audio bleep through the driver’s earpiece), but back then it was purely mechanical, we had none of that. We used to have to judge when to change gear, so we felt the torque of the engine and where the top of the power curve was.

  In the early cars, I would always look at how awkward it would be to get my finger round to try to reset the rev limiter, because if you over-revved the engine you’d get a bollocking. However, as it was a mechanical rev meter, you could sometimes reach down and reset it to save a telling-off. Of course, the teams quickly figured this out and so they’d always place it somewhere that was virtually impossible to get to, so you couldn’t actually cheat the system. Sometimes I’d be doubled up inside the already super-cramped cockpit, banging my head and straining to reach the rev meter, all the while usually chuckling to myself at the absurdity – and pain! – of the situation.

  You would have all your temperature gauges, your oil, water and various other pressure gauges that had greater or lesser importance. The pressure of the fuel pump was vitally important because, quite simply, if you starve the engine of fuel it can essentially detonate and blow up. That tended to be a bad thing! There would also be a dial or lever that allowed you to alter the bias on the brakes.

  Essentially, the cockpit of those cars carried the absolute minimum required to run an F1 car of the day. What’s more, if anything did start to feel wrong with the car, maybe there was a definite problem or you just had a bad feeling, then of course there was no two-way radio to the pit lane in the earlier cars. There were radios once you were in the pits, so when you came in during a race they’d plug you in to talk, but for large parts of my career, once you left the pits, that was it, you were on your own.

  Just a quick digression here, about my wonderful and dearly missed friend Colin Chapman. We had these radios that could be plugged into the cars in the pits and sometimes the cables were really quite long. Coming into the pits as we did at very high speed it could all get a bit messy! At my first race, I’d just come off the back of a good lap and I drove into the pits to talk to Colin and my engineer. I was very pleased with the lap and my engineer put his thumb up to gesture his satisfaction. Colin was standing next to the car but not really looking around, and the next thing I knew he’d grabbed the engineer’s thumb – thinking it was the radio plug – and was desperately trying to ram it into the radio socket, all the while talking to someone and clearly unable to work out why the plug wouldn’t slot into his belt controller properly. I was shouting through my visor, ‘Colin, that’s his thumb!’ But I was mostly just laughing out loud, it was so funny. He was so focused on the car and the race that he simply didn’t notice he was effectively about to amputate this guy’s thumb instead of talking to me on the radio. Fortunately, most radio hook-ups went to plan rather better but, nonetheless, the reality of driving F1 cars during that era was that once you left the pits, you were on your own.

  I hope you can see from this description that an F1 car in the early 1980s was a very uncomfortable and at times extremely lonely place to be. There is really only one word to describe a Formula 1 driver’s cockpit: hostile. If you are driving an ugly car, then of course it is more hostile; it is not a nice place to be. However, if you are driving a good car that is balanced, has good suspension and great grip, then it is an excitingly hostile car. On those occasions, despite all of the discomfort, the claustrophobia, the heat, the extreme demands on your body . . . there is no better place in the world.

  I was due to race twice more in my first grand prix season. In Holland, I had some mechanical failures and ended up doing a qualifying lap in Elio’s car, complete with his personal seat, but I was still good for 16th on the grid. A brake failure retired me on lap 16, which was obviously disappointing, but my lap times had been a few tenths behind the two main drivers and it was another grand prix under my belt. The final race of the season for me was supposed to be the European Grand Prix at Imola, but I slid off in first qualifying and was unable to start the race.

  There was another opportunity to race at the forthcoming United States Grand Prix, so I was still buoyant, despite the frustration of Imola. I was so focused. I’m not going to reel off the usual lap times and stories of how much testing I was doing, but I do have another barometer of how hungry I was at this point.

  In Formula 1, you need focus to succeed and climb up the grid towards a world title. However, you also need focus to stay alive; more so in those yesteryear races when safety standards were not what they are today. It’s stating the obvious, I know, but if you didn’t concentrate in an F1 car from the late 1970s and early 1980s, you could end up dead. It’s as simple as that. In elite sportsmen and women, the level of focus they have is often way beyond what non-professional people think is focus. Sometimes I am focused to such an extent that I shut out all distractions and am pretty much in my own world. Let me give you a funny example from those early times with Lotus.

