Nigel Mansell - Mansell - My Autobiography

When you hire Nigel Mansell as your driver, the actual time spent in the car and what I can do with the car is far from all that you are buying. The ability to get the best out of the the car is well known, but also crucial is the ability to get the car into a shape to be used like that.

I need to be surrounded in a team by people who believe in me and who know that if I am given the right equipment, I’ll get the results.

When I aligned myself to Williams in 1991/92, everybody worked my way and we delivered the goods: nine wins, fourteen pole positions and the title wrapped up in record time by August. If we hadn’t delivered the goods then I could sympathise with the team’s frustration and difficulty in continuing the relationship. But to change tack just because of pressure from the team’s French partners to bring aboard one of their fellow countrymen, Alain Prost frustrated me enormously, although I could understand the reason behind it.

There is an old Groucho Marx joke which goes: ‘I wouldn’t want to be a member of a club which would have someone like me as a member.’ I am the exact opposite of this. I only want to be in a team that wants me there and wants to work the best way both for the team and for me. If I feel that I do not have the team’s full support, then I am quite prepared to leave.

I don’t want to be in a situation where everyone is not pulling together.

BE FAST AND CONSISTENT

Patrick Head, Williams’ technical director, has said that one of my major strengths as a racing driver is that I don’t have on days and off days. I am consistently fast, which is a big help to a team when it comes to developing a car. They know that the speed at which I drive a car on any given day is the fastest that car will go, so they always have something consistent to measure against.

Of course, in reality, every human being has on days and off days, but if you are a real professional it shouldn’t show in the car, because you are being paid to drive the car and to perform. Also your professional integrity should not allow you to take it easy on yourself when you feel like it. A champion needs to have that extra will and determination to get the job done so that, although you might not feel on top form out of the car, you perform to the highest levels in it. That takes a lot of energy but it is vital if you are going to be successful.

Sometimes you have to face the fact that even your best efforts are not going to yield the results. In my second year of IndyCars in 1994, it just wasn’t possible to do what we had done the year before and win races consistently with the car we had. I gave it a massive effort in bursts during qualifying and sometimes was able to get on pole or the front row, but the Penskes were so superior over a race distance that there was nothing I could do to beat them, even if I drove every lap of the race as if it were a qualifying lap. When it’s not possible you can’t make it happen. That’s not to say that I gave up or resigned myself to making the numbers up. I was just being realistic.

I am often asked how I feel I have improved as a driver over the years. Obviously you cultivate your skills and talents in all areas, but if I had to be specific I would say that I have improved as a human being and that has matured my racing technique. I’m a little bit more patient now and I’m not as aggressive as I used to be, although there is still a lot of aggression there. I have much more knowledge of how to get the job done and I don’t pressure myself into doing a certain lap time, which I used to do all the time.

I am a better thinker in a racing car nowadays, I don’t feel that I have to lead every lap of a race. As long as I’m the one who crosses the line first that’s the important thing.

I have also developed the courage to come into the pits when the car isn’t working and to tell the crew that it’s terrible, rather than feel that I have to tread on eggshells so as not to hurt their feelings. In the early days, when I complained about a car everybody would say, ‘Oh, he’s whingeing again, he’s no good.’ Now I have the self belief and I know what is right and what is wrong and stick to it. I don’t just steam in and criticise, I make suggestions and pressurise people into accepting that something isn’t good enough and needs to be changed. In other words I have become a little wiser about how to operate and do things.

MY UNUSUAL DRIVING STYLE

My driving style has changed little over the years that I have been racing. It is quite a distinctive style, because I tend to take a different line around corners from other drivers. The classic cornering technique, as taught by racing schools, is to brake and downshift smoothly while still travelling in a straight line and then to turn into the apex of the corner and apply the power. Thus you are slow into the corner and fast out of it.

I never consciously set out to ignore those rules, I just devised my own way of driving and stuck to it because I found it faster. It is a lot more physical and tiring than the classic style, but it’s faster and that’s what counts.

My style is to brake hard and late and to turn in very early to the apex of the corner, carrying a lot of speed with me. I then slow the car down again in the corner and drive out of it. Because I go for the early apex, I probably use less road than many other drivers. In fact if you put a dripping paint pot on the back of my car and on the back of another driver’s car around a lap of a circuit like Monaco, you would probably find that my lap is 20 or 30 metres shorter than theirs!

To drive like this I need a car which has a very responsive front end and turns in immediately and doesn’t slide at the front. I cannot drive on the limit in a car which understeers, for example. My cars tend to handle nervously because I need them to roll and be supple; a car which does this at high speed is an uncomfortable car to drive and is very demanding, but invariably it is faster. Because it’s ‘nervous’ it will react quickly to the steering and will turn quicker into a corner. The back end feels like it wants to come around on you, but that’s something you learn to live with. Although it’s nervous it’s got to be balanced properly, if it isn’t then there’s nothing you can do with it. A stable stiff car is reassuring to drive and won’t do anything nasty to you, but it’s not fast. If you want the ultimate then you’ve got to have something which is close to the limit. This makes demands on you physically, of course. It’s much more tiring to drive a car this way and you need to have a particularly strong upper body and biceps in order to pick the car up by the scruff of the neck and hurl it around a corner.

The best car is not just a car which wins for you, but one which gives you the feedback that you need as a driver so you can have total confidence in it. The best car I ever drove was the active suspension Williams-Renault FW14B, in which we won the 1992 World Championship. It was a brilliant car because the only limiting factor was you, the driver. The car could do anything you wanted it to. For example, if you wanted to go into a particular corner faster than you had ever done before, all that was holding you back was the mental barrier of being able to keep your foot down. If you went for it, the car would see you through. I loved that.

SLOWING THINGS DOWN

Any top class racing driver must have the ability to suspend time by the coordination of eyes and brain. In other words, when you’re doing 200mph you see everything as a normal person would at 50mph. Your eyes and brain slow everything down to give you more time to act, to make judgments and decisions. In real time you have a split second to make a decision, but to the racing driver it seems a lot longer. If you’re really driving well and you feel at one with the car, you can sometimes even slow it down a bit more so it looks like 30mph would to the normal driver. This gives you all the time in the world to do what you have to do: read the dashboard instruments, check your mirrors, even radio your crew in the pits. That’s why, when I say after I won the British Grand Prix, for example, that I could see the expressions on the faces of the crowd, it’s because everything was slowed and I had time to see such things.