Mansell: My Autobiography

Like my mother, I am very sensitive to what’s going on around me. I am renowned for being an incredible fighter, yet I have a soft side to my character. Nothing gives me more pleasure than to do something for a friend or a family member. Throughout my life I have found that many people seem to regard kindness as a weakness and will prey on that perceived weakness. It’s is a side of human nature that I will never understand. Kindness is fundamental to my nature. But if a tough decision has to be made, I can be as hard as nails. If I believe something is right I will go through a brick wall to make it happen.

I used to get up to quite a bit of mischief, as any young boy does, but I was always pretty responsible and early on I developed a clear set of beliefs and values. I learned to trust what I thought was right and wrong and to do what I thought was right for me. It became the code by which I have lived my life and according to which I have made every important decision.

Looking back, my formal education was totally inadequate at times, mainly because of the lack of continuity. But in another way it was marvellous, because I was constantly thrown in at the deep end with people and I learned more because I was up against it. I was always mechanically minded and when I went to technical college a lot of the work came as second nature to me. It was a question of applying myself and if I wanted to apply myself I did pretty well, whereas at school I did just enough to pass the exams.

After Hall Green Bilateral I moved again, to Hall Green College, where I stayed until I was 16. I got a couple of GCE O-levels and a few CSEs, then went to Solihull Technical College. I was 19 years old when I transferred to Matthew Bolton College in Birmingham to study engineering.

Although when I was young I had a lot of unpleasant problems to contend with in the playground and I struggled on the academic side, my athletic ability always kept me going. I became a good, disciplined athlete and my competitive spirit grew stronger and stronger throughout my school years. I loved to win and however steep the odds I never regarded any game as lost until the final whistle blew. I played hard at soccer, crunching into every tackle and chasing every ball. Even if we were playing a so-called ‘friendly’ match against another school, I felt it absolutely necessary to play to win. I was at my best when my team was a goal or two behind and we had to fight back. If we won after coming from behind the satisfaction was even greater than usual. I loved team sports. Although I also enjoyed solo sports like tennis, I was always a team player and I learned a lot of lessons from playing team sports which would stand me in good stead later in life.

I had a lot of fun playing sports. I remember one soccer match I had at college where I scored the winning goal completely by accident. I was running back from the goal, trying to slip away from the defender who was marking me. The ball was crossed into the middle, but I couldn’t see it because my marker was standing in the way. Suddenly the ball came through, hit me right in the face and flew into the goal. My team-mates seemed pretty impressed with my header. I had no idea what had hit me and I fell to the ground, so everybody thought it was a diving header and were even more impressed. In reality it was a total fluke, but the result was marvellous!

Some people have suggested that my fighter’s mentality was shaped by the fact that I come from Birmingham. They argue that because Birmingham is looked down upon by people in the more genteel South of England, its people have to fight harder for recognition. I think that’s a bit of a myth. I don’t believe that where you come from really matters. Although I am proud of my background, we have lived and travelled all over the world and my allegiance is to England rather than to any particular part of it.

My family and in particular my parents were very supportive of me as a child and my father backed my karting career. However, as will be explained in later chapters, they were not in favour of me pursuing a career as a professional racing driver. It caused a few problems for us initially, although they came around to my point of view in the end and we were reconciled. Their main objections to my chosen career were from the safety point of view as they didn’t want me to get hurt or killed, but also my father saw a terrible struggle ahead for me and he just wanted me to be happy and settled. Our family did not have the money that many aspiring racing driver’s families have and I think that my father felt frustrated at times that he was not in a position to do anything about it. He badly wanted to help, but he was inhibited financially. As a result I think he felt a bit out of place in the early days.

I persisted in my dogged pursuit of success in racing and when I made it into Formula 1 they were genuinely very happy for me. Unfortunately, my breakthrough into F1 with Lotus coincided with the awful news that my mother had terminal cancer.

She was a strong and marvellously brave lady through to the end, despite having to go through endless treatments of radiation therapy. I remember one time I took her to the hospital for her treatment and on the way home I had to stop three times for her to be sick. It was so upsetting. She was proud of me for getting into Fl, but all she ever saw of my F1 career was the struggle. Neither did she get the chance to see her grandchildren.

My mother was terribly ill for a few years before eventually succumbing in 1984. Sadly, the illness had a bad effect on my father. As happens often when one partner has a terminal illness, it does odd things to the one who survives. My father had a hard time dealing with the situation and handling life. He went off at a tangent and nobody within my family, including myself, could understand him any more. He remarried two years later to a woman 26 years his junior. It put a strain on the family and upset me terribly.

