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(RHYTHMICAL MUSIC)
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The 1992 season kind of felt like Nigel's last chance
to win that elusive world championship.
At 39, it was now or never for Mansell.
The '92 car, wow.
You look at it and you just immediately think
that car has to be quick.
Nigel was finally gonna do it.
Red 5 ran through the first five Grand Prixs of the season,
won every single one, dominated every single one.
Came to Monaco where pole position is absolutely essential
and nailed it by an historic margin.
Track position is everything in Monaco.
Normally if you get on pole and get in the lead,
nothing goes wrong, you should win.
The noise was incredible, the excitement.
Disappeared into the distance, built a 30-second lead.
He was way out of front, leading the race,
looking dominant.
Then he started to hear a vibration from a rear wheel.
Was it a puncture? Was it a bearing?
I had to come and make an unscheduled stop.
OK, we put new boots on, which gave me grip.
To be honest with you, I dunno whether he had a puncture or not
or whether it was a loose wheel nut.
But when he went back out, he was in second behind Ayrton Senna.
The closeness of the finish became an epic.
To overtake at Monaco, you need some luck.
To overtake in Monaco with Ayrton Senna in front of you,
you need a miracle.
He was so quick there, the way he was just darting behind Senna.
Defence from Ayrton Senna,
amazing weaving attack from Nigel Mansell.
We never touched, we never hit.
With the current rules today,
Ayrton would've got stop-go penalties for blocking.
It should have been a Nigel victory.
He was way faster than Ayrton.
On the last few laps, he tried everything to get past Ayrton
but there was just no way.
He never won the Monaco Grand Prix. It's crazy.
And the winning streak came to an end, but what a fantastic duel.
It wasn't to be.
He'll look back and that was the one that got away.
If you had to sum up Mansell and Williams
between '86 and '91,
the '92 Monaco Grand Prix actually does that.
He was nearly there once again and then snatched defeat
from the jaws of victory.
You started to think, "Right, he's won the first five of the season,
but now Ayrton Senna is on the top step of the podium.
Is it all gonna unravel once again for poor old Nige?"
(RHYTHMICAL MUSIC)
(CAR ZOOMS)
(CLICKING)
This is fantastic.
This is the reboot, isn't it, of Williams?
It's a very young-looking Frank Williams in his suit.
You know, Frank had lost his team to the Canadian oil baron
billionaire Walter Wolf, and he's had to restart again.
And this is really the beginning of Williams' Grand Prix engineering
as we know it now.
Motor racing was his life. He loved it.
I mean, and I'm sure all the members of the family
would agree, motor racing first, everything else second.
He was so determined.
We were on the steps to the Sao Paulo Hilton
before the Brazilian Grand Prix in '77 and he said,
"I've had enough, Peter, I've had enough. I can't do this anymore."
And what he meant was working for Walter Wolf
and he said, "Oh, I'm gonna start again. I'm gonna start again.
And I'm gonna have engineering in the title of my next race team.
'Cause Formula One's future is about engineering."
I always remember him saying that.
And then very soon afterwards he contacted Patrick Head.
He'd seen in Patrick this gem of a brain.
Patrick Head is one of the great figures in Formula One
technical history. Came from a military background,
which is what gave him a very stiff spine.
But he had a very, very clear understanding
of the whole of a Formula One car.
And I think Patrick loved Frank's
just burning fire of enthusiasm,
and very quickly he got it together.
He did a deal with the Didcot local council who, at that stage,
they had a very large train terminus, if you like.
That was a mainline thing to London.
But nobody wanted to live in Didcot or work in Didcot.
And so they gave Frank an amazing deal to set up
a little race shop under the arches
of the railway line, actually.
You always had the sense of Frank Williams being this figure
in the background, just looking for opportunities,
commercial opportunities, sporting opportunities.
The famous, you know, wearing out a pair of shoes every month
because he was just walking everywhere and would never stop.
(SPEAKING IN ITALIAN)
Then, of course, on top of that,
he had this amazing ability to pick up languages.
(SPEAKING IN ITALIAN)
And very quickly became multilingual.
We were all aware that Frank was in the Middle East a lot.
You know, "I'm gonna show the Middle Eastern community
that they can be the best in the west if they race with me."
So Frank being Frank,
had the brand-new Williams '06 liveried up
in Saudi Arabian Airlines colours
and had it towed to the Dorchester Hotel
where he knew where the key Saudi prince was staying that week.
Had to bribe a traffic warden
to be able to park there on Park Lane.
Rushed into the lobby and rang the prince's room and said,
"Have a look out the window."
Looked down, saw Frank waving next to the car
and the guy sort of gave the thumbs up and that was the deal done.
We're in the Middle East now. Big time in Formula One,
but Frank was the first guy to go there.
(INDISTINCT RADIO CHATTER))
I thought I was gonna be a fighter pilot, an astronaut,
various things.
But then police officer brought me back to my home.
I was driving a one-wheeled JLO faster car
down the pavement. Not what you did.
I thought, "Oh, I'm gonna be a race car driver."
(LIGHT MELODIC MUSIC)
(CLICKING)
Maybe you're born with a silver spoon in your mouth
where you never have to worry.
I'm afraid I was right at the other scale
where we didn't really have no... anything to rub together.
So we worked really hard to actually achieve whatever we did.
Birmingham, England in the 1960s and '70s
where Nigel grew up was very much an industrial town.
Britain's second city automotive kind of capital, really.
A bit like Detroit in the US.
His father was a professional. He was an engineer with Lucas.
His mother ran a tea shop.
Not terribly glamorous and not really the sort of place
you'd expect a Grand Prix star to come from.
ANNOUNCER: If you've never driven a go-kart, have a go.
It's great fun and there are many tracks open to the public.
In fact, it's becoming increasingly popular
as a competitive sport.
I really persuaded my father when I was six-and-a-half,
seven to take me.
It was to Shenington, a kart track,
and I thought, "I know I've got this."
It was terrifying.
And then I had a terrible rude awakening
because every time I did one lap and I thought I was really quick,
everyone else had done two laps.
In the next practise, I went out
and I went down the straight and everything went quiet.
And obviously I came to a standstill and had the marshals
running over to me, said, "You're OK, you're OK."
I said, "Yeah, the chain's fallen off."
And he looked at me, he said, "You got a bit more of a problem
than the chain falling off. The whole engine fell off."
And so my engine and chain was down the road.
(CHUCKLES)
I remember having a tear in my eye then and my dad saying,
"Well, we'll try and get a better engine
and a better kart for you."
I think it was about my third event
was the British Championships.
The British team manager was there watching
to pick a team to go and race in Holland and Sweden
and go to the world championships.
(ENGINE ROARING)
And I went from the back of the grid,
which was about 33 karts, up to third in one race.
He picked me as one of the drivers to actually do that.
We were obviously very thrilled but incredibly disappointed
because we didn't have the finances to go and get another engine.
It was my grandparents, when they heard that I'd been picked
for the British team,
they brought me a complete new engine -
I'll never forget 'cause it's 34 pounds,
which was about $50 back then -
to allow me to go racing and represent myself
and the British team, which was truly fantastic.
(CLICKING)
I was training as an engineer at Lucas Aerospace
and I wanted to go racing.
I didn't want to go karting anymore.
He raced karts. But if you really wanted to show your talent,
you got into Formula Ford 1600.
35 car grids,
incredibly competitive, wide track cars,
narrow tyres, no wings, just sliding all over the place.
It was the category, really.
'Cause it's mostly down to what the driver can do in the car,
not the package he's driving.
If you could win the British Championship in Formula Ford,
you know, you had a future in front of you
if you could find the funding.
And my father, Eric Mansell did a deal with me and said,
"Look, finish your qualifications. It takes three or four years.
Once you get your degree and you're an engineer,
fully fledged and you got an engineering job at Lucas Aerospace,"
he says, "Then we'll go racing."
19-and-a-half, 20, I got my results and I was elated.
I passed.
I didn't get a first class pass, but I got a pass.
Right, let's go racing, you know? Really, really good. Really happy.
And then my dad laughed at me
and I didn't appreciate him laughing at me
and I didn't understand it and I said, "Why are you laughing, Dad?"
He said, "Well, where do you think we're gonna get money from
to go racing? We can't go racing."
I said, "You promised me." He said, "Yes."
He said, "I did that for you.
So you made sure you get your qualifications.
I had to give you a goal to achieve."
And we fell out.
I fell out with my parents and my dad at that point,
which is a bit sad for me to even share that with you now
because I didn't speak to him for a fair bit of time.
He really didn't have any money, you know,
and he had to work really hard and...
to make ends meet and get out there.
