Mansell: My Autobiography

Rosanne went back to Birmingham, because she had to go to work the next day. I think that the shock hit her quite badly. She was tired and despondent. We had been burning the candle at both ends to support ourselves and now we were left wondering whether it was all worth it.

I hated being so far away from her and the rest of my family. The hospital was in Kent, over 200 miles away from my home. I felt isolated and depressed. I couldn’t wait to get out of there and get home. After a few days, I tried sitting up and the following day I told one of the nurses that the doctor had said I could walk to the toilet if I felt strong enough. He hadn’t said anything of the sort, of course, but I wanted to speed up my release from the hospital. The short walk to the toilet and back took nearly an hour. I was roasted by the doctor when he found out. He said that I should be flat on my back for several months, not walking around. Didn’t I understand how serious an injury I had?

The walk to the toilet had been like rolling in broken glass, but it gave me the confidence to discharge myself, much to the dismay of the specialists. I’d had enough of lying around in the doldrums, I wanted to get going again. I was in a position to win the Formula Ford Championship and I couldn’t do it from a hospital bed.

Back home again, things didn’t look too bright. With me having quit my job a few weeks before, we had only Rosanne’s salary to live on. The situation only served to harden our resolve. The accident had been a setback for sure, but we were not going to let it get in the way of our objective. As the weeks passed I took longer and longer walks every day and gradually my neck began to feel better. Seven weeks after the accident I was back in a racing car.

I had missed a few rounds of the championship and had dropped a few points behind the leaders, but I managed to pick up the pace when I returned and soon began winning again, although in my first race back I had a bit of a scare. On the second lap I took off over the back of another car and flew through the air for a short distance. Luckily I got away with it.

As the season wound to a close I was back in contention for the title. My main rivals were Trevor van Rooyen and Chico Serra, the much fancied new Brazilian driver. Both had well-funded teams and plenty of equipment. Van Rooyen always seemed to have a few more horsepower than the rest of us and although everyone suspected that he had something special in his engine we could never prove it. Before the last race at Thruxton, which would decide who was champion, John Thornburn asked the stewards to announce that they would seal the engines of the top four finishers after the race and take them away to be checked. They agreed.

To win the championship I needed to get pole position, win the race and get the extra point for fastest lap. It was a tall order. Luckily van Rooyen didn’t seem to have any advantage on the straights that day and through qualifying and the race I was able to pick off my objectives one by one. I started from pole. It was a very close race, but my determination saw me to victory and I became 1977 Formula Ford Champion.

It was hard to believe that only a few months before I had been flat on my back with doctors giving me little chance of racing again that season. It was not the first adversity I had encountered in my racing career and it certainly wouldn’t be the last, but I had overcome it. I had set myself an objective and achieved it, which was immensely satisfying. In all I had competed in 42 races that year and won 33 of them. I felt that I had proved something to the people in the business who were watching. Rosanne and I allowed ourselves a little time to enjoy the satisfaction before turning our attention to the next step.

I wanted to drive in Formula 3, so I became a window cleaner and then we sold our house.

It is hard to imagine, looking at all the rewards I have around me now, that I was once a homeless window cleaner. I didn’t have to do it, no-one was forcing me, but racing will make you do some crazy things once you get hooked.

Although I had a firm offer on the table for a well-funded works drive in Formula Ford for 1978, I knew that I had to move forward into Formula 3. That was the stage on which true talent was often recognised and I was confident that, given a fair shot in a decent car, I would be spotted by a Formula 1 team owner. The problem was that the stakes were much higher in Formula 3. It would cost several times my old salary just to compete for a season and I didn’t have access to that kind of money.

I took a job with my friend Peter Wall, who had an office cleaning business. I did a little administrative work, but mostly I cleaned offices after the workers had gone home for the night. My speciality was window cleaning. It was actually great fun and quite satisfying when you saw the sunlight gleaming off a freshly cleaned window. The only problem was that the business was based down in Cirencester, some two hours drive from home, so I often had to stay at Peter’s house overnight, away from Rosanne.

I spent the rest of that winter looking for sponsors to help foot the bill for my move into Formula 3. Despite sending hundreds of letters I got nowhere. It was a fruitless search and although I learned a lot from it, I was still no closer to a Formula 3 drive and the 1978 season was approaching fast. So that’s when we did what any right thinking people would do under the circumstances – we sold our house.

It was a tough decision, but as we could see no other way of raising the money we were left with no alternative. Rosanne was still working long hours as a demonstrator for the gas board and her salary supported us as we moved into rented accommodation. It was sad to let our place go as we had been happy there, but we both knew that it was the right thing to do.

We raised £6000 from the sale of the house and added another £2000 from the sale of some personal items. We were staking everything we had. I took the money to March, who had promised to help me if I could get enough cash together to start the season. They were confident that they would pick up enough backing along the way to mount a challenge.