Then he became very ill and he died too. In the space of three years I had lost both of my parents. It was very hard. Rosanne lost her mother five years before I lost mine, so we have one last surviving parent between us. When I see people today who are ten years older than me and who still have both their parents, I think that they should be very proud of them and very happy.

Losing both my parents in that way was upsetting, but you have to be strong and realise that you have your own life to lead and you must make the most of it. My life has shown me many times that virtually nothing is ever certain. The only thing which is certain is that one day you are going to die. The day you are born is the day you start to die. Everyone has their allotted time and that will be made up of good times and bad times. It doesn’t matter who you are or how clever you are, you are going to age, gradually lose your health and fitness and eventually die. So when my parents were gone I said to myself, ‘Right I’ve got to get on with my life and make my own decisions, because I’m only young once and there is a lot to be done.’

Rosanne and I turned to each other and worked through it. Our marriage has gone through many ups and downs but we have a solid family unit. We had no parental advice or guidance about bringing up our three children and in the business we’re in that’s not been easy. Hopefully, it is possible to bring up normal children in this kind of environment. You only really know when they grow up into adults, but I feel that our three children are just like anybody else’s children. Certainly their father and mother think that they are exceptional. Rosanne and I are very close and the five of us are a tightly knit family. I wouldn’t swap that for the world. Our children dearly love us and we dearly love them.

I became a father for the first time in August 1984, half way through my final year at Lotus, when Rosanne gave birth to our daughter Chloe. It was a magical experience. The births of all three of my children are some of the most special moments I have ever had.

Becoming a father changed me considerably. Life is very blinkered at times. Ignorance is blissful. Fatherhood opened up a whole new aspect of life which I don’t think you can even begin to appreciate until you become a parent. You have a tremendous responsibility to this little child who can’t feed itself or look after itself or do anything for itself until it reaches a certain age. Even then it has to have great counselling and schooling from its parents.

Rosanne and I waited seven years after we were married before we had children. We wanted to make sure that we had all the necessary security before we brought a child into this world. Parenthood is a huge responsibility. The financial burdens it places on you are great. To bring children into the world when you can’t give them the basics and all the love they need, is totally irresponsible. All it does is create problems for everybody, not least yourself.

Without doubt my own experience of education has helped me to plan my children’s schooling and to make sure that where my education fell short, theirs would not. Like any father I want them to have all the things which I did not have. Away from school, they are also getting an education on life from following Rosanne and me around the world. Having seen the inside of the Grand Prix scene, they are more worldly wise and have a better understanding of the wider picture than most children and certainly more than Rosanne and I had at their age. Chloe, Leo and Greg are learning certain disciplines which I would have found very useful at their age. For example, they will all be karate exponents to at least black belt level before they are eighteen and I am sure that they will grow up to be self-reliant and self-disciplined. Helping them to get the right start in life is the least I can do for them.

My family is the the most important thing in my life and I would go through a brick wall to give them the environment they need to flourish and grow.

After all, it’s the way I was brought up.

PART TWO

THE GREASY POLE

‘I was told that with a name like Nigel Mansell I would never make it or amount to anything in life …’

5

LEARNING THE BASICS

My father was quite a keen member of the local kart racing scene and he encouraged me to take an interest. We went down to watch a meeting at the local kart track and I remember being drawn in by the spectacle of these little machines buzzing around the twisty track. Some were being driven with more enthusiasm than skill, others looked more purposeful. Watching them exit the corners you could see the difference in speed between the ones who were really trying and those who were just out for fun. I felt I understood quite a lot about it straight away and I couldn’t wait to get out there and see what I could do. I was hooked.

The great thing about kart racing in the late sixties and early seventies was that it was completely uncommercial. It was purely a family thing. The people involved were all very friendly and there was always a real community spirit about the local kart meetings. The whole family would turn out on a sunny Sunday afternoon, including mothers and sisters who would take turns to hold a spanner or cheer on their boy, when they weren’t doling out lemonade and egg sandwiches.

Money didn’t seem to make the difference between winning and losing back then. If your family was a bit better off than the next one you might have a few more engines or a couple more sets of tyres. But money wasn’t a decisive factor. You could always go out in whatever kart you had and if you won, you had the satisfaction of knowing that it was more due to your efforts than anything else. I found that very satisfying.

Our first kart was a pretty crude piece of equipment, powered by a lawnmower engine. We bought it secondhand at a cost of £25. It wasn’t up to much but I was terribly excited about it and spent as much of my spare time as possible driving it round dirt tracks in an allotment near where we lived. It wasn’t very fast, but the important thing was that it needed no pedalling and it was thrilling to press down my foot and increase the speed.