And he was determined but, but underprivileged,
I think you should say.
Nigel's wife, Roseanne, is one of the great figures,
actually, in the story.
They'd met when they were young.
I mean they would sleep in the back of a van
at the racetrack rather than spend the money on a B&B or a hotel.
She basically gave all of her salary
as a British gas demonstrator to him to go racing.
I mean, few wives would just believe in this crazy
pipe dream that Nigel seemed to have at the time,
but she stuck with him through thick and thin.
(BRIGHT MUSIC)
(CLICKING)
Well, my first Formula Ford car was dug out of a garden.
It was a Javelin JL5
and it had flowers and weeds growing out of it.
My car was going down the straight about 140.
The back end just dropped down a little bit
and I saw this wheel go flying past
and realised it was my wheel that had come off,
and so I didn't race that car anymore.
I borrowed, then, a Crosley 25
and I went and won straight away, first time out.
Even then he had this inner belief
that he was the fastest guy on the racetrack.
Really, really quick.
So you could see him on the track with other drivers
and they'd be going into the chicane
and Nigel would be the one coming in a little bit earlier,
a little bit softer with his transitions.
Nigel had an incredible year in '77 in Formula Ford.
He entered 42 races and won 33 of them.
It's an incredible record.
We won, ended up winning the championship,
which was wonderful, but it sort of took off from then.
But what I didn't realise, once you became champion in one series,
you step up to another series, you start all over again.
(CLICKING)
'78 was a bit of a nightmare for Nigel.
I mean, it was the worst time of my life, really.
The step from Formula Ford to Formula Three is huge.
You know, we had a home then, our first home
and it cost just over £4,000
and we sold everything we own -
books, pictures, furniture and the home -
and went into a rented accommodation
to be able to buy a works drive,
which was March Engineering.
The works team at Formula Three is essentially one that's backed by
one of the factory engine suppliers or chassis manufacturers.
So they typically end up being the best teams
with the best engines, the best setups,
and in the end the best drivers.
And they said, "Look, if we give them all this money,
we feel sure that after a few races I'd get some results
and they'd guarantee they'd be bring a sponsor for us on board."
In six weeks, they took all the money and fired me.
He only did five races that year and the money ran out.
A guy that good, what a crying shame.
You know, she was working, I was doing a window cleaning job.
I'd live away from home, sometimes six weeks at a time.
He had a belief in his own ability,
and him and his wife were happy to put everything
on the line for that.
But then I managed then to get the Unipart Drive in 1979
and that's when my career took off again.
ANNOUNCER: No change in the order.
Andretti, Peterson, Scheckter, Alan Jones, the Australian.
Williams had an incredible start to their time in F1.
(CLICKING)
Yeah, the 07 was a quick car
from the minute it turned the wheel
and the grip of the car was just in another world.
With these ground effect cars, we have very much more cornering force,
but they're just as quick down the straight.
It's one of those things. We all dream about something for nothing.
Ground effect was a strange idea
where you had skirts that pretty much touch the ground around the car
but then sucked it down to the ground,
which meant you could go around the corners more quickly.
And certainly going into the 1979 British Grand Prix,
Williams were really good at this.
When they turned up at Silverstone,
they were a second faster than anything else.
They'd done a few tweaks to the aerodynamics
and wow, they had hit the magic spot...
..and they were up and running.
'79 British Grand Prix.
Frank got his first win and it was at Silverstone,
not that by Monday, Frank was thinking much about Sunday.
He was already thinking of the next race, typically Frank.
But that was an interesting crossover
of Nigel and Williams that day
because he was in the Formula Three race in the Unipart car.
I was very close friends with Carlos Reutemann,
who at that point was at Lotus and Colin Chapman.
ANNOUNCER: It seems a pity that with a British car like this,
there apparently isn't a British driver good enough for it.
We would be the first team to consider new talent coming along
and we are always constantly on the lookout.
So I drag Carlos and Colin to watch Nigel.
Carlos took one look at him and turned to me and said,
"Yeah, yeah, he's got it for sure."
And he was saying to Colin, "Look, this guy is really good."
We did an interview with Colin Chapman.
He was already world champion with Mario Andretti and so on.
Where is the next British world champion coming from?
And he said, "I've heard a lot of good things
about a young lad called Nigel Mansell."
It'd always stuck with me that he got the pronunciation
of the surname wrong, Nigel Man-sell.
He kept referring to him as Nigel Man-sell.
The pivotal time in 1979 was when we were at Alton Park Racing,
doing about 160 miles an hour.
And Andrea de Cesaris put a wheel into my back wheel,
flipped me and I somersaulted in the air about three times
and landed upside down.
Bingo, and that broke my back for the first time.
And I ended up in hospital with a broken back
and crushed vertebrae on the spine.
And I had an extraordinary phone call from Colin Chapman
and I said, "Oh, hello Mr Chapman, how are you?"
He said, "Oh, Nigel." He said, "I'm running a test in Paul Ricard
and I got six drivers I'm evaluating down there
and I'd like to give you the opportunity
to drive a Formula One car."
He said, "Can you be there in a week's time?"
I put the phone down, and picked the phone up to my specialist straight away.
And I said, "I'm going to drive a Formula One car
in a week's time down at Paul Ricard. What can you do to help?"
And he tried to talk me out of being insane.
And I said, "Well, I'm doing it with or without you."
I had a corset made up.
I got the strongest painkillers, which make you go a bit doo-lally
but I've never driven a Formula One car before.
I had no idea, no knowledge.
Formula One racing,
one of the most challenging and dangerous sports on Earth.
It's a big jump to go from Formula Three to Formula One.
You're getting something like four or 5G of braking force,
which means your head is four times its normal weight on your neck.
You have to prepare for that. You can't just throw someone in.
Formula One was unbelievably dangerous.
It was just happening so often that you kind of expected it.
ANNOUNCER: Ronnie Peterson's Lotus collided
in a horrific traffic jam,
a crash from which the popular Swede was never to recover.
It was the most dangerous era of all.
I mean, they were losing one or two Grand Prix drivers every year.
You make a mistake back then, you were dead.
If you were lucky, you smashed your legs and never drove again.
You broke your back, you never drove again.
You were quadriplegic, never drove again.
(ENGINE ROARS)
I was going down the straight and everything going
(WHOOSHING SOUNDS) as it does at 215 miles an hour.
Had no time to brake, no time to see the corner.
Everything happened so fast.
And I was so excited because Giles Villeneuve in the Ferrari
came past me and I tucked in behind him down the straight,
and I was going the same speed.
And I stayed with him and I thought, "Oh, this is great.
Oh, how quick was that last lap? Was it any good? Was it any good?"
All excited. I was six seconds a lap,
six seconds a lap off the pace.
I was so dejected I couldn't find six seconds.
It was ridiculous, you know?
And I remember calling Roseanne and saying,
"I think I've made the most terrible mistake of my life."
Basically I'm outta my depth.
I did actually speak to Nigel actually on that night.
I remember him saying, "Oh, you know, it's all happening really quickly."
And he wasn't really dancing with the music
and I was a bit nervous.
And then I went out in the car and to this very day
it felt like a big rocket hit me in the head.
Instantaneously, everything slowed down.
I could see the trees, I could see the barrier,
I could see the corner. I had enough time to brake,
had enough time to change gear.
The next lap, I was six seconds a lap faster.
They were very impressed to the point that Colin signed me
as a test driver. Of course, what did I say?
"Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll have it. I'll have it."
You know, "Do we get any money with it?" (CHUCKLES)
(CLICKING)
This is the ultimate chance now
because after Formula One there isn't anything else.
Formula One is the tops. And this is what I've been aiming for
for the past three or four years now.
And to get a chance with a team such as with Lotus is phenomenal.
He took full advantage of his testing role,
set some great lap times and that gave Colin Chapman
the confidence to throw him in for his Grand Prix debut in Austria.
A year before he was cleaning offices in Cirencester.
And now he finds himself on the grid of a Formula One Grand Prix.
The press coverage at the time,
a lot of people were writing, you know,
why is this guy being fast-tracked into Formula One?
There are so many more deserving drivers out there.
Nigel, I think only had a couple of wins in Formula Three
and not done much more.
The thought was, he'd sort of lucked in.
You just don't have the experience, you don't have the name.
People were saying with a name like mine
I'd never make it in Formula One.
The name was terrible. I was terrible.
You know, they even commented on my accent that was,
you know, shocking and I shouldn't be in Formula One.
You know, he should come from Argentina
and be called Juan Manuel Fangio.
He should be called Alberto Ascari or something,
you know, Enzo Ferrari, anything, you know,
but Nigel Mansell from Birmingham?
