Courage for me is an outstanding act of valour, when someone goes way over the normal call of duty and in fact puts their own life at risk to save others. Courage is more spontaneous, instinctive; less premeditated. If someone steps out with a knife pointed at you, do you dive for cover or grab the knife? I feel like I have only been truly courageous once in my life and that was in Rio in 1981. This incident has been documented briefly before, but I want to revisit the afternoon in more detail because it summarises my belief about, and philosophy on, courage. The only time I have shown unconditional, utterly selfless courage in my life is when I had to pull my very good friend Peter Collins out of the sea in Rio and save him from drowning, in March 1981.
As you know, Peter had played a pivotal role in bringing me to the attention of Colin Chapman and, since then, we had become firm friends. He is a lovely man who I will always be very grateful to for his part in helping my career. In Rio that day, we were relaxing on a typical Brazilian beach, surrounded by bronzed bodies. Rosanne went in the sea initially, but she didn’t like the strength of the undercurrent and soon got out. I jumped about in the shallows for a while then we both went back to our towels to lie down. We were chatting and having a lovely time when we both noticed Peter was still out in the sea; in fact, quite a long way out and, at first, we thought he was waving at us.
Then I said, ‘He’s not waving hello – he’s in trouble.’ I shouted to Rosanne to go and get some help and then sprinted to the water, jumped in and started swimming towards him. By the time I got to him, he was in big trouble, gasping for air as the undercurrent tugged away at him. Then our lovely friend and my team-mate Elio swam in to help too, but he got pulled away by the fierce current and started swimming in the wrong direction. I couldn’t believe it. It was getting really scary and by now Peter was pretty blue. It was terrifying. I realised that we didn’t have much time, but I couldn’t swim strongly enough to fight against this vicious riptide – it was so violent. That’s when I realised that I was probably about to drown, too.
Meanwhile, Rosanne was running up and down the beach looking for a buoy or a safety ring, but there was nothing. She was getting frantic, shouting, ‘Somebody help!’, but they all just sat or stood there and watched. Nobody could speak English, although it was pretty obvious there was a problem. She was desperately trying to get help, but to no avail.
I just fought and fought, while holding Peter and treading water. By now his eyes were bulging. I will never forget his face, his eyes. I just kept thinking, Oh dear me, we are in trouble here. Luckily, destiny was on our side that day: by the grace of the good Lord we momentarily found a sandbank out of nowhere and that very brief – but crucial – moment of sanctuary meant that we could just touch our toes on the bottom for a matter of a few seconds and breathe and gasp for air. Then the waves started crashing over us again and we were fighting against drowning once more. I later found out that many people died every year on that strip of beach and, let me tell you, I thought we were next as I tried to save Peter’s – and now my own – life.
We were so lucky. Eventually, I managed to drag him nearer to the shore and pull him up, then we caught one of the waves and I sort of surfed him in. He was almost unconscious by this point. It felt like we had been out there an eternity, yet there were hundreds of people on the beach just watching – no one came. I later found out that Rosanne was on the beach literally begging people to help us and nobody would. It transpired that people were so frightened of the tide that they were fearful they would die in any rescue attempt. Peter was from Australia and perhaps understandably saw the surf and thought this would be fun to swim in. It was just an innocent, and almost fatal, mistake.
Eventually, Rosanne found some guys who were willing to help. They waded into the shallows and made a chain with their linked arms, then grabbed our arms and passed us up to the beach and safety. We were both lying on the floor, exhausted, and they began to perform CPR on Peter. They tried to start doing the same to me, but I pushed them away. I was fine – shocked, spent, traumatised, but fine. Peter was taken to hospital, as was Elio, but luckily both were okay.
Later, the enormity of how close I came to losing my own life with that act of friendship really hit me. Peter has very graciously told many people that he wouldn’t be here now if it wasn’t for what I did that day. Had I not been at the height of my fitness, then this particular part of the story could have been very different, because I simply wouldn’t have had the physical endurance to keep us afloat for such a long time.
