Nigel Mansell Autobiography

by Nigel Mansell

  In the back of my mind – to be honest, it was almost the only thing on my mind, even as I was racing – I knew that the next day after the grand prix I was heading home to go to my mother’s funeral. However, unlike my memory loss of the actual race weekend, from the moment I woke up on the Monday, the day of her funeral, I can remember everything in acute, vivid detail. The race weekend is lost to me, but the day of the funeral is embedded in my mind forever.

  I flew home on the Sunday night and barely slept, then went to my parents’ house the next morning. It was still traditional back then to have the coffin in the family home before it went to the church, and sure enough my mom was there. It was very hard and things got worse because, when it came to taking her, my dad, bless him, had a meltdown. He wouldn’t let the hearse leave the street unless I was driving it. This created a problem because the funeral director patiently explained that I wasn’t insured and that they would not be able to allow it. However, Dad was adamant, so I said I would underwrite any problems that arose if there was a bump of some kind. I understand they were just doing their job and I was pleased they were able to help. I placed the garland I had won the day before in Dijon on Mom’s coffin and we began the journey to the churchyard. Even now, I feel very sombre writing this. I still grieve for my mom; it’s been over 30 years and I still feel the pain. I’ve never really been able to talk to anyone in depth about it, to share what I was thinking, it’s simply too painful. Writing these words seems like a good moment to tell people. I miss her terribly. Maybe that’s not the tough thing to say, but I am just being very honest with you.

  The first race after Mom’s funeral was in Monaco and it remains one of the wettest grands prix ever seen there – indeed, one of the wettest races in history. Alain Prost led, but I was able to overtake him on lap 11 and therefore take the lead of a grand prix for the very first time. Mostly, all I could think was, Mom isn’t here to see this. She only ever really saw me struggle. She was delighted when I got my drive with Lotus, but I dearly wish she and my father had seen more of the good times. I was thinking this inside my helmet as I led that Monaco Grand Prix. The brief moment in the sun didn’t last long, as five laps later I put my tyres on the slippery white lines going up the hill towards Casino Square, lost the car and hit the barriers. I was absolutely gutted. What can I say? I was probably going just a little bit too fast and I slid out on a different line, and everybody knows as soon as you put your wheel on one of those white lines, it’s like ice, so I crashed from the lead.

  I have realised that I never really grieved properly for my mother. I never fully understood the magnitude of the loss because that didn’t go with the job. I was worried that to show signs of emotion and grieving could be construed as a weakness. The thing is, in later life you realise that you never get that time with them back. Only now do I think I can finally grieve properly.

  That moment when I was told my mother had died changed my life forever and the repercussions are still with me to this day, and probably always will be. Taking that hearse to the funeral for my mom was the hardest drive of my life.

  There were some highlights in the rest of 1984. I earned my first pole position at Dallas in July, with Elio completing Lotus’s first front-row lock-out since 1978, a proud moment for us both. However, that race is probably best remembered for me pushing my car over the line in 100-degree heat. It was the most crazy weekend – we had qualifying at six in the morning (Jacques Laffite came to the drivers’ briefing in his pyjamas) and the temperature was so high the track was burning up. In the race itself, I struggled with handling and then deteriorating tyres, and, after a great tussle with Keke Rosberg, halfway through the last lap my transmission broke and I lost all drive. The speed I already had coasted me to the last corner, where I could see the start/finish line just up ahead. There was no way I was going to stop where I was, so I jumped out and started pushing the car. The heat was intense and I felt very lightheaded, but I wanted that finish position – for the points and also because I was paid finishing money at the time. I remember pushing and pushing and pushing, and then all I remember is the lights going out, as I fainted on to the track next to my car.

  Then I remember coming to and I was instantly very concerned because I was lying stark naked on a bed of ice. I could see all this silver paper around and over me and I was surrounded by all these mysterious figures in white clothes and masks. I honestly thought I had been abducted by aliens! I thought I’d been taken and was being examined and compromised. The reality was a little less Area 51 . . . They’d had to put me there to reduce my core temperature because it was so high. The headaches were incredible, so painful, but, hey, I got sixth place.