It didn't seem to fit well with our,
I think with our idea of what
a glamorous Formula One racing driver should be.
The Formula One world is everything that people think it is
from the outside. It's stylish, it's glamorous, it's exclusive,
and it's always sort of marketed itself on that kind of cachet.
And that makes it a big challenge for outsiders
to find their way in.
They were slight snobby about him if I'm honest, you know.
Colin was his own person, his own man.
He could have had probably a choice of 20 other drivers
with all sorts of Formula One experience.
I was always pushing the limits of trying to be part of something
that I wasn't part of.
A lot of the press was waiting for Nigel to fail.
And sure enough, in Austria,
I mean, you've got a sense of the future
because there was drama attached to it.
There is always drama attached to whatever Nigel Mansell does.
I go on the grid for my first ever race.
The guy comes with a bucket of water and pours a bucket of water
in the cockpit. I'm getting my arse burnt,
got a leak in the fuel tank.
Can you imagine the drivers of today sitting on the grid,
getting their arse burnt and their goolies and everything else
down there?
I suffered first degree burns of the lower buttocks,
so it was quite an uncomfortable race for me.
Oh, I got burnt to buggery. I got second and third degree burns.
And he was sort of lifted out of the car with burns
and everything else, spent the night in hospital.
INTERVIEWER: Can you sit down OK now?
Well, as you notice, I've probably been standing up a lot today.
(CHUCKLES)
We went to Zandvoort for another race.
With only ten minutes to go, he said,
"Right, I'm giving you a Elio's car. Go on, qualify."
They didn't do a seat adjustment, seatbelt adjustment,
didn't do a pedal adjustment. Just straight into the car.
The pressure.
I think I qualified 14th or 15th,
but more importantly, I was only one or two tenths slower
than Elio with one go.
And I think at that moment Colin thought,
"Yeah, Nigel Mansell is a serious racing driver."
At the same time, Frank had this beautiful operation.
The car was, you know, just wonderful.
To this day, you've gotta say Alan Jones
in that 07 Williams, particularly 1980,
that's as solid a car driver combination
as you'll ever see in Formula One.
It's one thing to win Grand Prix, it's quite another
to win World Championships.
1980 was a huge year in the history of the Williams Grand Prix team
because that was when Alan Jones clinched
their first world championship title.
It was extraordinary when you reflect now
on how long it takes a team to build itself,
establish yourself, let alone win a world championship
and they did it in the space of effectively three years.
It is one of Formula One's great stories.
(RHYTHMICAL MUSIC)
(CLICKING)
Elio and, of course, Nigel Mansell,
two young up and coming drivers.
Elio has more experience than Nigel.
Nigel is the best British driver we've had come along in years.
The thing that I was really getting a sense of
at the Lotus base in the early '80s
was this bond that had been formed
between Nigel Mansell and Colin Chapman.
I think he saw in me someone who had a tremendous appetite to learn.
And being a qualified engineer at that time,
I had a far greater understanding than somebody
who just was a driver.
What he did for me was just like a father figure.
If he said do something and jump out the window,
I'd jump out the window.
He was also very much appreciating his attitude to racing,
which is go for it.
ANNOUNCER: So Mansell third, number 12 in the new Lotus 87.
Only his eighth Grand Prix.
Nigel was doing a great job.
He managed to get a couple of podium finishes -
one in '81, one in '82 -
and he was starting to establish himself in Formula One.
Nigel was happy. He was in a really good place.
After all the struggles to get to this point,
he was a Grand Prix star.
He was established, he was making some decent money.
ANNOUNCER: The gold lettering on the £21,000 sports car says it all.
Nigel Mansell has arrived.
Williams were absolutely flying in the public consciousness
and a lot of the support that had been very much behind Lotus
at the end of the '70s was suddenly behind this little team at Didcot.
The FW07 and the FW08,
conceptualised by Patrick Head and Frank Dernie,
took ground effects and raised the bar to a whole new level.
By 1982, Rosberg had delivered the team
its second World Championship.
Williams were now well established as a top team in Formula One.
Colin Chapman, the man who made Lotus cars famous
around the world, has died.
He was 54.
A spokesman for Lotus says he died of a heart attack.
I was absolutely devastated.
I mean, there's no words even after all these years
to describe the feelings.
Whatever motivation I had just evaporated in thin air.
The direction in life was lost.
It was the most shocking time in my life
'cause it wasn't just the fact that we lost Colin,
I felt like I lost my father.
So the regime changed at Lotus,
and Colin Chapman was replaced by Peter Warr,
who had been Colin Chapman's number two,
who wasn't as appreciative of Nigel's talents
as Colin had been,
and they locked horns very early on.
Communications and dynamics and leadership just disappeared.
You did get the impression that Peter Warr
was not only very negative within the team towards Nigel,
but also outside the team.
And Nigel had a very difficult time in making sure
that his reputation remained intact.
I suppose a low point was Monaco 1984,
which was a very wet race.
He qualified second on the grid behind Prost
and he was over a second faster
than his Lotus teammate, Elio De Angelis.
And the whole of that Monaco Grand Prix,
he was just out there to show he, Nigel Mansell,
was the quickest guy on the planet.
He passed Prost on lap nine
and really started disappearing off into the distance.
The race was under control,
obviously in very treacherous conditions.
And then he went and dropped it into the barriers.
And I think where Nigel went wrong,
his immediate quote at the end of the race was,
"I went on the white lines and the painted white lines
are very slippery", and, of course, the press had a field day.
A lot of excellent drivers made mistakes and fell off
and, you know, I feel through no real reason of their own.
An habitual whinger in terms of what the press thought.
You know, it was always someone else's fault. It wasn't ever his fault.
And leading that chorus of criticism
was Peter Warr himself.
I'll never forget because I just couldn't believe
he said it publicly. He said, "Well, while I have a hole
in my arse, he will never win a race."
And what's that supposed to mean for crying out loud?
Well, as I said, he must be very constipated now.
(CHUCKLES)
By the end of '84, Nigel really needed a way out of Lotus
and particularly that toxic relationship
he was facing with Peter Warr.
It wasn't working out and he was really, really looking
for another home for the next chapter of his career.
Around the British Grand Prix time,
I started to inundate Frank with lots of,
"You've gotta sign Nigel" conversations
and started to back it up with lots of stats.
First lap out of the pits, laps on cold tyres, hot tyres,
qualifying, comparing it with all the other drivers on the grid.
And he was pretty enthusiastic about it.
And, of course, next week would come and nothing would happen
and Nigel will ring and say, "What's going on? What's going?"
"No news. No news." And so it dragged on and on.
We got to the Dutch Grand Prix
and I remember saying to Nigel,
"Frank's gonna give us an answer."
And I actually got a little bit frustrated
with the conversation.
You either want someone to drive for you or you don't.
Nigel just went ballistic and said, "Right, tell Frank the deal is off
'cause I don't wanna drive for anybody that doesn't want me
and can't make up their mind. Just go tell him that now."
So I did.
I went back to Frank's little motor home. I said, "Look, Frank,
you're not gonna like this. This is what Nigel's just said."
He said, "All right, tell him he's got the deal."
Just like that. It was incredible.
And I ended up driving for Williams in '85 with Keke,
which was marvellous.
(RHYTHMICAL MUSIC)
(CLICKING)
(ENGINE ROARS)
Start of '85, there's no doubt Nigel was the number two
in every dimension,
purely because Keke Rosberg was a Grand Prix winner.
He was known as Rocky. He was really quick. Great car control.
I had a very uncomfortable pressure initially with Williams.
The bad blood was told to Keke
and other people within the Williams team about me.
Nigel was this English guy
prone to errors of the, you know, the Monaco '84.
And there was this sort of aura about Nigel as, you know,
why have William signed him, really. And I'm sure Keke,
he didn't feel Nigel was a threat, I don't think.
Without a win, and you're alongside a world champion,
there is an expectation that one is gonna be better than the other.
My first race was in Rio
and I got planted off at the first corner.
It wasn't too good.
Second race was in Estoril,
and going to the grid, it was raining and we had turbo engines,
which were like an on-off switch.
So I get halfway around the corner, then the power surges.
Anyway, I spun off, hit the barriers on the warm up lap
to the grid and smashed the front suspension
on the left-hand side and had to limp back to the pits.
I'll never forget the number Patrick Head did on me.
Oh, my goodness me, he was so upset.
Peter Collins was the team manager and he said,
"Look, just go and clear your head. Just focus on being ready
to get back in the car and start from the pit lane."
And then about a third, halfway through the race,
my teammate Keke Rosberg, ex-world champion,
in the fast corner coming onto the main straight,
he had a mighty accident
with the identical symptoms that happened to me on the warm-up lap.