I have raced inches from concrete walls that would take my life if I lost control of a car. I have tested parts on cars at 200mph that are completely unknown in terms of performance and safety, effectively being a human guinea pig for what are essentially untested, ground-based missiles. However, that day in Rio is the only time I would suggest that I could use that very special word for my actions: courage.
Back on the track, my debut full season in F1 was marred by tragedy, with incidents that tested even the most experienced and resolute drivers. In May, the F1 circus rolled into Zolder, Belgium, which was to be a weekend of extreme opposites for me. On the one hand, I would secure my first ever podium, but, in dark contrast, one mechanic was killed and another seriously injured.
In the pit lane, a mechanic suffered severe head injuries when he fell between the wheels of a car and, terribly, he died the next day. The tragic accident sent shock waves around the paddock. Then, at the start of the race, Riccardo Patrese’s Arrows stalled, so a mechanic jumped over the wall to restart the car. I was sitting behind Riccardo’s car and therefore witnessed what happened. Patrese’s team-mate Siegfried Stohr saw the green light, started his grand prix and slammed into the back of his colleague’s car, smashing into the legs of this poor, trapped mechanic.
It was so graphic, so shocking and, coming just a few hours after the mechanic had been fatally injured, it felt horrendous. Carnage. At that specific moment, I was strapped into my car, a few feet away from where this guy had been crushed. At the time, I was certain he would die from his injuries, but thankfully, although his legs were broken, he did survive. However, seeing that terrible accident had an instantly destructive impact on my psyche. I have spoken about this before, but I sat in the car and I couldn’t move my arms or legs. I don’t mean I was strapped in tightly; I mean, I literally couldn’t move. I was paralysed with shock. I was crying behind my visor. The team wanted to get me out of the car but I wouldn’t, or rather I couldn’t. In retrospect, it was a blessing that I couldn’t move because I honestly think if I had got out of that car at that moment, I would never have got back in again. It was that shocking. I was so distressed that they even fetched Rosanne to the grid to talk to me and calm me down. There seemed to be an all-pervading sense of tragedy on the grid that weekend. This was only my seventh official grand prix. I just felt, What is going to happen next?
When the race finally got under way, I managed to put the distress out of my mind and drive very well. I had no choice, it was my job. After a thrilling tussle with the great Gilles Villeneuve, I managed to grab third in a rain-shortened race. Zolder was a very challenging, twisting, undulating circuit. I got the car reasonably hooked up and, despite everything that had happened, I was very focused. Villeneuve was pushing me hard in his Ferrari – he was known for his unbelievable car control and his fiery style of trying to overtake, so to have the pressure of his Ferrari behind me and still succeed in beating him to the podium was a very proud moment.
Stepping away from the injury and death of that weekend, that first podium was a fantastic milestone for me personally. I had beaten a well-established team-mate. I had held off one of the sport’s greats for third place. I actually felt like I had won the race. I would even say that first podium, given the extreme circumstances and the standard of drivers around me, is on a par with my first win. Part of the reason for my delight was that I felt I had consolidated my position within F1. When you break through into the top level
of any sport, it is a great achievement. However, some people relax and forget that they have to then consolidate that position. They have to validate their membership. In Formula 1, validation is gaining a podium. For me personally, it meant the world. There were so many other drivers who were waiting in the wings all the time, lots of teams; injury was a constant threat, from testing to racing and accidents, so drivers came and went really quickly. Your window of opportunity could be frighteningly small. I felt Zolder had validated me as a Formula 1 driver and it gave me a huge boost of confidence.
The twin-chassis controversy rumbled on to Monaco, where I was very proud to qualify in third, but in the race itself I retired with rear suspension problems (a disappointment that was mitigated a little after Colin had doubled my retainer, as I mentioned before). Then, after that, the 1981 season was pretty patchy, with three top-seven finishes and five more retirements, four through reliability issues, one through driver error. Lotus performed only modestly well for the rest of the season, but, despite the many difficult moments that year, I was aware that I was gaining experience all the time. I also heard that a few other team owners had been talking about me and asking questions.
