Mansell: My Autobiography

When you first drive a Grand Prix car, everything happens so quickly that you can sometimes frighten yourself. Once you’ve had some experience of racing at these speeds you can get into pretty much any racing car and go quickly, provided that you’re comfortable with the car of course. The more time you spend in the car the more in tune you become with the speeds involved.

Sometimes unexpected things happen incredibly quickly and you just have to rely on instincts to see you through. A good example of this is the incident which occurred when I was with Ferrari at Imola in 1990, when Gerhard Berger in the McLaren pushed me onto the grass at the Villeneuve Curve. That was an incredible moment. It was a split second decision as I travelled backwards at nearly 200mph whether to put it into a spin or whether to try and catch it. I took the first option and managed to bring the nose around the right way and kept on going. Although I cannot say that I saw the direction I was pointing throughout the two full revolutions the car made, I was aware through instincts of exactly where I was going the whole time. The result was a spectacular looking double spin and I kept on going. I probably only lost about 40mph in the spin. Because the adrenalin was pumping so hard after it, I broke the lap record on the next lap.

At times like that you’ve got to be a bit careful. Your heartbeat gets up to 150-200 beats per minute. You don’t think about it, but it is very important that you breathe properly, because you are on the verge of hyperventilating at that pulse level. It is vital that you understand your body and that you manage it as much as you do the car.

DRIVING ON THE LIMIT

Everybody has different limits, that’s one of the things which differentiates good amateur drivers from great professional drivers. Most top Grand Prix drivers will go beyond their limits at some time in their career and a few really top ones are able to go beyond their limit, if the occasion demands, for a period of time. Ayrton Senna talked after qualifying at Monaco in 1988 of going into a sort of trance, where he was lapping beyond his limit, treading into unknown territory. He stopped after three laps because he frightened himself. While I would not describe the feeling as being like a trance, I have had a similar experience several times, most notably at Silverstone in 1987, when I caught and passed Nelson Piquet after 29 laps of totally committed driving. This experience of mesmerising speed is described in detail later in the book. More usually that feeling comes when you commit every ounce of your strength and determination on a qualifying lap.

When you go for the big one in qualifying, you give it everything you’ve got and on certain corners you over-commit. Now this is where the judgment comes in because if you over-commit too much then you won’t come out of the corner the other side. You enter the corner at a higher speed than on previous occasions and if you are able to carry that speed through the corner you will exit quicker than before. You can’t do it consistently because the car won’t allow it and something will inevitably give. Of course you have to feel comfortable with the car. If it’s bucking around all over the place and is unstable even at medium speed through a corner then you would be a fool to go in 20mph faster next time round.

Provided that the car is doing more or less what you want it to, you can hustle it around on one or two really quick laps. It then comes down to your own level of commitment and that depends on so many factors. Some drivers become less committed after they have children, others lose the edge after a major accident, others will become more committed when it’s time to sign a new contract for next year!

Mental discipline plays a huge part in driving on the limit. A top athlete in any sport must be able to close his mind completely to extraneous thoughts and niggling doubts and concentrate 100%. If you want to be a champion, you need to be able to focus completely on the job in hand to the exclusion of everything else going on around you. Your brain must have a switch in it so that the minute you need to concentrate, your mind is right there and ready to go. I have been able throughout my career to give a consistently high level of commitment and even my harshest critics would admit that there are few more committed or focused drivers than me.

It’s a personal thing. You have to be true to yourself and if I thought that I had lost my edge I would stop racing immediately. I am interested only in success and winning races and if my brain and body did not allow me to be completely committed I would know that I was wasting my time. The moment I feel that, I will retire on the spot.

You can only do what your brain and your body will allow you to do. For example, in qualifying for the British Grand Prix in 1992, the telemetry showed that I was taking Copse Corner 25mph faster than my team-mate Riccardo Patrese, using the same Williams-Renault FW14B. In fact over a whole lap I was almost two seconds faster than him. As we sat debriefing after the session, Riccardo looked at the printouts and said that he could see how I was taking Copse at that speed, but that he couldn’t bring himself to do it. His brain was telling his body, ‘If we go in that fast, we’ll never come out the other side.’

Every really hot qualifying lap relies on the brain and body being in harmony and prepared, at certain key points, to push the envelope, to over-extend. That is the only way you are going to beat the Rosbergs, Piquets, Sennas and Schumachers of this world. It goes without saying that once you operate at that level, your self-belief must be absolute.

In all my career I have done maybe 10 perfect laps. One of the ones I savour the most was at Monaco in 1987. To do any kind of perfect lap is special, but when you do it at Monaco that’s as good as it gets. When you run the film of the lap through your mind afterwards and you examine every gearchange, every braking point, every turn-in and how you took every corner and at the end of it you say ‘I could not have done that faster’, that’s when you know you have done a perfect lap. You don’t need to go out and try to do better. When you get a lap like that you don’t even need to look at the stopwatch on your dashboard or read the pit boards. You know it’s quick.