  As I mentioned, I was supposed to be travelling to Watkins Glen for the final race of the 1980 season, the United States Grand Prix. Rosanne and I were all geared up to go; we were both very excited about the prospect as we had never been to the States before. Unfortunately, shortly before, my team-mate Mario had a big accident in his car in Canada and the monocoque was written off. Then I got a phone call from Colin and he said, ‘Nigel, I’m really sorry, you won’t be able to race in America because we have lost a car and there is no way we can get it repaired in time. We need to use your spare car, so I’m afraid you don’t have a drive. I’m sorry to say that the USA race is off, for you.’

  He could obviously tell how devastated I was, so he said, ‘Look, I know it’s no compensation, but when was the last time you and Rosanne had a nice holiday?’

  ‘I can’t remember the last time we had a proper holiday, Colin.’

  ‘Well, how about you both come out to the States anyway and visit all the tourist spots? You will absolutely love it out there.’

  It might sound odd but, as much as I was flattered that he’d offered, I was actually still really disappointed not to be racing. I wanted to be at the coalface, so to speak, to be racing, not lying on a beach or at a theme park. I’d have been far happier if he’d said, ‘Come at our expense to Watkins Glen and just watch.’ That would’ve been much better for me. I’d rather be in the mix, learning, consuming information and knowledge, not soaking up the sun.

  Anyway, that wasn’t going to happen and Colin, being a total gentleman, made his generous offer, so off we went to America. However, the whole time we were there my mind was basically in the pit lane. As beautiful as some of the local scenery was, I was constantly thinking about what was happening at Watkins Glen. Funnily enough, Rosanne’s mind wasn’t stuck in the oily pit lane like mine!

  One particular day, we were due to go on an organised coach trip to see the sights. I wasn’t really interested, but Rosanne was keen so I agreed to go on the escorted tour. We got on the coach with a crowd of other holidaymakers and off we went. I have to be honest, this wasn’t really my cup of tea at all. I prefer my own company with Rosanne, just us two; being stuck on a coach with a load of strangers would never be my idea of a fun holiday.

  We visited various spots and the guide told us all about the area, but after a couple of hours, I’d kind of had enough. Then we stopped for a break at a vineyard, by which time I’d decided I needed a bit of peace and quiet. We all started to file off the coach and, with my back to Rosanne, I took her hand and said, ‘I need a bit of separation from all this. Let’s just have a wander off for a bit.’

  I could feel a bit of resistance in her hand, and I noticed she wasn’t particularly taking mine that eagerly, but I was determined – focused! – on gett
ing away for a little while. I didn’t look at her; I just held her hand tightly and walked off the coach. ‘Come on, Rosanne. Let’s go, please.’

  I was talking to her as we walked away from the coach and when we got up to a viewing area I said, ‘Isn’t this nice? Look at that beautiful scenery.’

  Silence.

  I thought, Oh dear, maybe I’ve overstepped the mark? So I started to say, ‘Look, we haven’t fallen out have we . . . ?’ But when I turned to speak, I actually ending up saying, ‘Who the hell are you?’

  It turned out I’d grabbed some complete stranger’s hand, marched her off the coach and there I was, a hundred yards away from the group, talking to this poor woman, while Rosanne was still standing by the bus! My wife was with the woman’s husband and they were both killing themselves laughing.

  I said to the woman, ‘I am so sorry. Why didn’t you say something?’

  She just smiled and said, ‘Well, you were very persuasive so I just went with it.’

  You see – the power of focus.

  It was at the end of the 1980 season that I found out that Mario Andretti was leaving to join Alfa Romeo and that Colin Chapman wanted me as his number two driver, alongside Elio. Colin was keen to have a British driver in his team and, despite some initial resistance from sponsors, he was adamant and eventually announced that I had been given a full contract to drive the 1981 season. This was incredible news: I was going to be a full-time Formula 1 driver. Not a test driver. The real deal. I was to be paid $25,000 for the year, but would have to cover my own travel expenses, which were to be considerable. I didn’t care. Frankly, I would have walked barefoot to the races if that’s what it took. This was it: Colin had given me my big chance.