I drove the whole race tentatively
and making sure I wasn't gonna fall off,
but I came from last to fifth.
From the pit lane
to P5 in the rain.
Terrible visibility.
He's in traffic the whole race and he's passing people.
And he said he literally listened to the engine note
of the car in front.
And when that engine note changed,
that was the moment Nigel, without seeing anything up,
just a bank of spray, he just moved to the right or the left.
That's how he did it.
If ever there was a race where if he was prone to mistakes
and if he was incapable of winning in the right situation,
it would've been shown up that day, but he didn't.
He delivered beautifully on that day.
Just before the British Grand Prix and Keke came up to me.
He says, "I need to apologise to you."
He said, "I listened to those idiots
telling me all different things about you,
which I know now is totally untrue."
And he said, "I'm sorry." He said, "I had preconceived
judgements, which are totally wrong."
In Formula One, it's, obviously...
it's down to the driver, but it's a team sport.
So, you know, the car is very important,
the team is very important and you need the full package, really,
to win your first race.
It's a combination of man and machine.
That's part of why people love it, I think.
And the real magic is when you get a combination of a driver
who's on the up, who's able to make a car faster.
Through my engineering background, Patrick Head,
we got on really well.
It was a breath of fresh air.
We got half a second, half a second to maybe six,
seven tenths a lap faster, just with one test.
Because he'd got so much road dust on him at that point
that when finally he was in a very, very good car
with a good balance, with a very good rear end,
lots of power, Brands Hatch,
great circuit that he loved,
it was right up Nigel's street.
The 1985 European Grand Prix
was held at Brands Hatch
and it was a huge day for Nigel.
He made a great start from third on the grid.
Got up to second, but he ran wide early on,
which allowed both Nelson Piquet and Keke Rosberg to get past.
Rosberg tried to overtake Senna,
who put quite an aggressive block on him,
causing Rosberg to spin
and it left Piquet with nowhere to go.
Piquet gets caught up in that, as well, and that takes him
out of the race. Rosberg's not happy. He has to go into the pits
to get some service on his car to repair it.
He comes back out again and who does he find but Senna.
Holds him up. Somewhat predictably,
he wasn't in a mood to let him pass
so he put a bit of a defensive block on him,
which gave Nigel the opportunity to sneak by
and take the lead in front of his home crowd.
Great move on Ayrton Senna that put him in front of the field
and it was a huge breakthrough.
Once in front, Nigel then set about building a lead
and this was going to be his big day at home
in front of the British audience.
You're in a car on your own and you're like in solitary confinement,
sepia,
blasting around the circuit with your hair on fire.
You have to manage the car, drive the car.
It's very physical, but the mental side of it is huge.
Every single corner I was making sure
I was micromanaging the corners, making sure I got the apexes,
making sure I was carrying enough speed, but not too much.
You had to sort of control your breathing,
you had to control your motion, counting the laps down,
and then also the extra pressure of managing the gap
of the car chasing me down
'cause it wasn't a walkover.
It was only about five seconds or so in front.
So I've never felt that pressure ever before.
But sheer panic set in,
and with a few laps to go, I mean, you know,
a tyre could blow out, suspension could break,
the brakes could fail, engine could blow up,
you could make a mistake and spin off.
And all these feelings in the car you have to manage
because if you don't
you'll crash on every corner.
(UPLIFTING MUSIC)
1985, the Grand Prix of Europe at Brands Hatch.
And at long last, the British Motorsport public
could let out a collective sigh of relief
because after 72 Grand Prix starts,
Nigel Mansell at last crossed the line in first position.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
I actually saw Roseanne long before I saw Nigel
at the end of the race.
And we didn't say much, really.
Just, you know, hugged and...
it's happened and it's OK now.
It'd been such a long, hard fight to get there.
(UPLIFTING MUSIC CONTINUES)
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
You know, I think Nigel was one of those guys
that didn't really wanna show too much emotion.
And then as soon as he won his first race,
I feel that it all came out and we saw the true Nigel
and he felt confident in, you know, expressing himself.
It's the most wonderful feeling in the world.
Now he didn't need to prove anything anymore.
I think anybody who's tried for the number of years he'd tried
and then you suddenly win a race,
you're a foot taller, then, aren't you?
(UPLIFTING MUSIC CONTINUES)
If anybody's won the race for me today,
it's the people out there. They've just been unbelievable.
I mean, on the last few laps I could just see 'em.
I mean, it was just extraordinary.
The best feeling I've ever had in my life.
I think more than any other British driver I've known,
he has a genuine love affair with the British public.
And once you get over that hurdle,
I was up and gone.
I mean, I was ready to win everything.
Immediately after came the second victory -
the very next Grand Prix in South Africa.
And suddenly we went into the close season thinking,
"Hey, you know, this guy could really take it
onto to the next level."
(CLICKING)
(FOREBODING MUSIC)
Keke had had an offer to go to McLaren.
The thinking was, Nigel's pretty good,
but is he that good
and is he gonna win us a world championship?
So Frank was casting around for the next driver.
We need to get a proven winner. We need to get Nelson Piquet.
He was a double world champion at that point
and he was Mr Perfect in every dimension
from Frank's point of view.
He loved the bikes, he loved the girls,
he loved everything about Nelson's cosmopolitan way of life.
He sent me off to Nelson's hotel room
to get the draft agreement signed.
Just said Nelson is the number one driver.
I wasn't exactly thrilled with it 'cause I knew Nelson's reputation.
Hopefully we could work close enough with Nelson to be,
you know...
be in the top three all the time.
From his point of view, it was just yet another super quick driver
who'd won world championships. He always thought,
"Well, you know, and I'll beat him, I'll look even better, I guess."
You know, that's the way he thought.
The feeling was one of tremendous optimism.
ANNOUNCER: Part of the contract allows Mobile to tour
the Williams Oxfordshire-based race shop
with some of its favoured clients.
And we can monitor the functions of the engine meanwhile.
ANNOUNCER: For Peter Windsor, it's a routine floor show.
I joined Frank full-time in '85
to do all the liveries and the uniforms,
all that colour stuff. He can blame me for that.
But as a result of that, I was quite involved
at tests and at races.
We were testing at Ricard.
I mean, you could... there's so many ifs about this thing,
but in fact Frank didn't really need to be there.
He wanted to be there 'cause it was a test
and it was the first time we were running
the FW11 Honda car.
I set off with Frank and he was in a Avis Ford Sierra.
And it was a lovely afternoon, Saturday afternoon,
but I didn't know that he was so into being flat out
all the time.
All I said was, "Are the brakes OK on this thing, Frank?"
Which was my way of trying to say, "Do we need to go this quickly?"
And he said, "Yeah, yeah, the brakes are fine, brakes are fine."
And he goes through this kink.
The back end just came out a little bit and I remember thinking,
"Now we'll see how good he is."
Frank did one of those,
which immediately set up an oscillation, of course.
We were obviously gonna hit the wall.
(CAR SMASHES)
Came to rest upside down.
All I could hear was Frank saying, "Get me out, I'm trapped.
I can't move. Get me out."
The next thing, I was just lying in the grass field
with a car ten metres away with Frank's...
well, I was just cradling Frank's head in my lap.
Nelson and I, an engineer, we raced to the accident
and obviously saw the whole thing
as it as it happened, pretty much.
And I remember, obviously, travelling to the hospital
in the ambulance to try and keep Frank alive, basically,
and keep him stable.
Nigel got into the ambulance with Frank
and basically just kept him conscious,
kept winding him up,
cracking jokes, abusing him, whatever, you know,
just to keep him going, keep the adrenaline going.
He was incredible under stress.
Somebody rang up and said,
"Oh, Frank's had a bad accident."
Yeah, I mean we were all obviously quite shocked,
and then the stories coming out was how bad it was.
I think we were all sort of on tenterhooks
because Frank was such an integral part
of the paddock and the team.
Patrick Head assumed the mantle of leading the team
and did a fabulous job.
Everyone just closed ranks,
which is what you have to do in adversity.
Even Nelson and I closed complete ranks
and for a short period of time
we really worked well together.
Determination of Ginny Williams was to keep her husband alive.
I mean, an amazing lady who fought
because, you know, there were people saying,
"No, he won't survive."
But when he reappeared, I mean, it was a...
it was very emotional for everybody.
Very emotional.
Well, I suppose that day was just the inevitable result
of 27 years of really good driving.
I was laying there on the ground while the ambulance came.
It took about an hour to get there.
I couldn't feel very much except my hands and arms were burning
as if I'd fallen off a bicycle and got gravel,
you know, ripped the skin off.
