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I have always been competitive. I think that it is something you are born with. At around the age of seven I realised that I could take people on, whether it was at cards, Monopoly or competitive sports and win. At the time, it wasnât that I wanted to excel, I just wanted myself, or whatever team I was on, to win. I have always risen to a challenge, whether it be to win a bet with a golfing partner or to come through from behind to win a race. I thrive on the excitement of accepting a challenge; understanding exactly what is expected of me, focusing my mind on my objective, and then just going for it. I have won many Grands Prix like this and quite a few golf bets too.
As a child at school I played all the usual sports, like cricket, soccer and athletics and I always enjoyed competing against teams from other schools. But then another, more thrilling, pursuit began to clamour for my attention.
My introduction to motor sport came from my father. He was involved in the local kart racing scene and when he took me along for the first time at the age of nine, a whole new world of possibilities opened up. It was fast and exhilarating, it required bravery tempered by intelligence, aggression harnessed by strategy. Where before I had enjoyed the speeds my mother took me to as a passenger, now I could be in control. It was just me and the kart against the competition.
To a child, the karts looked like real racing machines. The noise and the smell made a heady cocktail and when you pushed down the accelerator, the vibrations of the engine through the plastic seat made your back tingle and your teeth chatter. It was magical. It became my world. I wanted to know everything about the machines, how they worked and more important how to make them go faster. I wanted to test their limits, to see how far I could push them through a corner before they would slide. I wanted to find new techniques for balancing the brakes and the throttle to gain more speed into corners. I wanted to drive every day, to take on other children in their machines and fight my way past them. I wanted to win.
At first I drove on a dirt track around a local allotment, then I went onto proper kart tracks. The racing bug bit deep. I won hundreds of races and many championships, and as I got more and more embroiled in the international karting scene in the late sixties and early seventies I realised that this sport would be my life. Where before I had imagined choosing a career as a fireman or astronaut, as every young boy did in those days, or becoming an engineer like my father, now I had an almost crystal clear vision of what lay ahead. My competitiveness, determination and aggression had found a focus.
I also used to love going to watch motor races. The first Grand Prix I went to was in 1962 at Aintree when Jim Clark won for Lotus by a staggering 49 seconds ahead of John Surtees in a Lola. I saw Clark race several times before his tragic death in 1968 and I used to particularly enjoy his finesse at the wheel of the Lotus Cortina Saloon cars. He had a beautifully smooth style and was certainly the fastest driver of his time. I can also remember rooting for Jackie Stewart when he was flying the flag for Britain. We went to Silverstone for the 1973 British GP, when the race had to be stopped after one lap because of a pile up on the start line. Iâll never forget watching Jackie in his Tyrrell as he went down the pit straight in the lead and then straight on at Copse Corner. I thought: âThatâs not very goodâ but it turned out that his throttle had stuck open.
Throughout the sixties and seventies as I tried to hoist myself up the greasy pole and move into their world, I followed the fortunes of the Grand Prix drivers. My favourites were James Hunt and Jody Scheckter, while I particularly liked watching Patrick Depailler and Ronnie Peterson, who were both very gutsy, aggressive drivers with a lot of style.
I never saw him race but I had a lot of respect for the legendary fifties star Juan-Manuel Fangio. To win the World Championship five times is a remarkable achievement. I have read about him and met him several times and I only wish I could have seen him race. Iâm told it was a stirring sight.
As I turned from child to adolescent and into adulthood I absorbed myself totally in motor racing, becoming totally wrapped up both in my own karting career and in the wider field of the sport. I am very much aware of the history of Grand Prix racing and I think that nowadays it is a lot more competitive than it was in the days of Fangio or Clark, although Iâm sure that the people competing in those days would dismiss that idea.
People like to compare drivers from different eras and discuss who was the greatest of all time, but the cars were so different that it makes it impossible to say who was the best; you just have to respect the records that each driver set and the history that they made. What I think you can say is that anyone who is capable of winning a World Championship in one sport could probably have done it in another discipline if they had put their minds to it, because they all have something special in them which gives them the will to win.
I had that will to win and I knew all along that, given half a chance, I could make it to the top. Against the wishes of my father, I switched from karts to single-seater racing cars in 1976 and thus began the almost impossible seventeen year journey which took me to the Formula 1 World Championship in 1992 and the IndyCar World Series in 1993. Along the way I suffered more knocks than a boxer, more rejections than an encyclopedia salesman.