  Six reliability retirements and four accidents meant that on track my last season at Lotus was only modestly successful. My highest points tally, 13, and a top-ten finish in the championship helped. I never finished higher than that year’s ninth place in the World Championship for Lotus and, I’m not going to lie, it was often a struggle with the cars. However, those formative years in my F1 career were at times completely wonderful. I’d had the absolute privilege of working with, and getting to know, the legendary Colin Chapman. I had made my start in Formula 1 and thereafter progressed to a point where I was becoming a serious force to be reckoned with. Yes, towards the end, when Colin was sadly no longer with us, it wasn’t so nice, but my main memories are of being around Colin and the fantastic people in the Lotus team. What a privilege.

  By August, it was announced that Ayrton Senna was coming to Lotus and my time with Colin’s team was drawing to a close. If I hadn’t found a competitive drive I think I would have retired; right from the early days I felt there was no point in making up the numbers. Happily, there were some interesting offers on the table for me and, despite some frustrating delays when I had to tell Frank Williams that I was walking away because I was tired of waiting for his decision, it was eventually announced that I had signed a contract to race for his Williams team from 1985. I felt very optimistic about driving for Frank’s brilliant team, which had won the World Championship twice in the last four years, although their more recent win ratio per season was relatively modest. Nonetheless, Frank and his chief designer, Patrick Head, were exemplary and proven winners. My good friends Peter Collins and Peter Windsor were also at the team and it felt very exciting indeed. My mission to win the Formula 1 world title was still on.

  CHAPTER 8

  1985 SEASON, WILLIAMS AND THE TURBO YEARS

  My first few days at Williams were extremely exciting. Frank and Patrick made it clear they were looking forward to working with someone with my engineering background; the car I would be driving appeared to be a significant improvement on the previous season’s Williams; and the team was in its second year of a very encouraging partnership with Honda, so I sensed I would have an impressively powerful engine behind me.

  My team-mate at Williams was the 1982 world champion Keke Rosberg. We had a stuttering start but soon became good friends, and I admire the man hugely. Before I arrived, he had heard some negative stories about me from various people in the pit lane, including one particular person at Lotus, so he came to his relationship with me at Williams with a good deal of trepidation. In fact, that is something of an understatement, because he’d actually threatened to leave the team if I was signed. Frank had been unmoved and signed me anyway. However, after a couple of races and some tests, Keke came up to me and said, ‘I am really sorry I believed the bullshit they said about you – you are fantastic to work with.’ I really admired him for that.

  I am extremely fond of Keke. He was an old-school racer, a man’s man, a thoroughbred. He’d have a drink and a cigarette, he spoke his mind, he was a straight shooter. He was really funny and entertaining too, plus he didn’t suffer fools easily and we got on really well. There wasn’t anything that rankled with me and Keke.

  I would also say I learned a fair amount from driving with Keke, which sadly only lasted that one year, my first sea
son with Williams in 1985, after which Keke joined McLaren. In racing terms, he was a thoroughbred, a true champion with dignity and talent. In my opinion, he was an understated world champion because he had great car control and pure, unbridled ability. I thoroughly enjoyed my all-too-brief time with him as my team-mate at Williams.

  One time racing for Williams in Monaco I came out of the tunnel backwards – never a good racing line – and then went on to complete a very quick practice time. Afterwards, Keke came up to me and said, ‘Are you okay, Nigel?’

  ‘Yeah, fine, Keke. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Don’t you remember what happened?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You spun in the tunnel . . .’

  ‘Oh, that, yeah . . .’

  ‘I was behind you! I was waiting for bits to come off the car. You frightened the shit out of me!’

  Keke used to give some fantastic backhanded compliments too! Another time, I’d done a really fast lap when, back in the pits, Keke approached me and said, ‘I know now how you managed to do that lap time.’