The season started well. I was on pole position for the first race and came through to finish second behind Nelson Piquet. Little did we realise at the time that our careers would become closely linked in years to come.

On race morning I was practising standing starts on the Club straight when I was approached by two people. One of them I recognised as Peter Windsor, an Australian journalist working at the time for Autocar magazine. Peter introduced the other man to me as Peter Collins, another Australian, who had a job at Ralt cars, but who was soon headed for the Lotus Formula 1 team as assistant team manager. We chatted for a while and I think that they were both impressed by my single-mindedness. They told me years later that they had never encountered anyone at that stage of his career who had such a clear focus on where he wanted to get to. We hit it off immediately and they said they would keep an eye on my progress. It was to prove one of the most important meetings of my life so far.

The Silverstone race was an encouraging start, but after that, things went downhill fast. It was a very poor car and although I’d been able to hustle it around Silverstone for that first race, I couldn’t get it going quickly anywhere else. March blamed me. I knew that it wasn’t me who was at fault. I did four more races and picked up some minor placings but all too soon I was told that the money had run out. They had found no backing, so that was it. End of season. Close the door on your way out.

Rosanne and I were devastated. We had blown everything in six weeks and there was nothing left. We had hit rock bottom.

John Thornburn, Nigel’s team manager in Formula Ford: ‘Alan McKechnie and I had decided to take a break from motor racing after a bad experience with a sponsor. Then Nigel showed up. When I realised that he was winning races with a car which we knew had a twisted chassis, I decided to go and have a look at him racing. I went down to Thruxton and stood on a couple of corners and it was obvious that he was very special. He was bearing everybody in an old nail of a car. So we decided to help. We used to turn up with the McKechnie Wine Company van with the race car on a trailer behind it and he’d go out and beat the pants off all these kids in state-of-the-art cars with huge transporters. It was brilliant.’

Peter Windsor, journalist on Autocar magazine: ‘Nigel is unbelievably competitive and always had this incredible desire to succeed. When I first met him he was running ten miles a day in army boots and firing off five letters a day to sponsors. He had total commitment and talent. To my mind there was no way that the guy would fail to make it. He was always looking forward. I covered Formula 1 for Autocar and Nigel used to ask me lots of questions about how Grand Prix drivers operated, how they travelled, whether they had managers and so on. Then he’d say something like, “I’m going to be winning Grand Prix races soon and I’ll have a house in Spain. “It wasn’t a romantic notion, it was the way he wanted to live.’

7

ROSANNE

Nineteen-seventy-eight was without doubt the worst year of my life and by far the lowest time in my racing career. I had been given a lot of false promises and told I would get a lot of support and help which wasn’t forthcoming. I was bitter about it, but there was nothing I could do. In many ways the frustration was the worst part; I felt as though I was powerless to stem the flow of disasters and body blows. I wanted to take control of the situation, but I couldn’t see a way forward for my career. We needed money before we could begin to look for any solutions.

Rosanne had been the bread-winner ever since I had turned professional the year before and now I had to lean on her even more. She had a very good job and she put in all the hours that God sent. Although a lot of my time was spent looking for drives and for sponsors to pay for them, I carried on working for Peter Wall down in Cirencester, so Rosanne and I were forced to spend time apart, which put a strain on our marriage.

Although we were both very committed to getting on with what we had decided to do, namely my racing career, the awfulness of our situation began to put that commitment into question. When we were together we talked long into the night about the future. Should we abandon our plans? Should I forget about trying to be the Formula 1 World Champion and go back to engineering or should we stick to our guns, tough it out and hope that someone, somewhere would give us a break soon?

We reminded ourselves that what we were trying to do was something you can only do when you are young. We knew that eventually we would want to have children and so we needed to make the most of the opportunities now. In most jobs, you go to your office or place of work each day, do your job and if you like it and the company is happy with your work, you can do that job up until the day you retire. Before I left Lucas I would occasionally thumb through the magazine which the company sent out to all its employees. There were always photographs of people who were celebrating their retirement after years of faithful service. Sometimes the magazine would honour an old gentleman who had been with the company for 40 years. I used to look at the faces of these people and wondered how they could spend almost half a century doing the same job.

They had made their choices of what they wanted to do with their lives and, with Rosanne’s support, I had made mine. Motor racing was calling us and we knew that although we had hit rock bottom, if we didn’t dedicate ourselves even more at this time to what we believed we could do, then all the money we had lost and all the sacrifices we had made would be for nothing. It would just be a bad memory for the rest of our lives. I have never wanted the word ‘regret’ to be part of my vocabulary.

I know how competitive I am and could see that if I stopped racing now I would carry a chip on my shoulder about it for the rest of my life. We turned the situation around by looking at it in a different way. We drew positive lessons from the negative experiences we had suffered. The disasters and the knocks spurred us on to succeed and made us all the more determined not to give up.