In our sport it is often said that truth is stranger than fiction. The most unbelievable things can happen in motor racing, especially Formula 1, and in my case they frequently did. I can laugh now at my childhood vision of a racing driverâs life, it seems hopelessly naive in comparison to the reality.
We began writing my autobiography at possibly the worst time I can remember for trying to explain why I am a racing driver. My rival in many thrilling Grands Prix and a driver whose ability I respected enormously, Ayrton Senna, had just been killed in the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix. It was a crushing blow. The last driver to have perished in a Grand Prix car was my old team-mate Elio de Angelis in 1986, another death which hit me hard. I had seen many drivers get killed during my career, but for some of the younger ones it came as quite a shock to realise how close to death they could come on the track.
It had been twelve years since anyone had died during an actual Grand Prix. There have been huge advances made in safety since those days which certainly helped me to survive some horrific accidents, but when Senna and Roland Ratzenberger were both killed in the same weekend the whole sport was left reeling. There had been many terrible accidents in the preceding twelve years, but the drivers had got away mostly unharmed. Racing had been lucky many times, now its luck had run out.
Every time I thought about it, shivers ran down my spine. It was difficult to comprehend that Ayrton was dead; that he would never be seen again in a racing car. Ayrton was always so committed. Like me, he explored the limits and we had some thrilling no-holds barred battles where both of us drove at ten tenths the whole way. A mistake by either driver in any of those situations would have given the race to the other. It was pure competition.
He won half of his Grands Prix victories by beating me into second place and I won half of mine by beating him. We are in the Guinness Book of Records for sharing the closest finish in Grand Prix racing, at the 1986 Spanish Grand Prix, where he just pipped me by 0.014s as we crossed the finish line; a distance of just 93 centimetres after nearly 200 miles of racing. Some of the battles we had are part of the folklore of racing.
At Hungary in 1989, for example, I seized the opportunity, as we approached a back marker, to slingshot past him and grab a memorable victory. But perhaps the most enduring image of our rivalry was the duel down the long pit straight in the 1991 Spanish Grand Prix. His McLaren-Honda against my Williams-Renault; both of us flat-out on a wet track at over 180mph, with only the width of a cigarette-paper separating us, both totally committed to winning, neither prepared to give an inch. Like me, Ayrton wanted to win and was not a driver who took well to coming second.
Naturally everybody wanted to know what I thought about Ayrtonâs death and whether it would make me retire. I had achieved a great deal, I didnât need the money, I was a forty-year-old married man with three children, why continue to take the risk? The press had a field day, some writing that I was considering retirement, others saying that I was negotiating a return to Formula 1 for some unheard-of sum of money. I have never had such a hard time justifying what I do for a living as I did in the weeks following Ayrtonâs death. Every day I even questioned myself why I was doing it.
It didnât help that this period coincided with preparations for my second Indianapolis 500; a race which I remembered painfully from the year before, when I nearly won despite a severe back injury caused by hitting a wall at 180mph in Phoenix the previous month.
Every journalist and television reporter I spoke to during this period wanted me to articulate my fears about racing and my thoughts on Ayrtonâs death. They were just doing their job, of course, and it was my responsibility as a professional sportsman to talk to them, but it became thoroughly demotivating. If it were not for the fact that I am totally single-minded when it comes to racing, the barrage of questions about death could so easily have taken the edge off my competitive desire.
My passion for racing, undiminished by over thirty years of experience, was the only thing that made me put my helmet on, get into my car and drive flat out.
I am a great believer in fate, something else I inherited from my mother, and this has helped me to come to terms with some of the most difficult times in my life. If things had worked out differently and I had stayed at Williams for another couple of seasons after I won the 1992 World Championship, I would have had a great chance to win again in 1993 ⦠but then the tragedy that befell Ayrton at Imola could have happened to me.
There are three or four drivers in the world who could have been in that particular car that day, but it wasnât Prost, it wasnât Damon Hill and it wasnât me. It was Ayrton. Probably through no fault of his own, one of the greatest racing drivers of all time is dead and it could quite easily have been me. So when people ask me whether I have any regrets I tell them, âYou cannot control destiny and in our business there are occasional stark reminders of that.â As a racing driver you must believe in fate. You wouldnât get back into another car if you didnât.