When I came back into the pits David Brown, my engineer and a man who would become one of my closest allies in racing, pointed out that the white Goodyear logos had been rubbed off the walls of the rear tyres where I had brushed the barriers! You have to skim the barriers at a couple of points when you’re flying at Monaco, it’s the only way to be really quick. It sounds frightening, but it’s supremely exhilarating. I never feel more alive on any race track than I do on the streets of Monaco. Everything has to be synchronised and you need to have fantastic rhythm as well as aggression and a truckload of commitment to be fast there. I have always enjoyed the challenge, but I think also that the romantic in me responds to the idea of going well at this most celebrated of Grands Prix.

Generally speaking, although qualifying is important, merely lapping quickly, in other words driving fast, is not what turns me on the most. Competition is the most important thing and driving flat out against someone else with victory as the end result is my idea of heaven. Nevertheless, when you get a perfect lap in qualifying it feels absolutely marvellous. When I got out of the car at Monaco and looked at the white smears on the walls of the tyres where the manufacturer’s logo had been wiped off, it even impressed me. There are no long straights at Monaco, it’s all short chutes, but coming out of the tunnel I was clocked at 196mph, a full 17mph faster than Prost in the McLaren. I was six tenths faster than Senna and 1.7s faster than my team-mate Nelson Piquet and I had done not just one, but three laps which were good enough for pole!

From the point of view of a race, it’s not a major psychological advantage over your rival to get pole position. Anybody can get pole position if they have an exceptional lap in the right equipment. The key is to prove that you have the ability to do it time and again. It’s not one thing that gets you pole position, it’s a package of things, but you do have to put together the perfect lap and to show that you can do it more than anyone else. I am very competitive and I approach qualifying and racing at the same level.

Some top drivers believe that the race is the most important thing and that their position on the grid does not matter too much. Double IndyCar champion Al Unser Jr is like this, as to some extent was Alain Prost. They would concentrate on getting the set-up of the car absolutely perfect for the race and not over-extend themselves in qualifying. On one level you can see their point and I have done that a couple of times myself, notably at Hungary in 1989. It is the race after all which carries the points, but I have always believed that it is important to be quick and to show that you are strong throughout the weekend. Of course on certain tracks, like Monaco, there is a benefit to being at the front because it is hard to pass in the race.

Sometimes, as happened to me a great deal in the early part of my career, if your car is not up to scratch you are forced to make up the difference yourself. You do not want to be blown off in a bigger way than you have to be. So you delve deep into your reserves of commitment. You have to squeeze the maximum out of your car and out of yourself and whatever that yields is the absolute fastest that it is possible to go with the equipment. You can then go away satisfied in the knowledge that you’ve done the best job you can possibly do. Hopefully, if you are working your way up the ladder despite struggling with inferior equipment, the people who run the top teams will pay attention to you and maybe give you an opportunity in a good car.

It is also very important to be on the limit when testing a car because if you don’t know what a car is going to do when you are on the limit, then you’ll be in trouble when you race it. Anyone can drive at nine-tenths all day, but unless you understand what the car will do at ten-tenths and even occasionally eleven-tenths, then you are not being true to yourself, your car or your team.

When you are testing a car and you are not on the limit, you can make a change which might feel better to you, but which does not show on the stopwatch. If you then say, ‘No, it feels better like that, it’s only slow because I wasn’t pushing it,’ then you might subsequently find that the car won’t work on the limit and in fact you’ve made it go slower by making the change. If you find that out during a race, you’re in big trouble.

Sometimes making a car feel better doesn’t make it quicker, and the name of the game in motor racing is to shave as many fractions of seconds off your lap time as possible and then to be able to lap consistently at your optimum speed. It’s an uncomfortable truth for some, but the only thing that tells you that is the stopwatch.

Motor racing is in general, I think, the art of balancing risk against the instinct of self-preservation, while keeping everything under control. People can only aspire to great endeavours if they believe in their hearts that they can achieve their goals – and to my mind that’s the difference between courage and stupidity.

Courage is calculating risks; when someone sets an objective, realises how dangerous it is, but then does it anyway, fully in control. They have to fight with their feelings and hopefully are honest with themselves when facing up to the dangers inherent in what they are doing. Then there are others who aren’t really in control.

STARTING A RACE

The start of a Grand Prix is a very dramatic moment and there is a lot of chaos and confusion going on around you. But the most important thing you have to think about is your own start and making sure that you get away as well as you can. The first couple of corners in a Grand Prix can make a huge difference to the result. If you have pole position and you get a good clean start, you can open out a lead over the field, because they are jockeying for position behind you. Also it goes without saying that if it’s wet and the cars are kicking up huge plumes of spray, there is only one place to be!