I’m sure that there are a lot of people who, if placed in the same situation, would have given up. They would probably have stayed low for years and would have carried that bitterness and sadness through the rest of their lives. But in Rosanne I had a pillar of strength and together we managed to turn things around.

Unfortunately, renewing our commitment to racing did not put food in our mouths. This was a lean time financially. We had only Rosanne’s salary plus the few quid a week that I earned from my office cleaning sorties to Cirencester. We were caught in a trap. We had only enough money to live on and to pay the bills on our rented apartment. We so badly wanted to take a holiday or just go out for a night to cheer ourselves up, but we couldn’t afford to do anything. In the early days of our marriage, before most of the funds were channelled into racing, we used to take holidays abroad. That was out of the question now.

There was maybe an afternoon or a week during this period where we had a great time, but it was so infrequent that you almost couldn’t remember it. And usually it was something which was free, like going swimming in a lake. We had sold almost everything so we didn’t have any possessions we could enjoy. We used to spend a lot of time walking my parents’ dog on a great big park called Umberslade. We would walk for hours, chatting and playing with the dog. It became a big part of our routine because it didn’t cost anything and we could spend some quality time together relaxing, away from people and the pressures of the telephone and life in general.

Rosanne was so strong. She was just as committed to my racing career as I was, even though she had no family background in racing and had only become aware of it properly when she met me. She did not regard my goal of winning the World Championship as a pipe dream, as I’m sure many wives would have done under the circumstances. She believed in my talent and she knew as well as I did that if I could just get one decent shot at it, I would make good. We had only been married for three years, but she gave me all the support a man could reasonably ask of his wife and far more besides. It makes us appreciate what we have now all the more, because we have not forgotten those times when we had nothing.

Rosanne came into my life when I was seventeen. She is a year younger than me and we were both students at Solihull Technical College near Birmingham. Although we were not in any of the same classes, I had seen her around the college and she had really caught my eye. She looked bright, confident and strong and I knew that I wanted to meet her.

My chance came one morning while I was driving to college. I had passed my driving test and bought a second-hand Mini van. I saw her walking along the road, so I pulled over.

‘Hey, you’re going to the college, aren’t you? Do you want a lift?’

She hopped straight into the car. She told me later that she only did that because she thought I was somebody else – a neighbour of hers – and that if she had realised it was a total stranger offering her a lift she would never have got in. As she has said since, ‘It’s funny how things happen in life, isn’t it?’

It was only a short drive and we talked in general terms about this and that, but she made a major impression on me. We ran into each other more and more frequently at the college and before long we started going out together. It was a good relationship from the start and we made sure that we saw each other every day.

She was the youngest of three children from a loving family. She knew nothing about motor racing when I met her. Her brother watched the occasional Grand Prix on television, but didn’t consider himself a fan.

I introduced her to karting and I think she could see immediately how important it was to me. What impressed me about her was how willing she was to muck in. Although I took her on some exciting nights out, we also had plenty of long nights in working on the kart and she became quite handy with the sandpaper and the plug spanner. She always used to stick around and help me and we developed a deep bond. Although karting was thrust upon her and she much preferred horse riding, she was behind me from the start and came to almost every race with my family.

Then came the Morecambe accident and she began to see the other side of racing. She was always nervous about watching me race – she is to this day – but Morecambe gave her a nasty shock. She was there when the priest gave me the last rites. She had never seen anything like that before, let alone when someone she cared for was the victim. It was her first experience of the dangers which motor sport can bring. It was a worrying time for her and, being fairly young at the time, she found that she was having to be very mature when dealing with a different side of life.

She could have tried to persuade me to stop after that, I’m sure many girlfriends would have done, but she could see how much it mattered to me and I suppose she could also see that my competitive instinct would always need an outlet. If it wasn’t karting it would have been something else.

As well as being highly competitive, I have always been very aggressive and very physical. As I matured as a racing driver I channelled these characteristics into positive aspects of my driving, but before I met Rosanne I used to like raising hell with my male friends.

I don’t scare easily and I was never afraid to get into something with someone bigger than me. Having said that I was pretty large myself at that time. As we all know, beer is very fattening and by indulging my taste for it my weight shot up to almost 200lbs, which is a lot for a man of 5ft 10in. It was all pretty pointless, but when you’re a teenage male there is always pressure to be tough and to look after yourself. We used to dare each other to do daft things like jump off motor bikes at 30mph. That escapade landed one of my friends in hospital.

Rosanne was always a cut above all of that and I did not want her to get involved with that group of friends. In the early days of our relationship I would enjoy a civilised evening with her and then after I dropped her off I would go out again and hit the town with my friends. Gradually I changed, broadened my horizons and took more of an interest in the things which interested her. We would go on day trips in the car with a picnic, or visit stately homes and art galleries. She was really into horse riding, so I went along with her on rides. We enjoyed each other’s company so much that it became second nature to me to want to do these things. After all it was only fair; she supported my karting and helped me work on the karts. We were happy and very much in love.

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