Over the years I have hurt myself quite badly in racing cars and this will have prompted many a sane person to wonder why I race. Naturally pain is the farthest thing from your mind when you are in a racing car. You have to blank it out completely and focus on the job in hand. This is a quality only the very top racing drivers have. You must be able to forget an injury. Your mind must push your body beyond the pain barrier. I have often found that adrenalin is the best painkiller of all. In a hard race, even if you arenât carrying an injury, your mind pushes your body beyond the point of physical exhaustion to achieve the desired result, which is winning.
When the race is over your brain realises that your body is exhausted and canât move and then you are reminded of the pain. I have been so drained after some races that I have been unable to get out of the car. But my ability to blank out pain has been invaluable throughout my career; indeed I doubt whether I would ever have made it had I not had that ability. I won my first single-seater championship in my first full year despite suffering a broken neck mid-season. I got my big break into Formula 1 in 1979 with a test for Lotus on one of the worldâs fastest Grand Prix circuits, Paul Ricard in France, and managed to get the job despite having a broken back at the time.
I even won the 1992 World Championship with a broken foot, which I sustained in the last race of 1991. An operation over that winter would have meant it being in plaster for three months. However, I was determined to get into perfect physical shape and to put in a lot of testing miles in the car to be ready for the following season. So I delayed the operation. I couldnât tell anyone because if the governing body found out they might have stopped me from racing.
The orthopaedic surgeons thought I was crazy. The foot was badly deformed and after every race that year I could barely walk. Some journalists chose to interpret my limp as play-acting which, in retrospect, is pretty laughable. But then what do they know? None of them have ever driven a modern Grand Prix car flat out for two hours.
If they had they would know that the cockpit is a very hostile environment. The body receives a terrible pummelling during the course of a race from the thousands of shocks which travel up through the steering wheel, the footrest and the seat as you fly along the ground at 200mph. Through the corners the g-forces try to snap your head off. When you brake your insides are thrown forwards with violence, your body gripped by a six-point harness, which pins you into your seat. When you accelerate your head is thrown back violently against the carbon fibre wall at the back of the cockpit, which is the only thing separating you from a 200 litre bag of fuel. On top of that, the cockpit is hotter than a sauna and you are wearing thick fireproof overalls and underwear. The only thing which is in any way designed for comfort is the seat, which is moulded to the driverâs body.
If you have a good car and everything is right, you become at one with the car and it allows you to express yourself. It responds to your commands, goes where you point it and allows you to explore the limits with confidence. You can get into a straight fight with another driver, both pushing your machines to the limits, both determined to win. On days like that, driving a Formula 1 car is magical, another world. The pure essence of competition.
Other days you have to fight the car all the way. You might realise early in a race that your car is not handling properly but you have to try to drive around the problem. The car might catch you out or do something you donât expect, and this destroys your confidence in it. Everything becomes a struggle, but you fight to stay in the race with your competitors. You must do everything you can to remain competitive. Driving a Grand Prix car hard is always exhausting, but you must not let up or give in to pain until you reach the end. As Ayrton once said, âAll top Grand Prix drivers are fast, but only a very few of us are always fast.â
I often wonder what life would have been like had I chosen a less dangerous sport. I play golf to quite a high amateur standard and Iâm pretty sure that if I had poured the same dedication and focus into it thirty years ago that I poured into racing, I could have made my living from it. Whether I could have reached the same level and got the same rewards, Iâm not sure and I will never know. But I think in many ways if I had my time again I would like to find out.
It may sound improbable, but I have had days on the golf course where I have scored back-to-back eagles, or had a round of 65 including half a dozen birdies, and these have been some of the biggest thrills Iâve ever experienced. I love the idea that itâs just you and a set of clubs against the golf course and the elements. Itâs a true test and if you get it right the sense of gratification is quite overwhelming. And if, by chance, it all goes wrong and you slice your ball into the trees, you donât hurt yourself. You just swallow your pride, grab a club and march in after it.
Having said that, Iâm glad that motor racing has been my life. It has satisfied my desire to compete and, above all, to win. It has tested my limits and my resolve many times. It has bankrupted me, hospitalised me and some of the disappointments it has inflicted on me have almost broken my heart. It has also robbed me of some good friends.