But over the next few months, one realised that, you know,
you're not gonna walk again, and that was rather a shame.
NARRATOR: Frank Williams is quadriplegic.
Yep. From his shoulders down,
he has no control over the functions of his own body.
The intricate wiring of his nervous system is snapped,
leaving the moving parts as dead as a broken machine.
One of his first reactions was to sort of curse and swear
and say, "I hope this isn't gonna mean
that I'm not gonna get to the Brazilian Grand Prix."
(DRUMS BEATING)
Piquet kicked off the 1986 season
with a win on home ground in Rio.
The second round in Spain, Nigel and Ayrton
were wheel to wheel, recording the second closest finish
in F1 history,
but Nigel just got beaten on that day.
It was so close, I think they should give us...
they should give us seven-and-a-half points each.
The canny Alain Prost then took back-to-back victories
at Imola and Monaco,
and as the reigning world champion,
he then drove himself right to the forefront
of the '86 title battle.
Nigel really had to dig deep to make sure
that he remained within range
and my goodness, during the mid part of that season,
he put together a string of results
which changed the course of the championship.
I'm sorry it took so long, Frank,
but we cracked it this year already.
(DRUNS BEATING)
The relationship with Nigel and Nelson broke down very quickly.
Nelson felt that, as number one,
he shouldn't be troubled by the other car at any stage.
I was winning races and told to slow down.
Or, I was catching up with the leader
and told to slow down and stay status quo.
Well, at those times my radio didn't function very well.
You know, if you're racing, you're racing.
The memo was I should never be quicker than him
and I should never beat him, but I didn't get the memo.
He put together a run of four wins in five races.
The most important and the most emotional
was the British Grand Prix win at Brands Hatch,
beating Piquet and beating Piquet well.
Adding to the emotion at Brands Hatch
was the appearance in the pit lane
of Frank Williams in his wheelchair.
A few months earlier, nobody had expected to see him back
at a Grand Prix circuit, but with Nigel winning
and his team spearheading the world championship race,
one of the great moments.
(HORN BLARING)
Mansell's victory spurred Piquet on
and he went on a run of victories of his own.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
With three races to go, four drivers could still win
the World Championship, and the ringmaster, Bernie Ecclestone,
gathered them all together in Estoril for a legendary picture
now known as the Gang of Four.
That photograph of the four drivers -
Senna, Prost, Piquet, Mansell -
reminds you of just how tough
and how competitive Formula One was at that time.
I mean, you're talking about four of the all-time greats there
in one shot. I mean, it was truly a golden era.
It's just unbelievable to think back
that the former office cleaner from Hall Green in Birmingham
at that time was leading all of them.
And the others had world championships,
and Nigel hadn't got one yet,
but there they are trying to be friendly. (LAUGHS)
(ENGINE ROARING)
To be realistic, I think Nigel is world champion today,
but it's not finished yet.
The lineup for the grid for tomorrow's Australian Grand Prix,
Nigel Mansell will start on pole position.
Remember, Nigel only needs to finish in the top three in Adelaide
to win the world championship ahead of his two closest challengers,
Alain Prost and Nelson Piquet.
He now has the chance, of course, to take the title he's waited for,
for six years.
With Senna out of contention,
the season came down to one final race in Adelaide.
Three drivers, Mansell with a six-point lead
over Piquet and Prost. Surely this was his to lose.
Just very excited that we were gonna get a British world champion.
It was Nigel's moment, it was Nigel's day in the sun.
Once again, Formula One was front page news.
Can our Nige do it?
We hadn't had a British world champion since James Hunt in 1976
and there was this fantastic sense of national expectation.
(HELICOPTER WHIRRING)
(CARS REVVING)
ANNOUNCER: And it's go, and a superb start from Nigel Mansell.
Senna goes through into second place ahead of Piquet.
Race was going to plan.
Nigel was gonna win.
You know, it was all going so well
and then it... of course it all unravelled.
In a race, you're never counting any chickens.
You know, you know anything can happen.
Tyres were a big issue then.
Particularly on a circuit like Adelaide,
there's a lot of heat and load
going through the rear tyres, particularly under traction.
Having said that, in those days a pit stop
was always a slightly risky thing.
You just want everything to go smoothly.
You don't want to go into the pits
and worry about a wheel not going on
or a cross-threaded wheel nut 'cause then your race is over.
They looked at the tyres, though, and they said they look good.
You know, they look fine so Nigel doesn't need to come in
for a tyre change. So he just cruised around.
He was in an easy position
and he was gonna be world champion
until that fateful straight.
(EXPLOSION) And look that!
Collosally, that's Mansell.
That is Nigel Mansell.
(SOFT MUSIC)
We were watching that long shot of him coming down the straight,
and then suddenly all hell lets loose and we just were gobsmacked.
It all was looking so good.
I think it was also, it was so spectacular
seeing the sparks and the wheel.
I can still, in my minds eye,
see the car, and see the tyre and see the sparks.
They brought Piquet into the pit,
so that scuppered his world championship chance, as well.
Alain Prost was the world champion.
When you feel like you're in control, shit hits the fan.
It normally does,
but that one was just out of the blue.
Everybody beats themselves up if it could have been avoided.
We could have put him on new tyres.
The only thing I regret is that I should have broken
a couple of legs and gone in the wall
and would have been world champion. You know, it'd been worth it.
If he didn't hang onto it at 200 miles an hour
and take it down the escape road, he would've put it into the wall.
They probably would've red flagged it, 'cause the car would've been
in the middle of the circuit. They would've taken it back a race
and he would've won the world championship.
But he did the right thing.
Just in that one moment, you can see how good Nigel is.
Every correction he makes to the wheel is absolutely perfect.
There's no overcorrection at any stage.
He's only got one tyre on the back of the car
and he's flat out and that was it,
championship to Prost. I'm sure Piquet was delighted.
For us, it was just like the worst trip home
that I've ever had.
No, I don't... I think he hightailed it away.
I don't remember even speaking to anybody who'd seen him
because, obviously, he would've been distraught.
Must have been devastating and I can't imagine
what went through his head.
You couldn't breathe. I couldn't breathe.
I mean, you come that close
and to know that you might never,
ever, ever smell it
or touch it or taste it ever again is...
How do you live with that the rest of your life?
And that's what kept me going.
I mean, the whole world had fallen apart.
The world championship had gone.
It was one of those iconic moments again in motor sport.
You know, that's how you lose a world championship.
I still sometimes have some sad moments
thinking how easy and how close it was
and to lose it in the way that we did was, was horrendous.
But the flip side of that is,
I think that just cemented the fans in place
for the rest of my career.
I mean, they lost the world championship, too.
That's what it felt like.
They shared it
and we shared everything together.
The irony is that, you know,
that he became a bigger star because of what happened
and the way it happened.
And perhaps even if he'd won, you know,
it became part of his story.
His story is drama.
So there was no world championship for Nigel,
but all the accolades came his way
over the next couple of months.
There were honours of all kind,
including one which he always regarded
as particularly significant.
And that was the BBC viewers and the television viewers
voting him Sports Personality of the Year.
Where everyone, in their tens of thousands,
voted for the top sportsman of the year.
Far bigger honour
than winning the Formula One world championship.
I love the fans...
..and they kept me going.
Bless them.
You'll have to forgive me. You get a bit...
It's the pollen, it's the pollen. That's what it is.
(SOLEMN MUSIC)
(CLICKING)
(TENSE MUSIC)
That turbo car from 1987
was the peak of the turbo era.
They couldn't even measure the amount of horsepower
it was producing
and the Williams Honda FW11B
was the biggest monster of them all.
It was the best car out on the track.
It was gonna become down to a battle
between the two drivers - Nigel and Nelson.
They had not got a relationship.
They were what we'd say trading blows, weren't they?
I could sense and see there was a division happening in the team,
but I just put that down that, you know,
Nelson was a multiple world champion.
When you haven't won one, that's where you really are
at a disadvantage. He was being put under scrutiny.
You cannot say a better driver or worse driver
because I can say I win two championships and Nigel lost one.
Teammates in Formula One.
Yeah...
mates doesn't really work, I don't think.
There's always an atmosphere in a team,
especially if you're fighting for wins.
And Nigel and Nelson definitely had that.
Nelson Piquet, deep down there was a kind of
viciousness and a poison to him.
He was niggly, he was combative,
he was gossipy
and he was everything that you didn't want a teammate to be.
When Nigel did start to cramp Nelson's style,
whether it being qualifying, whether it be on the first lap
of a race, whether it be beating Nelson,
outracing him from start to finish,
he would go into Frank's office and say,
"You know, this is ridiculous. What is going on?
I'm supposed to be number one driver and this guy,
you keep giving him this and that and he's ahead of me.
