Today’s drivers get out of the car as if they have just stepped out of a hair salon
Mansell: In the 80s and 90s F1 was a serious occupation...
ANY regrets looking back on a long career, Nigel? ‘Three broken backs, two bust wrists, both feet smashed and titanium in my left shoulder,’ comes the answer in flat Brum straight down the line from his house in Florida.
It may be 40 years since Mansell’s Formula One debut but his knack of wearing every scar on his bloodied sleeve has not diminished. ‘Ask any surgeon and they will tell you those kinds of injuries stay with you for the rest of your life.’
Now 66 and with enough ailments to conjure images of retirement spent in a wheelchair, he is still playing golf, ferociously hard. ‘Golf — it’s still a love of my life,’ he says. ‘I love it; it hates me.’
The coronavirus-delayed 2020 F1 season is finally due to start in Austria on July 5. That is where Mansell first raced an F1 car, for Colin Chapman’s Lotus team in August 1980, on the old Osterreichring, one of the fastest and prettiest graveyards in the world. Only five years before Mark Do no hue crashed and died there. Mansell’s debut, naturally, was not without incident itself.
Sitting on the grid full of excitement, he felt a burning sensation around his buttocks. It was a fuel leak. He battled on and that was him started on a top-flight career that took him to the 1992 F1 world championship and the 1993 Indy Car title.
Just as the Osterreichring has been tamed, in its new guise as the Red Bull Ring, so has the sport at large. Mansell is a devoted admirer of Lewis Hamilton but he regrets the British great he backs to rewrite the record books is operating in a more anaesthetised age.
He knows the modern world could not countenance death on the scale of the past. Which talk of mortality, sadly, brings us to Mansell’s harrowing memories of the demise of Ferrari’s flying buccaneer, Gilles Villeneuve, in qualifying for the Belgian Grand Prix.
‘In those days people got killed regularly and that could seriously affect your psyche,’ he says. ‘Gilles befriended me and we became close. He gave me good advice. So I’ll never forget the tragedy that befell him in Zolder, not until the end of my days. I was in the car behind and I saw it all happen.
‘I saw him go through the air. I saw him come down. I saw him fly out of the car. I saw him go into the crash fencing. I drove past and I remember thinking that his chances were virtually nil. It was the most shocking thing I ever witnessed. I was upset then and I still am.
‘ Formula One throughout the Eighties and Nineties was a very serious occupation. If you didn’t get killed, you could get injured, with the barriers right on the edge of the circuits. You never knew what would happen next.’
For 12 years no driver died. Then, as triple world champion Niki Lauda put it: ‘God, who for so long had held His hand over Formula One, lifted it.’ That was at Imola in 1994, when Roland Ratzenberger and the sport’ s leading man Ayrton Senna were killed in a single terrible weekend. ‘A yr ton’ s death was a catastrophic day for motorsport. It changed it for ever,’ says Mansell. ‘It moved it in a lot of good ways and a lot of bad ones, too, because it sterilised race circuits throughout the world. That is a terrible mistake. Formula One was an incredible sport when you got rewarded for driving well and penalised when you drove indifferently. You couldn’t go barrelling into a corner at 200mph if you didn’t have the skill. Now it has changed beyond belief.
‘Lewis would have done well in those circumstances, but it is very, very difficult to compare eras. Then so many brilliant drivers had a simple accident and broke their legs or arms, or whatever and couldn’t continue their careers. Now good drivers make heinous mistakes and don’t get injured.
‘ They barely sweat in the car. At the end of the race, it’s as if they have just come out of a hair salon. The beautiful thing in my day was if you had done 180 Grands Prix and you were still alive you patted yourself on the back and said you had a great career.’
Mansell contested 187 races. He racked up 31 victories — a British record until Hamilton bounded past. ‘To see drivers now do 300 Grands Prix and have no injuries — well you can’t compare. We had to apply blood, tears and sweat and when you won you got nine points. They have an easier time and when they win they get 25 points.’
Among the indelible Man sell scenes are the on-track mobbing he attracted at the end of British Grands Prix. Perhaps his finest performance came at Silverstone in 1987 when he drove with trademark grit to reel in team-mate Nelson Piquet to win.
There followed his stint as ‘ Il Leone’ at Ferrari before his return to Williams and the title after years of endeavour, the first eight of them spent as a No 2.
‘The defining moment, the pinnacle, was in Hungary having come second to Ayrton in the race but winning the title. He put his arm around me and told me it is the best feeling in the world.
‘The other great feeling was the chance the late, great Colin Chapman gave me to test an F1 car. Without that opportunity nothing else would have followed.’
THERE seems no chance in the foreseeable future of six-time champion Hamilton ,35, leaving Mercedes for Ferrari. There is no room in the red corner after it was announced that Carlos Sainz will join from McLaren to partner Charles Leclerc next season.
Has Lewis missed the boat? ‘For me Ferrari was utopia,’ says Mansell, who — along with the real love of his life, wife of 45 years Rosanne — splits his time between America and the UK. ‘It is incredible to win for Ferrari and I love the team dearly, but if Lewis wants to chase history he will probably find Mercedes are more stable now.
‘Ferrari could have won world championships in the last few years but there have been too many unfortunate mistakes made.
‘As for Lewis, what an opportunity he has been given from a very early age. Like Michael Schumacher he has had the incredible support from manufacturers to demonstrate his abilities. He won his first world championship with McLaren and then went straight to a team where he won another five.
‘History will depict him as one of the greatest drivers, if not the greatest driver, in the history of our country. There is no reason why he can’t win a seventh or eighth world championship before he retires.’ The greatest ever, then? ‘ I always say Fangio because those who drove in that era — and I think Lewis would agree — were the true heroes because they had no seat belts, no proper helmets, no proper goggles and at times no gloves. They had a fuel tank between their legs and if you had an accident it was 50-50 whether you were thrown free or died.
‘But Lewis is doing fine. Everybody who gets that level of adulation gets a lot of advice. He just has to keep his feet on the ground, make his own decisions and be happy with them.’