But all of that is far outweighed by what it has given me. I have had two lifetimes worth of incredible experiences and more memories than if I were a hundred years old. I set out on this long and treacherous journey with nothing, except the belief that I had the talent to beat the best racing drivers in the world.
After a lot of hard work I was able to prove it.
PART ONE (#ulink_de1c1f50-fe19-5785-9fd6-6239230fe08e)
THE SECRET OF SUCCESS (#ulink_de1c1f50-fe19-5785-9fd6-6239230fe08e)
âI am interested only in success and winning races and if my brain and body did not allow me to be completely committed, I would know that I was wasting my time. The moment I feel that, I will retire on the spot.â
1 (#ulink_3c292549-41b7-5376-857d-81c57dc4df31)
MY PHILOSOPHY OF RACING (#ulink_3c292549-41b7-5376-857d-81c57dc4df31)
There are very few people who have any idea what it takes to be successful in this business.
Much of my life has been devoted to the pursuit of the Formula 1 World Championship. I was runner-up three times before I finished the job off in 1992. Yet if circumstances had been different and politics hadnât intervened, I might also have won a further two World Championships, in 1988 with Williams and in 1990 with Ferrari.
In both cases the essentials were there. The hard work developing the car had been done, but politics dictated that the pendulum should swing away from me. In 1988 Honda quit Williams and dominated the championship with McLaren, while in 1990 Alain Prost joined Ferrari, where we had developed a winning car, and proceeded to work behind the scenes to shift all the teamâs support, which I had worked for in 1989, to himself.
Although I consider myself strong in most sporting areas of motor racing, I am a poor politician and there is no doubt that this has accounted for me not winning more races and more championships.
Moreover, these experiences provide an object lesson in just how difficult it is to win a lot of Grands Prix and a World Championship; there is far more to it than simply beating people on the race-track. They also serve as a reminder that nothing in motor racing is ever certain. You might have all the right ingredients in place, the full support of the team, an excellent car, and yet some minor component can let you down or some freak accident, like a wheel nut coming off, can rob you of the prize after youâve done most of the hard work.
There are no shortcuts to winning the World Championship, but in my fifteen years as a Grand Prix driver I have learned a lot about what it takes to win consistently.
My philosophy of driving a racing car is part and parcel of my philosophy of life. Achievement, success and getting the job done in every area of life, not just in the cockpit, are fundamental to my way of thinking. Everything has to be right. Whether itâs getting to the golf club on time or having the right pasta to eat before a race, the demand for perfection everywhere is critical.
MOTIVATION IS THE KEY
Winning at the highest level of motor sport is not like winning in athletics or tennis or golf. In those sports you have just yourself to motivate. In motor sport, you require a huge team and huge resources and it is incredibly difficult to get it all to gel at the same time, to hit the sweet spot. Everything has to come together in unison.
When people think of Nigel Mansell the World Champion, they think that all my winning is done behind the steering wheel. Although important, the actual driving aspect is the final link in the chain. A lot of what it takes to be a champion takes place out of the car, unseen by the public. Winning World Championships as opposed to winning the odd Grand Prix is about always demanding more from your team and never being satisfied. This was a very important aspect of the 1992 World Championship and it is perhaps an area that the public understand least.
At Paul Ricard in September 1990 I tested the fairly unloved Williams-Renault FW13B. I changed everything on the car and got it going quicker than either Riccardo Patrese or Thierry Boutsen had managed that year, but it was clear to me that although Renault and the fuel company Elf had been doing a reasonable job, they had not been pushed hard enough to deliver the best. I immediately began demanding more from them, especially Elf. Having been at Ferrari for the past two years, I understood the progress which their fuel company Agip had made. Agip was producing a special fuel which gave Ferrari a significant horsepower advantage. I am a plain speaking man and I told them straight. The demands I made on them didnât endear me to them initially; in fact I pushed so hard that I was told at one point to back off. But I knew that if Williams-Renault and I were going to win the World Championship, we had to begin immediately raising the standards in key areas like fuel.
As I said, it didnât endear me to them to start with. No-one likes to be told that they can do a lot better, even less that they are well behind their rivals. Perhaps they thought that I was complaining for the sake of it, or âwhingeingâ. I think whingeing is a rather naive term to use for trying to raise everybody up to World Championship level!
Eventually they came around to my way of thinking. In the case of Elf, it took them three or four months to realise that I meant business and another three to deliver the fuel that I wanted, but the performance benefits that began to emerge in the late spring of 1991 were the result of the pressure that I had put on both Renault and Elf in late 1990.