They must be favouring Nigel with a better car
or Honda must be giving him a better engine
or something must be going on to explain this.
I don't like this situation. And Nigel's not good news at all."
Nelson was gonna use every bit of imagination
that he could to try to get inside Nigel's head,
irritate him, annoy him, upset him, beat him that way.
I think it was in Japan on the bullet train at one time,
and I'd hurt my ribs.
I think I fractured or cracked some ribs or whatever
and he kept poking me in my ribs on the way.
And I took it for a little while
and after you've been tapped a few times
I just turned around to him and I just looked at him
straight in the eyes and I said, "You do that one more time,
I will lay you out like there is no tomorrow."
Early '87, Nelson did an interview
with Playboy Brazil
in which he was asked about the differences
between him and Nigel.
And his reply was, "Well, the main difference
is I always have beautiful girlfriends and he has..."
And I won't use the word here, but he was very derogatory about Roseanne.
Roseanne is the nicest person you can meet in the world.
Their marriage is the most solid
I've ever experienced in any sporting environment.
The fact that Piquet felt that he needed to do these things,
I think it shows to what extent he felt threatened by Nigel.
Because if Nigel wasn't a threat, he wouldn't need to do it.
I think a lot of people thought it actually diminished Piquet.
He hit well below the belt and again,
but that just showed up his character
to say and do those things.
I don't think that speaks great volumes about yourself, does it?
And, of course, when that happens, from that moment onwards
he was a marked man so far as Nigel was concerned.
Whatever Nelson is, he is an idiot,
but he's a great driver.
Now, I had to hang it out there to even compete as a number two
to the number one.
Well, Nigel is a true racer
and when the lights go green, he kind of gets a bit red
and has a lot of anger in him and that's expressed
in some really superlative racing.
Frank Williams, he thought it was quite funny
that they were at each other's throat 'cause in his mind,
if you got two drivers who hate each other, they go faster.
What do you do? Do you turn around and say you've gotta be nice
to each other and work together?
As a team owner, you can't want better.
You know that at the end of a weekend
it will be a Williams car that wins
because your drivers are pushing each other so hard.
Piquet, by whatever means, was getting the upper hand
both in terms of what happened on the track
and maybe what was happening psychologically.
Our practise for the British Formula One Grand Prix
at Silverstone gets underway today
and the focus of attention this weekend will be on Nigel Mansell
and his William teammate Nelson Piquet,
who it seems have not been the best of friends.
The one great highlight, of course, was once again
the British Grand Prix at Silverstone,
where Nigel built up, built up,
built up to that wonderful move down the bottom
of the hangar straight.
The dummy move, I remember it in the karting days,
pretending you're going to the left and then
they slightly move that direction to cover you
and you change direction immediately and throw it down the inside.
(ENGINES ROARING)
They were so close to touching in what I would call
a pretty hairy overtake, but classic Nigel Mansell.
He was a bruiser and would do anything to succeed,
but Nelson gave him no room whatsoever.
It was one of the best overtakes 'cause that was on your teammate
in the same car.
And Williams did give both drivers the same equipment.
They never messed around like that.
I think that was actually the first proper track invasion we'd seen.
It was also the start, I think, of Mansell Mania.
If you're gonna have a home race,
that's the closest you can get to Birmingham.
So Silverstone is Nigel's backyard.
(CHEERING)
There were suddenly people coming to the races
that weren't necessarily Formula One fans.
They were Mansell fans. They wanted their man Nigel.
There was a worry, I think, in the sport that Nigel
was sort of attracting the wrong sort of fans. (CHUCKLES)
We were worried about getting football hooligans, I think.
People like an underdog, people like somebody
who's dogged and determined. I mean, the Bulldog spirit.
People were able to get behind the team and really felt part of it.
And when he won, it felt like they'd won.
They could see that Nigel was a real person,
that he had had a life before he became a Grand Prix driver.
He wasn't the product of some academy
that had taken him from karting straight through,
seamlessly into Formula One without ever having to do
a day's work in his life or get his hands dirty.
He was one of them, really.
The Red 5 symbol with Nigel
became a big marketing thing
and everyone knew Nigel as "Oh, Red 5, Red 5."
I think it's also because of his look.
You know, the bushy eyebrows, the big moustache.
He definitely had a look.
(LAUGHS)
Nelson wasn't happy. (CHUCKLES)
As you can imagine,
But the fans were.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
They absolutely electrified the Silverstone crowd
and left them all believing that, "Yeah, our Nigel's the man."
He's turned the corner and, you know, the rest of the championship
is surely gonna be his.
It looked like it was gonna go down to the wire again in '87.
Nigel was in a good place.
It was well set up and it was gonna be pretty close for sure.
Came down to the last two races,
Piquet leading the championship charge.
But Nigel Mansell was still in touch with those two races left,
first of which was the Japanese Grand Prix.
Suzuka, 1987.
Nelson went out and did an amazing time in qualifying
and put in a great lap.
The moment Nigel saw that time
that Nelson put in,
that was game on.
And off Nigel went to match him.
I probably...
I thought I could get around that corner
just that little bit quicker
and will just go on the curb that little bit.
(CAR SMASHES)
I remember the shock up my spine
and it stopped me breathing for a minute or so.
I couldn't breathe, I was just paralysed.
It crushed my lower back.
Spinal concussion, they call it.
He was in so much agony.
It was pretty obvious that Nigel was not gonna race the next day.
So, obviously, that had handed the championship
to Nelson there and then.
He went off by helicopter and that was effectively
the championship over and it gave it to Nelson.
You know, there was no roistering celebrating.
Nelson didn't do that, nobody did that because he got the championship
but not the way anybody wanted it to end.
It was an anti-climax.
(SOLEMN MUSIC)
We still won the constructors' championship.
It was a bit of a mixed emotion.
I was beginning to wonder whether Nigel was jinxed,
shall we say.
And once again, the chorus started -
it ain't gonna happen for Nigel.
You know, I watched a couple of people dying
in intensive care over the time I was there,
and then I thought, in all honesty, I'll never race again.
When you hurt so badly and you think you're never gonna walk again,
it doesn't really matter.
My focus wasn't about racing then.
It was about, you know,
having my children climb on the bed
and don't understand why dad can't come outta bed.
I think the race was about November
and my leg feelings and my legs never came back till...
started to come back in January, February, I think.
The end of 1987 was pretty awful for Nigel.
He was lying in a Japanese hospital with a broken back.
He'd lost the world championship to Nelson,
and then Piquet had taken the Honda engines with him
and left Williams for Lotus.
(CLICKING)
NARRATOR: These are the FW11s, which took the team
and their sponsors to absolute victory in 1987.
The problem is these $10 million technological masterpieces
are antiques, more useless than a pre-war Mercedes
because Honda won't even let Williams keep last year's engines.
Williams were back in the pack for the 1988 season
and seemed to underline even more the fact
that Nigel's big chance had gone.
Nigel Mansell is leaving the Williams team for Ferrari next year
in a deal rumoured to be worth around £4 million to Mansell.
Nigel was the last driver
to be personally signed by Enzo Ferrari,
and that's quite a significant thing.
It's something Nigel himself is very proud of.
"The prophet is never recognised in his own country" is a phrase.
Interesting phrase, isn't it? When he went and raced for Ferrari,
they just saw what he did in a racing car
and what he did in a racing car gave him
the name "Il Leone."
And that's the way to look at Nigel Mansell.
He was a lion in a car.
He delivered some decent results for them
and then came all the political machinations
that proved his undoing.
Prost fell out with Senna at McLaren and needed to get out of there.
Ferrari had the opportunity to bring him in.
And even though Nigel had been there longer than Prost,
Prost very quickly worked out which were the levers you needed to pull.
And that situation, of course, all came to a head
at the British Grand Prix.
I got there and I got in my car
because we had qualifying cars and race cars.
And I sat in the car and I got in.
It's just like putting a pair of pants and your trousers on.
It didn't fit properly.
This is not my car. What the hell's going on?
So I went to the team manager, I said, "Look, you know,
you swapped cars on me. What the hell's going on?"
They had to admit that they...
Alain said, "I wanted Nigel's qualifying car
because of that qualifier the week before everything else."
If they'd just told me the truth, I wouldn't have got upset.
But they didn't. I had to squeeze it out of them.
So we went out and I qualified in his car,
got pole position and I said,
"Which car are you gonna have for the race now?"
Nigel took pole position, he was leading the race,
but once again his Ferrari broke down
and his teammate went on to win.
And so in front of the crowd, he throws his gloves.
The wind went out of my sails.