It’s very important at the start to have mental profiles of each of the drivers around you, to know who’s fired up that weekend and who’s depressed, who’s trying to be a hero and who is desperate for a result. If there’s someone who has qualified way beyond expectations, then they will probably want to show that their position is justified so they are probably going to be dangerous. You need to know who is brainless, who is a cautious starter, and so on. You have to put all of this into your brain and let your instinct take you through. It’s like reading the greens on a golf course, or knowing about the going on a race course. It’s the finer points that matter.

Psychologically, the start is vital. In 1992 I had 14 pole positions and at the starts I went off like a rocket. I wasn’t holding anything back. I would open out as big a gap as I could as fast as I could. Sometimes I was two or three seconds clear at the end of the first lap. It was vital to dominate everybody, to intimidate everyone to the point where they knew who was going to win before the race even started. And it worked.

I was on a mission that year. No-one was going to beat me. I had psyched myself up throughout the winter and I was incensed when before the season started Patrick Head said when referring to the Williams drivers, ‘We’ll see who comes out better in 1992.’

That was an insult. My team-mate Riccardo Patrese was a great driver, but my credentials up to that point were a lot better and I had won three or four times as many races as him. What’s more, having spent years as the number two driver, I was finally number one. I was determined to crush everybody. I had to dominate the Williams team and I wanted everybody to know that I was number one. I also wanted Ayrton Senna, the only person whom I perceived as being a threat, to know that I was going to win the World Championship at the earliest possible time. The relentless pressure I applied through qualifying and then at the start helped to cement that idea in people’s minds.

Sometimes it can all go wrong at the start, as it did in Canada in 1982 when Didier Pironi stalled on the front row of the grid and Riccardo Paletti didn’t see him, hit him and was killed. I was one of the cars who had to dodge Pironi and there was no time to think about it, you just had to act. It’s the instinct of self-preservation. We all have this instinct because we don’t want to die. You know when you race a car that if you don’t do the right things at certain times, you could get killed or badly hurt. The start of a race is one of those times.

STRATEGY AND READING THE RACE

Peter Collins played a major role in helping me reach Formula 1 and he was my team manager for a few years at Lotus and Williams. I always used to laugh at him because he used to like to plan the race in minute detail beforehand and sometimes we would have ten different strategies in front of us. It was complete nonsense because usually something would happen that we hadn’t even considered. Before the start we used to study the grid and he would say, ‘What happens if he gets a good start and what if he gets a bad one?’ But whatever you tried to plan, it all used to change.

Niki Lauda was always a great planner, but what he thought about never occurred either, so he gave up wasting his brain power, relaxed and was ready for anything that came up.

That’s one of the strengths of my driving now. I don’t think about things too much. I’ve had so much experience and so many things programmed into my brain that I’m prepared for anything. When something crops up, you don’t have time to think about it anyway. If you try to think, you’ll be too slow in reacting. A mixture of instinct and experience tells your hands and your feet to position the car so that if something does happen, you’re in good shape. It takes years of experience to develop that ability. It just doesn’t occur by chance.

Once you are in the race, you can read what’s going on pretty well. You can control the race more in Formula 1 than you can in IndyCar racing. In IndyCar you rely on the team manager and the crew to call fuel strategies and the yellow flags can wreak havoc to your progress. You can win or lose a race because of yellow flags and that’s according to the rules. It’s a bit frustrating, but they are there for everybody, the fans and the television and the smaller teams. It can work for you and it can work against you. Does it level out? I’m not sure. I think I had a fair bit of luck in 1993, while in 1994 I had some bad breaks, but I’m happy that it worked out for me first time around.

Formula 1 is quite different. You win and lose a race out on the track. It’s a pure sprint and it’s very rare that a yellow flag or a pace car will intervene to deprive you of a win which you thought you had in the bag. You rely on pit signals and the radio link with the crew, but you can tell a lot from the cockpit about where the opposition is on the track.

OVERTAKING AND RACE CRAFT

The secret with overtaking is that you’ve got to be in total control of what you are doing before you set about passing other cars. If you are on the ragged edge just to keep your car at racing speed, then you are not going to be effective when trying to make up positions and compete with rivals. Some duels can last a long time and you need to be totally comfortable with your car before you can commit the mental and physical energy required to pass a Senna or a Prost on a race track.

When you come to pass someone, you first have to make sure that they know you’re there. Sometimes they do, but will pretend that they don’t and will try to block you or even put you off the track. It’s up to you to decide when and where to engage them in psychological combat.