A few other children had similar machines and we used to race them whenever we could escape from the house and our school homework. Before long I could beat everyone around the allotment and I was ready to go into properly organised local competitions, like the one I had visited a few months before.

Although the minimum age for a licence was 11 years and I was barely ten, we managed to get around the problem and I got my first licence. I was ready to go racing and based on my form around the allotment I felt confident that I would win my first race with ease.

Not surprisingly that first race was something of an eye opener. My primitive kart was hopelessly outclassed by the other machines and I watched in dismay as the field streamed away from me down the straight in the preliminary heats. I had my foot to the floor but I was going nowhere fast. To add insult to injury my engine stopped and I had to pull off the road. I sat there wondering what had happened. When I looked back I saw my engine lying in the middle of the track. The kart was so old that the bolts holding the engine in place had sheared. It was so humiliating. We got the engine welded on properly and went out to see what we could do, but it was a hopeless situation. The other children were so much faster that I felt I was standing still.

I had been naive in the extreme. There was far more to preparing a kart than I had imagined. That first race gave me a shocking lesson in the school of karting set-up. The other children’s karts had both of the rear wheels driven, whereas ours only had drive to one wheel. Not only that but they had a box of different sized sprockets, so they always had the right gearing for each track, whether it was slow and twisty or fast and sweeping. Also I knew nothing at the time about minimum weights. The power to weight ratio of a kart is critical and so the trick was to get the kart down to the minimum weight permissable in the rules, while tuning the engine to give maximum power. Our poor underpowered kart was 40lbs overweight, so we really didn’t have a prayer.

Most of the children were much older than me; some were as old as sixteen and I felt upset and humiliated by the sharp shock I had received. I went away at the end of that day a much wiser ten year old. I knew that I had a burning desire to race karts and my desire to beat everybody had been heightened by the experience. I was down, but I was determined to fight back.

I knew that we would never be competitive with the equipment we had so I put a lot of pressure on my father to get a newer and faster kart. Because karting was still uncommercialised, the cost of upgrading our equipment was not prohibitive. Looking back, I’m glad I was racing karts when I was. I shudder to think what it would cost today to buy competitive equipment.

My father was not rich and I had to justify the cost to him. I think he could see that I was very determined to race and that we needed better gear if we were to compete.

I knew even at that age that I was very competitive. No matter what field you compete in and no matter at what level, if you are born with the will to win then you know it from a very early age. At school you can see people around you who win and enjoy it, they really thrive on it. I was like that for me from the word go. By contrast you see other people who win or lose and it doesn’t really matter much to them either way. That is an admirable quality to have, but if you are a racer and you want to be successful as a driver, then it is completely the wrong attitude.

Winning is pretty much everything. Once you’ve realised that, it dictates the whole way you look at competition. If your equipment isn’t up to scratch, you do everything you can to upgrade it. No-one in our family was wealthy, but my grandparents used to give me equipment for my birthday and at Christmas. I remember putting pressure on them one year to give me a new engine.

Although winning is everything, that is not to say that you have to be a bad loser. I think you can be a good sportsman and be a gentleman and lose gracefully without losing your competitive edge. It’s a subtle difference, but an important one. Psychologically you approach competition believing only that winning is everything and losing doesn’t exist.

If you lose, there are always reasons why you have lost. This is where you’ve got to be honest with yourself and think, ‘This is the reason why I lost today’, rather than ‘The car, or the engine, let me down.’ It is important to be positive and to look for constructive reasons why you failed to win, but above all it is important to be honest with yourself. This is something I learned very early on in my competitive career. One of my strengths and probably at the same time one of my weaknesses is that I am very straightforward. I am honest with myself and with other people. I call things as I see them and sometimes that upsets a few people, as I would discover later in my career.

I won with my new kart and as the years progressed I moved up through the different junior karting categories. It was a thrilling time for me. The competition was fierce, but the atmosphere in the paddock was friendly. If you were short of a piece of equipment, you could always rely on someone in the paddock lending it to you.

All of my spare time and my school holidays were spent working on my kart and racing it. I can remember putting the kart in the boot of the car and going off to the little track at Chasewater testing. My father and I used to make dozens of trips like this. We would test engines and pistons and run bits in at Chasewater, then go back home and rub the pistons down and hone the barrels, then go back to the track to try it again. My father and I were extremely close in those days and I think in a way he was re-living his childhood through me, because he had a very bad time in the Second World War.

The karting became pretty serious as I began to race further and further afield. To start with it was the length and breadth of Britain, then when I was picked for the English team we began travelling to the continent and across the North Sea to Scandinavia. I was doing what I wanted to do, satisfying my competitive urge and loving every second of it.