And I knew when I threw my balaclava
and I knew when I threw my gloves over the copse corner
and I was almost gonna throw my helmets, as well.
(SIGHS)
All that commitment, all the focus and everything else just went...
And I said, "I'm done."
It does make me very sad,
but I'm announcing my retirement today.
And retired, and that was it.
And he was off.
You know, people in shock. I think we all were.
And the race was still going on behind and we were all thinking,
"What on earth is going on?"
I think a fair amount of the press took it all with a pinch of salt.
And, you know, "This is Nigel. This is Nigel."
My commitment was to my family.
The years I was away from my family and my wife was...
it was tough.
There's so many incredible moments in my career
with Lotus and Williams and Ferrari
and a number of people I loved had died.
My teammates had died.
I've been close, then,
obviously a couple of times.
I'll get out and get a life.
I've got a long life ahead of me.
I'm still alive, I'm still breathing.
I was the happiest I could have been.
I think it was about six weeks or so. It was really good.
I was planning my golf and I was planning fishing.
We were really, really, really in a good place.
It was great.
And then...
of course, Prost and Senna,
they're supposed to be driving for Williams
for '91 and '92.
They obviously did their homework
and saw that the Williams wasn't gonna be the world beater
that they thought it was gonna be and neither one of them
wanted to drive for him.
And there was no number one drivers around.
Sheridan popped up, he said,
"We'd like you to be the lead driver for Williams."
And, of course, then ultimately,
Roseanne and I decided that I perhaps wouldn't be able
to live with myself if I didn't give it a go.
And one of the journalists suddenly came up to me and said,
"I've just had my office on the phone.
They've just said that they've heard
Nigel's coming back to Williams."
I said, "Well, but he retired."
"Well, he is unretiring."
The sport couldn't afford to lose him
and thankfully Formula One
managed to hang on to Nigel Mansell.
ANNOUNCER: Welcome to the Goodwood Festival of Speed,
the world's greatest celebration of motor sport.
Undoubtedly one highlight of the weekend
will be Nigel Mansell
being reunited with the Mighty Williams FW14B.
Red 5 is back.
FW14B Car 11 is so special
because it was only Nigel Mansell that drove that particular car.
And also to Williams fans,
it really is the absolute pinnacle of what we can do as a team.
Today we are prepping the car.
We're gonna meet Nigel Mansell.
He's gonna sit in this car for the first time since 1992.
Make sure that we're happy with how he fits in the car
for the big moment on Sunday.
To bring such a driver as him and the car together,
it's a really big moment, not just myself,
but for the whole crew.
(CLICKING)
NARRATOR: Eight months on from his emotional retirement,
Mansell was back at Silverstone today
with a team he can trust and a new car
produced by the organisation that so nearly brought him
world championships in '86 and '87.
Nigel was back in normality again,
this time with a teammate
with which he could feel comfortable.
Finally he got Ricardo and that coincided with a whole new era
for Williams with Patrick Head working with
this amazing boy hero, Adrian Newey.
He didn't come in with any real fanfare.
He basically just appeared.
Even then, back then, you know,
you could tell straight away he was a very special individual.
He didn't always need a wind tunnel.
He could look at a car and see which way the air
was actually flowing over it.
Using the cockpit as an aerodynamic device was a completely...
a massive departure from the old boxy-looking Williams.
They'd also had Renault engines and Renault engines
were coming strong and they were going places.
So '91 season was all about Senna versus Mansell.
You talk about iconic moments in motor sport,
but that shot down the straight where Senna and Mansell
were defying each other to back off.
Wonderful Formula One.
I think it took me a little bit of time to realise
just how ruthless Ayrton was.
I mean, he actually planned how to knock people off the circuit
a number of times and I was a recipient of that a few times.
In the early days, Senna was a bit wild.
He didn't mind taking people off the racetrack.
Nigel famously once pinned him against the wall by his throat
and said, "If you ever do that again, I'll knock your block off."
We had a hell of a punch up at the Spa Grand Prix
and we both went off.
He says, "You're absolutely crazy, aren't you?" And I said, "No."
I said, "I'm not crazy." I said, "But I've had enough of you.
I'm not gonna let you intimidate me and take me off anymore.
And if you're gonna try and kill me, I'm telling you now, I'll kill you.
We're either gonna die together
or there's gonna be a healthy respect."
And from that second on,
and I would say there was a far greater understanding
between us.
Yeah, we got on a lot better then.
(BRIGHT PIANO MUSIC)
And then, of course, we get to Silverstone
and, of course, Nigel is gonna do it again for the crowd.
This time the crowd come pouring onto the circuit
and he picked up Ayrton Senna
and a wonderful gesture to give him a lift back to the pits.
He got criticised for that.
All Ayrton was doing was reading the data
from his steering wheel to report back to the team
and what he'd seen on the Williams.
So Nigel's nice act backfired a little bit.
After the Silverstone heroics.
Well, Nigel was in firm contention
until, of course, that awful moment in Portugal.
The scenario couldn't be better.
He's in control of the Grand Prix
and it looks like it's gonna be a big point swing
because Senna is further back.
It was all set up perfectly for Nigel.
The car came in, the gun went in,
took the nut out, wheel came off,
put the nut on. It got cross-threaded
and what he did was pull the gun out
and when the guy on the rear jack saw the gun come out,
he thought, "Oh, that wheel's clear."
And that was the problem.
(ENGINE ROARING)
I think I remember Patrick Head saying,
"Operationally, (CHUCKLES)
I think we could have done better,
like putting four wheels on instead of just three."
The media were onto us wanting to know whose fault it was.
And I'll give Nigel his due.
He never once blamed anybody.
He said, you know, "We win as a team and we lose as a team."
The world title challenge completely disappeared.
For a third time he was runner up
in the Formula One world championship.
But things were only about to get a bit worse in Adelaide.
We were racing in a monsoon.
There was something like seven, eight, maybe even nine cars
crashed out already and I was racing tooth and nail,
guess with who? Ayrton.
And I just aquaplaned straight off,
straight into a solid concrete wall
and I felt my foot break as soon as I hit the wall.
It wasn't really obvious at the time how serious it was,
but as time went on, it became clear this was a much more serious
situation than it had first looked.
My surgeon said, "Your foot splinted."
He said, "We've gotta get the chisel
and hit it with a hammer and get the bone spurs off
which were splintered."
And I said, "Look, I can't have three months off."
I said, "What's the worst case scenario?"
He said, "Well, eventually the splinters
will come through the surface."
And he said, "Then you can pull 'em out
but it'll be very, very painful."
And I said, "Well, I'll do that."
And when you have an injury, you have to then go to the FAA doctor
and pass medicals. I knew I wouldn't pass a medical
'cause if they examined it and touched it, I'd pass out.
My thought process,
perhaps not the best, I admit,
was not tell anybody,
which is pretty tough because I had a limp all year.
So '91 ends with Nigel second again
but there was a difference this time.
There was a real optimism within the team
and I think Nigel knew it, as well.
He just needed to make sure that he was ready.
I was overdue.
I mean, the fans were overdue. We were overdue.
I mean, come on, let's get it done.
(SOFT MUSIC)
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
How you doing? You all right? You good?
Nigel, you all right?
All right, Nige? Good to see you.
Might be racing this weekend. Oh, yeah.
Oh, dear.
This is your original seat.
Good Lord.
Definitely got smaller. You've got bigger.
(CHUCKLES)
Hey, Jay, this is the old crew.
We all go back a long way. Yeah.
Remember how to drive it? I don't know.
You have to teach me.
..zero, the engine will stop
and then just flick it back into P1. OK, got it.
Just make sure you're in neutral, yeah?Yeah. Got it.
When we start, we put this one up immediately.
Yeah. All right, and then we go,
we switch it off and then put it back to one.
Perfect. Perfect.
You don't remember?I remember, yeah. I remember.(CHUCKLES)
The clutch is very hard, isn't it? Hoo-hoo!
Amazingly enough, the seat fits really nice.
It's comfortable.
The back of the spine is in the seat, which is lovely,
and the headrest is not too bad.
I'll tell you, coming back and sitting in it,
you actually realise just how exposed we were.
I mean, when you think the protection they've got now.
(SOFT MUSIC CONTINUES)
Everyone...
I just want to let you know how really, really proud I am
to be here and drive the car.
It's fantastic.
All the memories are flooding back.
I remember this position very well.
(MEN LAUGHING)
This will always be your car. It's that time in history -
Memories in time, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, to think it's 30 years ago is staggering.I know. I know.
(ENGINE REVVING)
Can I take a picture of you? Yes, please. Yeah.
Oh, I'm so blessed. Thank you.
Thank you.
As '91 went into '92,
Nigel knew he had a real opportunity
to win the world championship.