Ayrton Senna opened up a points cushion in the World Championship by winning the first four races of 1991 in the McLaren-Honda, but after that we were able to compete on more equal terms and as the year wore on and the developments came through onto the cars, the wins started to come thick and fast. From then on everybody kept the momentum going, always striving to do a better job than they thought was possible and the result was the total domination of the 1992 Championship. It took a year and a half to get the team into championship winning mode but together we did it.
Motivation is a vital area of a driverâs skill. Towards the end of 1990 I visited the Williams factory in Didcot to meet the staff. Since I had left at the end of the 1988 season, the team had grown and new staff had been taken on. Consequently there were quite a few people there who didnât know me and who did not know how I work. I asked for everybody to come to the Williams museum where I did a presentation on what I thought it would take to win the World Championship. I needed them all to know that it isnât just a driver and a team owner who win World Championships, but the 200 or so people back at base, some of whom only give up the odd Saturday or Sunday to come in to work and do what is required to win, but who are all very important.
Similarly, in February 1992, around a month before the start of the season, I went to Paris with the then Williams commercial director, Sheridan Thynne to visit the Renault factory at Viry Chatillon. We went around the whole place, not just the workshops where they prepare the engines, but every office and every drawing office in the building. We shook hands with every single person from the managing director down to the secretaries and the cleaners and signed posters for each of them.
It was a good visit from a motivational point of view. It got everybody focused on what we were about to do and it helped all the Renault people to understand me a bit better and to feel a part of the success. We were taken around and introduced to everybody by my engineer, Denis Chevrier. I subsequently found out that he had been on a skiing holiday that week and wasnât due back until the weekend. But so committed was he to the cause of winning the World title, that he had cut short his holiday to be there. That is the stuff of which championships are made.
We also visited Elfâs headquarters and met with all of their people. I believe that this is a key part of building a successful team. You must push everybody involved with the team in every area and tell them that, although they are doing a good job, they can do better. A large part of it is demanding the best, better than people think they can achieve. From suppliers of components through to secretaries in the factory, everyone must be made to feel they can improve and to feel a part of the success when it comes. When I step from the car after winning a race or getting pole position, I shake hands with all my mechanics and congratulate them on the job that we have all done together.
Over the years, through sheer determination to succeed, I have learned all of the things that are required to win. I try to raise everybodyâs standards to a level that they donât always know they can achieve. I demand the highest standards from everyone around me and if everything is working right, then I just have to keep up my end of the deal on the track. If itâs not going right and everybody is searching for answers it puts more pressure on the driver and makes it more difficult to get good race results.
I have also learned that you cannot please everybody and that no matter what you do or say and no matter how you carry yourself when you are in the spotlight, people are going to criticise you. Sadly that is a given element of my life and I have come in for a lot of criticism, some of it justified, most of it, I believe, not.
If pushing everybody to produce commitment at the highest level in order to win really is whingeing, then Iâm a whinger â but I have the satisfaction of knowing that it leads directly to success.
There is a deplorable and negative characteristic of the British, which is to try to undermine success and to glorify the gallant loser. It is often called the âtall poppy syndromeâ. The media have a simplistic perception of a lot of stars; they like to stick a label on someone and work from there. Once the label is stuck on it is difficult to shake off. People are actually a lot more complicated than that and in most cases there is a great deal going on behind the scenes, which would explain a lot if only it were more widely known.
In 1992 I was criticised for implying that the victories we were accumulating were entirely due to me and not to the team and our fabulous car, FW14B. I always paid tribute to the team in post race press conferences, itâs just that the media chose not to use those quotes in their articles. I did a long interview with the BBC at the end of the year, where I spent quite some time going into detail about how the team had done a great job, but they cut that part out when they aired the programme.
The way I work is that I am the captain of the ship and I work for the common good within a team. I donât like anyone telling me how to drive a racing car or what to do out on the track â thatâs my business and my record speaks for itself. Outside the car I listen to all of the technical advice and make use of all the expertise available. I am a team player and I know that unless some outside factor comes in to upset the balance, whatâs best for me is whatâs best for the team.