  ‘Really?’ I was intrigued to know this former world champion’s expert opinion: had he seen something about my racing lines, my braking points, my cornering, what? ‘Why’s that then, Keke?’

  ‘It’s because you’re effing mad!’

  I’ve mentioned the astonishing performance benefit of the turbo car when I first tried the new Lotus in 1983, but my fondest memories of the turbo era are at Williams. A modern Formula 1 car produces in the region of 750–800bhp. In a car that typically might only weigh around 550kg, that is staggering and the subsequent performance is savage. Back between 1977 and 1988, Formula 1 enjoyed its first turbo era. For me personally, this was my favourite period in which to race. We had cars in qualifying that were producing over 1350bhp! That’s about 500bhp more than current F1 cars. Five hundred! That’s like adding the might of a Ferrari F40 engine on top of what you already have (one BMW qualifying engine even hit 1500bhp). I loved those cars and consider them to be the grand stallions in the history of F1.

  The golden years of that turbo era for me were the mid-1980s, particularly 1986 and 1987. My favourite turbo car was FW11B in 1987. The rate of development of this technology and these cars at Williams was simply astounding; they just kept relentlessly pushing forward. The work rate was unbelievable to watch.

  For example, in 1985 we had so many different engine evolutions, you almost lost track. They experimented with different size turbos – big turbos for fast circuits with the long straights, smaller turbos, quicker response turbos, they were all over it. Williams and Honda together was such a dynamic team. It was mesmerising how the engineers and the team developed the turbos from virtually nothing into these astonishing power units in such short periods of time.

  For us drivers it was just so exciting. You could get wheel spin in sixth gear with no traction control and a fully manual gearbox – you certainly had to drive the car! The surge of power when the turbos kicked in was breathtaking, I absolutely loved it. Mind you, learning how turbos operated was a bit of a knife-edge way to make a living, let me tell you, because those very early examples were utilising technology that was in its infancy, and that meant there were issues. Most obviously and crucially, the turbo lag – the time between putting your foot on the throttle and the response of the turbos in terms of injecting more power into the engine – was unpredictable and really quite slow at first. Then, after this uncertain delay, when the turbo did finally kick in, you had to hang on pretty tight! It was exciting because you never knew when the power was going to come in.

  You would go like stink down a straight, then when you got to a corner you’d have to put the throttle down one or two seconds before you actually wanted the power to be available, to allow for the turbo lag. You had to learn to gauge that delay, but to be honest in those early engines it was essentially guesswork. An educated guess based on testing and race experience, of course, but guesswork nonetheless.

  In 1985, we started off at the beginning of the year with a turbo that might just as well have been an on-off switch, it was all or nothing. When the turbo was off, the car wouldn’t turn into the corner and when it was on the car was viciously trying to spin. We almost had to go to psychiatric units for tranquillisers the day before we’d have to drive the car . . . and that was in the dry! If it was in the wet, it was suicidal. We had so much power that we had to have barn doors on the back of the cars; we couldn’t get big enough wings on them to try to restrain the power. If anyone had done the aerodynamics perfectly, I think we’d have been doing 300mph down the straights. It is insane the amount of power we had.

  One of the worst and in some ways most embarrassing accidents I’ve ever had in Formula 1 happened in Estoril in 1985 on the parade lap. I’d already ended up in a guardrail through no fault of mine in first qualifying, when Eddie Cheever’s car bounced off Riccardo Patrese’s Alfa Romeo and into me. Thanks to the amazing efforts of my mechanics and team, the car was repaired in time and so I was looking forward to the race.