You dreamt it for years and years, you've tasted it.
I mean, I'm getting goose pimply now.
How can you go goose pimply 30 years after?
It was almost like a Rocky movie.
I mean, he's 39 years of age, he's almost 40.
He's got a broken foot and he's going into the last year
of his contract.
There was very much this sense that it's now or never,
it's make or break.
He was running outta years so I think he knew
this probably was his last shot at it.
I think they were very excited and very confident about their car.
These days there's a new car every season,
but it was such a good car. I think they just felt that
they could develop some parts of it and it would be better.
The FW14B is one of the top five greatest cars of all time.
It had a new technological weapon known as active ride.
They had gone through such an exhaustive testing programme
in '91 with the likes of Damon Hill and Mark Blundell
to make sure the car was reliable for it in '92.
Nigel called me the test monkey. I think something like that.
It just...
was a beast, basically.
It had a life of its own.
It used to just sit there in the garage moving on its own,
up and down, side to side,
bleeding the air out of its hydraulic systems.
What was so special about the active ride suspension?
What it meant was that the car would anticipate
the bumps in the road.
Look at one of those videos on YouTube of holding a chicken's body
and tilting it like that and yet the head stays exactly
in the same place. That is active ride.
It's not to do with the suspension, it's to do with the aerodynamics.
If you look at pictures of the active car,
it looks like the suspension's broken.
It looks like... You can't see any air underneath it.
It is stuck to the ground.
If you can keep the car in a steady state and keep it stable,
then those aerodynamics are always operating at their top level.
It was only really made possible by computers
and it meant that this was the start of
really what we take for granted today.
You know, they broke that ground.
Active suspension looks great on paper.
Sometimes it does weird things.
Would start to shake a little bit and then it'd get really violent
and you don't want that when you're going 180 miles an hour.
So Nigel was understandably sceptical about this.
The car, I would say,
is one of the most dangerous cars to drive.
You had to anticipate what it was gonna do,
trust that it wouldn't completely fail you.
But if it did, you'd get hurt.
And it hadn't killed me, so it'd be all right. (LAUGHS)
Subject to upsetting my wife and the family and friends
and everything else, I came first.
There was nothing that came between me and doing my job.
Nigel took me to one side and he said,
"Just make this car bulletproof and we will clean up this season."
We basically then went off to the first five races
and won the first five races on the trot.
(CHEERING)
I think he found a groove with that car.
You know, I think he found a setup that really worked for him
and you can see it. He was so confident in his driving.
It's a complete caricature and a falsehood to say,
"Oh, this was a robot car and all Mansell had to do
was just drive it and he would win."
But Nigel was really in tune with the physics of the car
and he loved the physics of the car.
There's something extra that he was getting out of it.
I mean, he would wring it's neck.
I wanted things so bad
that I was prepared to
push it out there a little bit more.
Ayrton Senna, they were envious. Everyone was envious because
who wouldn't want to be in the sharp end?
I knew that everyone was stacking up to take the drive.
I was willing to go into every race and risk my life.
If I died, I died.
But the commitment I had was absolute.
I mean, that's the only thing I can say. The commitment was total.
We knew that the car could perform, we knew Nigel could perform,
and we had a confidence that
neither was gonna let us down.
We could see the championship coming towards us
and it was like, we can't drop the ball this time,
we can't drop the ball.
ANNOUNCER: Finally, the moment we have all been waiting for.
Today we are at Goodwood Festival of Speed.
We're here with FW14B, Nigel Mansell.
We can't wait to get onto the hill this afternoon
and give them what they've come for.
To see Nigel driving the car again,
it's hard to imagine what that means to us,
'cause I mean these were heady times.
We were developing the car week on week.
He drove it to the limit and it was just spectacular.
'92 Was just a dream start
and you wonder when it was gonna end, of course.
You knew something would go wrong at some point.
Of course it was Monaco and it was ridiculous.
Nigel, with this 30-second lead, came into the pits
but came out behind Ayrton Senna
and he gave us six laps of the most extraordinary
Formula One theatre that you can imagine.
He was right on his gearbox, but even for Nigel,
there wasn't gonna be enough room to get past it.
He never won the Monaco Grand Prix. It's crazy.
Yeah, what ifs.
Motorsport's littered with what ifs.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
At the '92 British Grand Prix,
I think we saw machine and Nigel Mansell as a driver
at its absolute zenith.
A bit special and the crowd there, electric,
the place was. You didn't need to watch the TV.
You could hear them just by the crowd as to what was happening
and set the fastest ever lap.
Nigel was 2.7 seconds ahead
of the first non-Williams driven by
no lesser driver than Ayrton Senna.
When Nigel won in '92, it was his fourth British Grand Prix win.
He was just the perfect guy at the perfect time,
in the perfect car, in the perfect team,
in front of a crowd that was thirsty
and hungry for a British hero.
(ETHEREAL MUSIC)
And so we got to Hungary and we went there
with a possibility of clinching the championship.
It's amazing to think, 'cause even then
that was quite early in the season to win a championship,
but that was the measure of the dominance of the season.
Didn't sleep a wink thinking, you know,
is it gonna happen, not happen?
Been there so many times before.
ANNOUNCER: Finally, the moment we have all been
waiting for is upon us.
I'll talk you through it as we go.
Obviously it's been a while for all of us. (LAUGHS)
We were all very cautious in terms of what had happened
in seasons before, but seven race victories coming up to Hungary.
A second place would give him the title.
How could he possibly lose it from there?
Are we all ready?
(ENGINE STARTS)
It went off sort of OK.
And I was second and... but then
same thing we had at Monaco again.
We had a problem with the rear with a slow puncture.
They were screaming, "Come in, come in,"
and it dropped me back to sixth.
Going out the pits with the mindset with the new fresher boots on,
I said, "I gotta do about ten qualifying laps
to get back as close I could to third place."
I had to come second to actually win the championship.
I pushed really, really hard.
ANNOUNCER: And he's away. Oh, he's not hanging around.
This is a classic Mansell and Williams display.
I'd have gone through anybody.
Nobody messed with me in '92.
Nobody.
ANNOUNCER: This is sensational.
Man and machine finally reunited,
sparking all those memories of 1992.
(ENGINES REVVING)
One last blast across the finish line.
What a fantastic sight.
You are about to see Nigel Mansell
become world champion of 1992,
and he's world champion.
(MUSIC CONTINUES)
(CROWD CHEERING)
I remember just thinking, yeah, yeah.
The British superstar.
It made you proud to get him to his...
basically his dream.
(CROWD CHEERING)
Ayrton was on the podium with me.
He turned to me and said, "Do you understand why I'm like I am now?"
And I said, "Well, not really."
He said, "Well, how good's the feeling?"
He said, "That's why we're such bastards."
And I figured he's right.
(CROWD APPLAUDING)
(CROWD CHEERING)
I always knew he could do it
and I always knew he would do it,
and I'm lucky to have been a part of that team
that enabled that to happen.
Massive round of applause for the 1992 World champion,
Nigel Mansell.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
He deserved two or three championships.
They weren't to be, but he deserved to be known
as Nigel Mansell, world champion.
Frank was happy, Patrick was happy.
I mean, not that Frank will ever show his emotions,
but you could tell.
Nigel's performance in Formula One
drew audiences.
I think he should be regarded as one of the greatest drivers
of all time.
(CROWD CHEERING)
INTERVIEWER: You think Roseanne Mansell
will be pretty relieved at this moment?
Yeah, I just can't wait to see her.
I'm still with my best friend through thick and thin,
which is my wife.
That is the thing that I'm proudest of.
We're coming up to 48 years of marriage, which is very special.
And when you look at the injuries
and some of the substantial injuries that I've come back from...
..I can't take the credit for that.
There's only one person...
..who can take the credit
and that's my wife to nurse me back.
I look back and go, how the heck did I get through all that?
I have no idea how I had the fortitude
and determination and even the...
oh, my goodness me,
the stubbornness to keep going,
but I did.
I don't like giving up.
(RHYTHMICAL MUSIC)
(ENGINE REVVING)
(CAR SCREAMING PAST)
You see how quick it went?
(LAUGHS)
Yeah, yeah. (LAUGHS)
(CROWD CHEERING)
(UPBEAT MUSIC)
Oh, no.
No.
Sorry.
Elvis, Priscilla, come here.
Come on, come on.
(UPBEAT MUSIC CONTINUES)
Gonna change the engine and gearbox for tomorrow
and a few other things, but...
(LAUGHTER)
How are you?This is my favourite driver.(LAUGHS)
This one is my favourite.
(UPBEAT MUSIC CONTINUES)
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