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, Iâll 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 hadnât delivered the goods then I could sympathise with the teamâs frustration and difficulty in continuing the relationship. But to change tack just because of pressure from the teamâs 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: âI wouldnât want to be a member of a club which would have someone like me as a member.â 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 teamâs full support, then I am quite prepared to leave.
I donât want to be in a situation where everyone is not pulling together.
BE FAST AND CONSISTENT
Patrick Head, Williamsâ technical director, has said that one of my major strengths as a racing driver is that I donât 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 shouldnât 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 wasnât 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 itâs not possible you canât make it happen. Thatâs 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. Iâm a little bit more patient now and Iâm 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 donât 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 donât feel that I have to lead every lap of a race. As long as Iâm the one who crosses the line first thatâs the important thing.
I have also developed the courage to come into the pits when the car isnât working and to tell the crew that itâs 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, âOh, heâs whingeing again, heâs no good.â Now I have the self belief and I know what is right and what is wrong and stick to it. I donât just steam in and criticise, I make suggestions and pressurise people into accepting that something isnât 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 itâs faster and thatâs 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 driverâs 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 doesnât 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 itâs ânervousâ 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 thatâs something you learn to live with. Although itâs nervous itâs got to be balanced properly, if it isnât then thereâs nothing you can do with it. A stable stiff car is reassuring to drive and wonât do anything nasty to you, but itâs not fast. If you want the ultimate then youâve got to have something which is close to the limit. This makes demands on you physically, of course. Itâs 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 youâre 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 youâre 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. Thatâs 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, itâs because everything was slowed and I had time to see such things.
When you first drive a Grand Prix car, everything happens so quickly that you can sometimes frighten yourself. Once youâve had some experience of racing at these speeds you can get into pretty much any racing car and go quickly, provided that youâre comfortable with the car of course. The more time you spend in the car the more in tune you become with the speeds involved.
Sometimes unexpected things happen incredibly quickly and you just have to rely on instincts to see you through. A good example of this is the incident which occurred when I was with Ferrari at Imola in 1990, when Gerhard Berger in the McLaren pushed me onto the grass at the Villeneuve Curve. That was an incredible moment. It was a split second decision as I travelled backwards at nearly 200mph whether to put it into a spin or whether to try and catch it. I took the first option and managed to bring the nose around the right way and kept on going. Although I cannot say that I saw the direction I was pointing throughout the two full revolutions the car made, I was aware through instincts of exactly where I was going the whole time. The result was a spectacular looking double spin and I kept on going. I probably only lost about 40mph in the spin. Because the adrenalin was pumping so hard after it, I broke the lap record on the next lap.
At times like that youâve got to be a bit careful. Your heartbeat gets up to 150-200 beats per minute. You donât think about it, but it is very important that you breathe properly, because you are on the verge of hyperventilating at that pulse level. It is vital that you understand your body and that you manage it as much as you do the car.
DRIVING ON THE LIMIT
Everybody has different limits, thatâs one of the things which differentiates good amateur drivers from great professional drivers. Most top Grand Prix drivers will go beyond their limits at some time in their career and a few really top ones are able to go beyond their limit, if the occasion demands, for a period of time. Ayrton Senna talked after qualifying at Monaco in 1988 of going into a sort of trance, where he was lapping beyond his limit, treading into unknown territory. He stopped after three laps because he frightened himself. While I would not describe the feeling as being like a trance, I have had a similar experience several times, most notably at Silverstone in 1987, when I caught and passed Nelson Piquet after 29 laps of totally committed driving. This experience of mesmerising speed is described in detail later in the book. More usually that feeling comes when you commit every ounce of your strength and determination on a qualifying lap.
When you go for the big one in qualifying, you give it everything youâve got and on certain corners you over-commit. Now this is where the judgment comes in because if you over-commit too much then you wonât come out of the corner the other side. You enter the corner at a higher speed than on previous occasions and if you are able to carry that speed through the corner you will exit quicker than before. You canât do it consistently because the car wonât allow it and something will inevitably give. Of course you have to feel comfortable with the car. If itâs bucking around all over the place and is unstable even at medium speed through a corner then you would be a fool to go in 20mph faster next time round.
Provided that the car is doing more or less what you want it to, you can hustle it around on one or two really quick laps. It then comes down to your own level of commitment and that depends on so many factors. Some drivers become less committed after they have children, others lose the edge after a major accident, others will become more committed when itâs time to sign a new contract for next year!