The most disappointing race of the year was at Silverstone, my first British Grand Prix. Naturally, I was very excited at the prospect of racing in front of the home fans. Unfortunately, the twin-chassis controversy overshadowed my weekend because when that car was stopped from racing, Lotus didn’t have enough time to prepare a replacement for me, so I wasn’t able to qualify and therefore didn’t race. How did Colin Chapman react to my obvious devastation, on a weekend when his technological tour de force of a car – which had cost him a fortune to develop – had been prohibited from racing? Well, he’d heard that Rosanne and I were having difficulty getting a mortgage and so he stepped in and helped us so that we could afford to get our own home. What a man.
CHAPTER 6
GROUND EFFECT AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF FEAR
As I was trying to establish myself as a top driver, one of the most exhilarating aspects of the amazing technology on these cars that I had to learn was the so-called ground effect. This was perhaps the most brutal, dangerous and yet hugely exciting technical development to appear during my career, and it was Colin Chapman who first introduced the concept in Formula 1, with devastating performance effects.
To be there at the time when this technology was evolving in Formula 1 was a great privilege and a real thrill. As savage and unpredictable as the cars with full ground effect could be, I loved the challenge and the adrenaline rush, but at the same time it could occasionally be genuinely frightening. Proper frightening. For those of you who do not spend hours poring over the history books of motorsport engineering and evolution, here is a basic explanation of how ground effect worked. It is well known that designers use wings and aerofoils on the top of cars to control the flow of air and therefore the amount of drag and downforce. Formula 1 cars had utilised wings on the car’s body for many years by the time I was racing, of course. What ground effect did was to exploit the fact that the ground itself was a part of that equation. By that, I mean the air between the underbody of the car and the ground plays a crucial part in the amount of downforce that the car generates. When the genius minds of people like Colin Chapman and his team dug further into this principle, it became apparent that by forming tunnels – known as venturis – along the underside of the body (and later the introduction of side brushes then skirts), the ground effect could be controlled, thus generating massive downforce, which in turn allowed cars to take corners far quicker. By using skirts and venturis, the gap could be controlled – like a very precise wind tunnel under the car – and therefore the air underneath could be manipulated to accelerate. Consequently, the pressure in that space would drop, while the pressure on the top of the car was unaffected, thus creating a downforce pushing the car on to the track. If you take an airplane, the principle is that the air pressure under the wing is greater than the air pressure above the wing, which creates lift and forces the plane into the air. Put very simply, ground effect is the opposite of that. Essentially, the presence of ground effect sucks a car down on to the track. The amazing thing was that the faster you went, the more the car was sucked down! In some cases, it was thought the massive ground effect was estimated to be as much as ten times more powerful than the downforce created by the wings on top of the car. Easily enough to drive the car upside down along a tunnel.
This all sounds extremely clever, and it was. Speaking as someone who helped test the principle at high speed on many hundreds of breathtakingly fast laps, I can also say that in terms of grip and downforce, when ground effect worked correctly it was absolutely astonishing. You could head towards a corner at 200mph, then brake no more than about 50 metres away from the entrance and still carry an incredible amount of speed through that corner. For a very fast corner, you could fly in at a staggeringly high speed and yet maintain that velocity, it was that stunning. The cars were glued to the track and you were just doing these ridiculous speeds. It was so violent, so staggeringly incredible, so amazing.
