Nigel Mansell - Mansell - My Autobiography

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.