Mental discipline plays a huge part in driving on the limit. A top athlete in any sport must be able to close his mind completely to extraneous thoughts and niggling doubts and concentrate 100%. If you want to be a champion, you need to be able to focus completely on the job in hand to the exclusion of everything else going on around you. Your brain must have a switch in it so that the minute you need to concentrate, your mind is right there and ready to go. I have been able throughout my career to give a consistently high level of commitment and even my harshest critics would admit that there are few more committed or focused drivers than me.
Itâs a personal thing. You have to be true to yourself and if I thought that I had lost my edge I would stop racing immediately. I am interested only in success and winning races and if my brain and body did not allow me to be completely committed I would know that I was wasting my time. The moment I feel that, I will retire on the spot.
You can only do what your brain and your body will allow you to do. For example, in qualifying for the British Grand Prix in 1992, the telemetry showed that I was taking Copse Corner 25mph faster than my team-mate Riccardo Patrese, using the same Williams-Renault FW14B. In fact over a whole lap I was almost two seconds faster than him. As we sat debriefing after the session, Riccardo looked at the printouts and said that he could see how I was taking Copse at that speed, but that he couldnât bring himself to do it. His brain was telling his body, âIf we go in that fast, weâll never come out the other side.â
Every really hot qualifying lap relies on the brain and body being in harmony and prepared, at certain key points, to push the envelope, to over-extend. That is the only way you are going to beat the Rosbergs, Piquets, Sennas and Schumachers of this world. It goes without saying that once you operate at that level, your self-belief must be absolute.
In all my career I have done maybe 10 perfect laps. One of the ones I savour the most was at Monaco in 1987. To do any kind of perfect lap is special, but when you do it at Monaco thatâs as good as it gets. When you run the film of the lap through your mind afterwards and you examine every gearchange, every braking point, every turn-in and how you took every corner and at the end of it you say âI could not have done that fasterâ, thatâs when you know you have done a perfect lap. You donât need to go out and try to do better. When you get a lap like that you donât even need to look at the stopwatch on your dashboard or read the pit boards. You know itâs quick.
When I came back into the pits David Brown, my engineer and a man who would become one of my closest allies in racing, pointed out that the white Goodyear logos had been rubbed off the walls of the rear tyres where I had brushed the barriers! You have to skim the barriers at a couple of points when youâre flying at Monaco, itâs the only way to be really quick. It sounds frightening, but itâs supremely exhilarating. I never feel more alive on any race track than I do on the streets of Monaco. Everything has to be synchronised and you need to have fantastic rhythm as well as aggression and a truckload of commitment to be fast there. I have always enjoyed the challenge, but I think also that the romantic in me responds to the idea of going well at this most celebrated of Grands Prix.
Generally speaking, although qualifying is important, merely lapping quickly, in other words driving fast, is not what turns me on the most. Competition is the most important thing and driving flat out against someone else with victory as the end result is my idea of heaven. Nevertheless, when you get a perfect lap in qualifying it feels absolutely marvellous. When I got out of the car at Monaco and looked at the white smears on the walls of the tyres where the manufacturerâs logo had been wiped off, it even impressed me. There are no long straights at Monaco, itâs all short chutes, but coming out of the tunnel I was clocked at 196mph, a full 17mph faster than Prost in the McLaren. I was six tenths faster than Senna and 1.7s faster than my team-mate Nelson Piquet and I had done not just one, but three laps which were good enough for pole!
From the point of view of a race, itâs not a major psychological advantage over your rival to get pole position. Anybody can get pole position if they have an exceptional lap in the right equipment. The key is to prove that you have the ability to do it time and again. Itâs not one thing that gets you pole position, itâs a package of things, but you do have to put together the perfect lap and to show that you can do it more than anyone else. I am very competitive and I approach qualifying and racing at the same level.
Some top drivers believe that the race is the most important thing and that their position on the grid does not matter too much. Double IndyCar champion Al Unser Jr is like this, as to some extent was Alain Prost. They would concentrate on getting the set-up of the car absolutely perfect for the race and not over-extend themselves in qualifying. On one level you can see their point and I have done that a couple of times myself, notably at Hungary in 1989. It is the race after all which carries the points, but I have always believed that it is important to be quick and to show that you are strong throughout the weekend. Of course on certain tracks, like Monaco, there is a benefit to being at the front because it is hard to pass in the race.