You first put the ‘sucker move’ on them, showing them your nose and setting them up with moves through certain corners to make them think that this is where you are going to attack. You are saying to them, ‘This is the move which is going to come off,’ when in reality you know that it isn’t. You feint to one side and they think that this is your last-ditch attempt to come through, but it isn’t. You’ve got something else in mind.

You save up your best move and don’t give them any idea what it is or where it will come. Sometimes you only get one chance and winning a race depends on one proper effort. If it comes off you win, if it doesn’t you lose. But to have many attempts and to fail all the time, merely weakens your position. You must show that you intend to come through and in many cases you can psyche your opponent out before the fight begins. Some will say, ‘Oh God, it’s Mansell, I can’t possibly keep him behind me,’ because they’ve had experience of being beaten in the past. This does not work on the real aces however. You’ve got to do something special to pass them and you’ll probably only get one go.

This is one of the strongest areas of my driving and I haven’t had too much trouble in my career passing people, with one exception. Ayrton Senna stood out during my career as the toughest opponent. Our careers coincided and between 1985 and 1992 we both wanted to win the same Grands Prix. When we both had competitive equipment we knew that to win we would have to beat the other.

We had some fantastic scraps, although in the early days he was quite dangerous to race against. He was so determined to win that he would sometimes put both you and himself into a very dangerous situation. It was a shame he did this. He was so good he didn’t need to do it, but he so badly wanted to win.

Sometimes you over-estimate your opponent and this can have dire consequences. For example you might be lapping a back marker, thinking that he will react a certain way, the way you would react if you were in his shoes. If he reacts in a quite different way he might collide with you and then you’ve thrown away the race because you attributed a higher level of intelligence to a driver than he actually possesses. It is a far greater weakness, however, to under-estimate an opponent, for obvious reasons.

There is no doubt that at the pinnacle of the sport there are some very forceful competitors.

Mike Blanchet, a former competitor of Nigel’s in Formula 3 and now a senior manager at Lola Cars: ‘Nigel likes a car with a good turn-in. He likes a more nervous handling car, which would frighten most drivers. Most of them like a neutral car with a little understeer, which feels safer. Because of his reflexes and his physical upper body strength Nigel is able to carry a lot of speed into corners without losing control of the car. A lot of people would spin if they tried to take that much speed into a corner.’

Peter Windsor, a former Grand Prix editor of Autocar magazine and Nigel’s team manager at Williams in 1991/92: ‘Nigel drives a little like Stirling Moss used to. Moss always said, “Anyone can drive from the apex of a corner to the exit, it’s how you get into the apex that matters.” Nigel got a feel early on for turning in on the brakes, crushing the sidewall of the tyre and thereby getting more out of a tyre. From the outside he makes a car look superb and his technique is very exciting to watch. He gets on the power very early on the exit of the corner. If the track conditions change suddenly or unexpectedly then Nigel is more at risk than other drivers because he’s more committed early on and more blind than others.’

Derek Daly, driver, turned TV commentator: ‘Mansell’s style is an aggressive style more than an efficient one, but it’s very fast. He makes an early turn-in; he gets his business sorted out in the apex and gets out of the corner as soon as possible. The key to being quick is the time it takes from turning in to reaching the apex and then the momentum you carry through the apex and out the other side. That is an area of the track where a lot of people slow down too much. Mansell doesn’t do that. He goes to the apex as soon possible, carrying lots of speed, lots of momentum and gets on his way. It is an unusual style – he often uses different lines through corners, but always the same cornering principle.’

2

THE BEST OF RIVALS

When I first started in Grand Prix racing there were many top names involved, each of which will always strike a particular chord in the hearts of Formula 1 fans around the world: Niki Lauda, Jody Scheckter, Gilles Villeneuve, Didier Pironi, Nelson Piquet, Patrick Tambay, Alan Jones, Carlos Reutemann, Alain Prost, Elio de Angelis, Jacques Laffite, Keke Rosberg, to name but a few. A lot of those drivers were either World Champions at the time or became champions in the next few years. Thirteen of them had won Grands Prix. I was lucky to enter Formula 1 at a time when there were far more significant names around than there are today.

In the late eighties there were only four ‘aces’ – Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost, Nelson Piquet and myself. Into the nineties and by the end of the 1994 season, Prost had joined Piquet in retirement and Senna had tragically died, so it was down to three: myself and the emerging talents of Damon Hill and Michael Schumacher. The new breed of drivers have not been able to establish themselves yet, either in the record books or the public’s perception, and their reputations remain unproven.

The biggest thing for a driver is to gain worldwide recognition and respect and you only get that by doing the job for a number of years and getting the results. You need years of wins and strong placings to establish your name. No disrespect to any Grand Prix driver, but until you have won five and then ten and then fifteen and then twenty Grands Prix, you cannot be considered an ace.