The science of ground effect kept evolving, too. The people developing the system were so brilliant they were quickly able to tweak and tune the way ground effect worked depending on which circuit you were at and the demands on the car. For example, they were able to alter the angle of the tunnels underneath. They used what were called ‘shims’, which helped to move the centre of pressure backwards or forwards along the bottom of the car. If you were on a slow circuit and wanted better turn into the corners, you’d move the centre of pressure to the front of the car by altering the tunnels, or by altering the rake of the car, which also adjusts the angle. On very fast circuits, where you wanted a stable rear end, you could move the centre of pressure backwards a little bit and carry more front wing to get the car to turn in and then to keep the stability so that you could go round the corners flat out. You could tweak it; you could move the main centre of pressure of the car depending on how you set the ride height and the angle of the wings, so it was a very complex science indeed, tuning these cars in a completely different way. To complicate matters, every time a car compressed – namely, when it braked and the underbody tilted, even minutely – the centre of pressure moved up and down the length of the car. So the challenge of regulating ground effect was a constantly moving target. Some of the brains behind the science were just legendary and they were able to manipulate where that centre of pressure was located, and in so doing they could make the car more driveable.
Of course, there was a price to pay for ground effect, on a number of levels. Firstly and perhaps most obviously, the sheer savagery of the cornering speed massively increased the amount of lateral G experienced by the drivers. Lateral G is the most toxic kind of G-force. You could be pulling around 5G through corners and it was just totally brutal on the body. There were corners on some tracks that drivers were used to going around at a speed they were familiar with from the days before ground effect. Now we were heading into and through these same corners at substantially quicker speeds. On certain tracks, it was almost like having to relearn the entire circuit. I have to say I always enjoyed that part; in my opinion, I was one of the fastest learners on the grid, so I personally felt I could quickly absorb the changes that ground effect created in terms of driving lines and the altered subtleties of each track.
The perfect ground effect set-up led to such colossal G-force that it was rumoured that some drivers were blacking out. The problem with G-force is that it is rarely constant. It changes from one moment to another. Also, linear G and lateral G are two very different experiences. The linear G-force in a straight line was massive; when you are loading up into a corner, heading straight towards the bend under deceleration, you just have acceleration or deceleration G. That is pretty immense at times.
However, the really vicious manifestation of this phenomenon is so-called lateral G – that is, the G you experience when you are cornering. This i
s the most dangerous G-force in the world. We were experiencing more G-forces than an astronaut might be faced with and yet we were not even wearing G-suits. Even fighter pilots who experience considerable positive and negative G do not experience the lateral G that an F1 driver does. To give you real-world context to that statistic: if you corner at 5G then you are experiencing the equivalent of five people of your own body weight pushing against your head.
It gets worse, much worse. It has been shown that when an F1 car bottoms out in the middle of a corner, for that split second the G-force shoots up to somewhere in the region of pulling 25 positive G. That’s 25 people pressing down on your body, all while you are driving at very high speed and trying to race other drivers, think about lap times, track position, strategy and so on. If that sounds extreme, that’s because it is. So when you see a car fly round a corner and sparks briefly fly up from underneath the body as the car bottoms out, you probably think that looks rather dramatic. Let me tell you, it’s absolutely dramatic for the driver!
Dealing with G is an absolutely pivotal part of being a great F1 driver. Understanding when the G will hit you, in what direction, how severe, how that will affect your driving and so on are crucial parts of the jigsaw. G-force is such a massive force, so powerful, that you have to find a way to cope with it. The best way in my opinion is actually counterintuitive, in that you have to learn to relax into the G, otherwise your own body’s tension works against you. Easier said than done when you are cornering at 150mph and your body is being battered and smashed inside the cockpit. The downside of relaxing into G-force is that when you learn to do that successfully, your muscle and skin and bone are literally forced into every tiny crevice and corner of the steel cockpit, and that can be really painful. That is when you feel every corner of the car, especially if you have got no foam or seat in the cockpit. Yet if you tense up in anticipation of that pain, you will negatively affect your performance. So it is quite an acquired skill, absolutely mind over matter, and really quite hard to do successfully for long periods of time.
Nigel Mansell Autobiography Page 7