Unfortunately, things were not quite so straightforward at school. Although the teachers did not object to me missing school to represent the country in international races, some of the other children at the school didn’t like it at all. They were jealous and resented my success. One morning the headmaster announced in morning assembly that I would be going to Holland for two weeks to race for England. I was to be given a special two-week leave of absence from classes. The school hall buzzed with an uncomfortable mix of approval and resentment.

Although the trip sounded pretty exotic, in reality it meant that I would be well behind with my schoolwork when I got back and would have to put in many extra hours. Some of the other children didn’t see it that way. They were jealous and they wanted me to know that I shouldn’t consider myself special. There was an uneasy atmosphere in the playground later that morning and then suddenly I got hit on the back of the legs with a cricket bat. I went down and when several others joined in I was beaten up quite badly.

So I learned another important lesson: that no matter what you do you cannot please everybody and there will always be some who want to undermine your success. Their attacks, whether they be with a cricket bat in the school playground or, later on, with words in the press, always hurt. They are motivated by jealousy; people who said that you would never be any good and who are forced to eat their words when you go out and prove them wrong. It is a reaction against success achieved against the odds, a denial that somebody from within their midst could be successful and get the attention and the rewards that success brings. This is a negative side of human nature which I have run up against many times in my life, but which I don’t believe I will ever understand. Sadly it is one of the prices you have to pay if you single-mindedly pursue your goal. It comes with the territory.

The karting trips abroad were great fun and often my father and I would be accompanied by my sisters Sandra and Gail. We would pack the car onto the ferry and set off on another adventure. I enjoyed meeting and racing against children from other countries, although it was always nice to come home once the job was done. The races were enjoyable and we had our fair share of successes. I had a few accidents too, but mostly these were harmless spills. Because the karts didn’t travel terribly fast, parents were never too worried about their children getting hurt. I had one accident where I took off and flew into the branches of a tree. The chassis buckled under the impact, but I was perfectly alright. Not long afterwards I had my first serious accident.

It was an accident that shouldn’t have happened, but in those days in kart racing there wasn’t the quality control in the manufacture of components which there is today. Also the thoroughness of scrutineering and inspection was way behind today’s standards. Unbeknown to me, the steering column on my kart was cracked when I started the race. I was coming down the hill on the fast kart track at Morecambe, travelling at probably 100mph and approaching a slight left-hander. I turned the wheel and the steering just snapped. I realised that I had no steering and at that speed there is no time to scrub off speed before you go off. I was in big trouble. I took off over a kerb and somersaulted. There was a huge impact and the back of my helmet struck something hard. I was knocked unconscious.

It must have looked like a serious crash. Whenever they take a driver’s helmet off and his whole face is covered in blood you know that it’s been a significant blow. I was taken to the Royal Lancaster Hospital where I was found to be haemorrhaging from the ears and the nose. The scar tissue which is caused in the channels of the ears by an injury like that stays with you for life and I have actually lost some of my hearing as a result.

I remember drifting in and out of consciousness. It was rather like a dream. I also recall hearing a voice and as I came to, I caught a glimpse of a priest standing at the end of the bed. He was saying prayers and his last words were, ‘And what else can I do for you my son?’ I realised that he was giving me the last rites.

My head hurt and I was struggling to keep awake. I vividly recall coming to the realisation that the situation was very serious. I knew I had to fight. I was not about to let life slip away from me. I summoned up the strength to speak … and promptly told the priest to sod off. Then I collapsed back into unconsciousness. I had a battle going on inside my head, but I have such a strong will to live that I came through that traumatic experience and before too long I was out of hospital and back at home with my family. It had been a frightening period but I knew that I had to go on and learn from it.

That accident taught me that I should always check four fundamental things before I race: the steering, the brakes, the suspension and the aerodynamic wings. I check them because if any one of them were to fail I would have no chance of controlling the car and could be killed. Pretty much anything else on the car can go wrong and you can stay in control. But if you lose any one of those four key things, it’s curtains. If the suspension fails, you’re on three wheels while if the brakes fail, you have no stopping power. If your front or rear wing fails or falls off then you have little or no control; and if the steering goes then you’re a passenger on a high speed ride.

In the early days I had a lot of accidents I shouldn’t have had. I’ve analysed every one of them because it is so important to learn. Accidents like the one I had at Morecambe weren’t my fault, they were caused by failures on the machine. In large part this was because we never had the finance to get the best and safest equipment. In my early single-seater days many accidents were caused by component failures and even when I joined Lotus we had five suspension failures in one season.