  On race day, it was raining but conditions were fair. I developed a misfire and then when I called for the power from the turbo nothing happened, so I took my foot off. However, as I did, the power suddenly came in for a few seconds, put me into a huge spin and I smashed into the barriers. Basically I didn’t have any control over the car at all. When that happened, you really weren’t driving; you were just sitting in the car watching what was going to happen. I limped into the pits and, not surprisingly, the whole front geometry and wishbone had to be changed, which was a huge amount of work to be done in a very short space of time. Consequently, I had to start from the pit lane. It was my first year with Williams and only my second race, so this was not a great way to impress your team bosses. I was actually really concerned that I was going to lose my drive. This was coming off the back of two years of a very negative atmosphere at Lotus. However, in very sharp contrast, after I span off in Portugal, Frank, Patrick and all the team were fantastically supportive and it all felt so very energising, inspiring even.

  I’d had to start from the pit lane but I managed to haul myself up to fifth, which was a great recovery. Ayrton won, his first ever grand prix victory. During the race, Keke was coming out of a fast right-hander in fifth gear when the car did the same to him – the turbos slammed in unexpectedly, put him into a spin and threw him into the guardrail, breaking a bone in his hand in the process. He was so upset and cross. I have to admit, I was gutted for Keke but, from a self-preservation point of view, at least it made the point that if this hugely talented former world champion could be thrown off track in that way, then at least it wasn’t just me. When I saw Keke in the pits afterwards he was really frustrated, as were the team of course, so I tried to cheer him up by saying, ‘At least you came off in the race!’

  I will say it again, I loved the turbo era. As a racer, it held my attention all the time; it was very demanding and at times dangerous, but always hugely exhilarating. The turbo cars were what I would call an old-school man’s car. A boy could not drive these cars, especially with the lack of driver aids and electronics, heavy manual gears and so on. This was about as physical as you could get in terms of driving an F1 car.

  It wasn’t just the physicality of the turbo cars that demanded you were on top of your game. There were so many subtleties too. If you called for power and changed gear at the wrong time, you’d basically blow the gearbox up! If you changed down too much, you’d mechanically over-rev and blow the engine up! Each driver’s hands-on management of the engine and gearbox was so crucial to a turbo car’s health, and by definition its performance and therefore likely success in the race. There were no wheel sensors, nothing like that, so the individual drivers had to do everything right. They had to have a real skill and understanding of how to drive those cars, and that’s what I found so utterly fascinating.

  There were other less obvious downsides to these turbo monsters. For example, in my days using a Renault V10,
if those engines were only slightly out of balance, the vibrations used to make me cough almost uncontrollably. The vibration of the car was at a very specific frequency that coincidentally made me cough constantly. This was not a phenomenon exclusive to me, but when you are doing 200mph in a 1350bhp car and competing against the best drivers in the world, constantly coughing isn’t an ideal ticket. One particular V10 was so bad they had to change the engine. I said, ‘I can’t drive it, really sorry.’

  During that classic turbo era, there were three or four seasons when it was just sensational. Evolutions came along seemingly every week; cars that had 1350bhp melted your brain with their ferocity and power, and the races were so physical, so draining, yet so fabulously exciting to be a part of. It was exhausting and yet life-affirming, astonishing and frightening all at the same time.

  Turbos were eventually banned in 1989 because of new regulations. Fast-forward to 2014 and turbos were reintroduced, but there isn’t really any obvious comparison. The motivation back then was to go faster, to wring more performance and brutal speed out of the cars. However, in the new millennium, priorities have changed, on a global scale as well as within the context of Formula 1. The sport is quite rightly trying to reflect that change of emphasis and remain current or, indeed, strive to be pioneering. So the new turbo era is mostly driven by a need for efficiency and fuel economy.

  I am fortunate enough to have seen some of this new generation of turbo engines up close and personal and they really are incredible works of art – compact, beautifully designed; the whole package is so clever, on a whole different level. I take my hat off to the engineers and designers. There’s hardly any turbo lag at all now and there are all sorts of clever bits of engineering to keep the turbo spinning and operating at optimum performance. It’s very clever stuff. The most astonishing thing is that in the space of a single season’s regulation change, engines were developed that are capable of the same performance as the year before but on a third less fuel. That is amazing. There is no point criticising the new turbos; you have to embrace the technology and go forward, while all the time doffing your cap to the brains behind these remarkable engines.