Masters Degree: Nigel Mansell

I was supposed to be interviewing only Nigel Mansell.

Over the last 12 weeks, you have read a series of interviews I conducted in Qatar with the complete driver line-up of Grand Prix Masters, looking back over particular aspects of their careers and their favourite memories.

Some drivers no doubt enjoyed the ego massaging I employed when I spoke to them, but it was genuinely insightful to see how each one now looks back on his varied Formula One career.

There were several common themes - nearly all believed they had the talent but things outside of their control prevented them from several victories or championships. Bernie Ecclestone, too, was mentioned several times, with his clever contract negotiations. Poor handling cars were also frequent topics of conversation.

I thought Nigel Mansell, of whom I had a poster on my wall throughout my childhood, would be no different.

While the majority had always been tricky to nail down given their schedules that weekend, Mansell grabbed me after a photo call and said "Do you want to do it now?"

"Yeah sure," I replied.

My plan was to ask Nigel something a bit different but also something I had intense knowledge about. Rather than his 1992 world championship year, I was all prepared to steer the conversation on to the topic of his historic 1993 IndyCar title.

So I followed him up to eat lunch. But, unbeknown to me, with several others.

"This guy sowed me back together," Mansell points at Steve Olvey, former Champ Car doctor and now holding a similar role for GP Masters.

"What people wouldn't do in Europe was what you did for me at Long Beach," Mansell says to Olvey. "Put a bloody great big needle in my back!"

What Mansell was referring to was the aftermath of the accident he suffered at just the second race of his IndyCar season in Phoenix. Having won his maiden race, a practice crash at his first oval meeting caused severe physical damage to Mansell, as Olvey tried to explain.

"We had to do it nearly every day," Olvey said. "The first time we had seen this particular injury was with Nigel at Phoenix because the gearbox went through the concrete wall.

"He could see the sky and it grabbed the car which caused shearing forces to his lower back. The tissues in his back all got separated and you had this big collection of fluid that kept coming back.

"You drained it and it came back, you drained it and it came back and it takes forever to get rid of it.

"So we had to a bleed a litre of fluid out right before the race and used compression bandages to keep it to minimum and to keep him driving."

"And I raced like that," Mansell chips in.

And then another familiar voice, synonymous with Nigel's career, adds his recollection of Mansell's injuries.

"You won't remember this Nigel, but you showed me your back in the Newman Haas motorhome before the start of the Long Beach race," legendary commentator Murray Walker interjects.

"I could not believe my eyes. It was incredible."

Mansell doesn't remember the accident at Phoenix and was unconscious when he was removed from the car. He remained unconscious when he wife Rosanne accompanied him by helicopter to the nearby hospital.

However, recover Mansell did, although he had to race through the pain barrier at the next few races, including Long beach (then the third round of the series) and the Indy 500.

"The impact was just mega," Mansell insists. "I don't remember the accident. The G loading on the car - what was the G loading on the car? Going backwards?"

Olvey thinks for a second. He replies: "We didn't have the data on that car at the time, but I could tell you from similar accidents with similar injuries, I guess over a 100 G."

"People have died from less," Mansell says, before taking a phone call.

Olvey uses this time to elaborate.

"That was before the HANS device came in, which was another issue. Nigel had concussion. If the HANS device was available then he wouldn't have had the concussion.

"And he might not have been unconscious in the car and the helicopter. With the new Carbon fibre tub - it didn't give at all. The old aluminium tub would give when the head hit."

Mansell is sorting out his aspects of his Formula BMW team, for which his two sons Greg and Leo, also present at the table, are driving for this season. The phone call finishes and he continues with me right where we left off. Well, nearly.

"Aren't you eating that?" he asks me.

I look at the tomato sauce and pasta remaining on my plate, and like some sort of bizarre nervous reaction, as if he was now my father ordering to finish up, says "Yes, I am! Just talking to Steve that's all."

Mansell looks bemused, but continues.

"When you are focused and you've had a real bad shunt," he says, "you can either get demoralised and think it is the end of your career. Or you gather whatever you can and you fight back as quickly as you can.

"It wasn't easy because I was lying in bed for weeks, I had a vacuum on my back sucking all this fluid out to try and compress the tissues.

"And I had big open surgery. Steve's partner Terry Trammell came down and my doctor George Morris, and they cut a 14 by 12 inch section of my back away. They patchwork quilted it back down by 148 stitches.

"We drained my back before Long beach and before the start of Indy 500.

"The biggest thing I remember was you put some anaesthetic in for the pain and then for half the race I couldn't feel my legs or my bum."

The injuries sound horrific, and I recall as a 13-year-old boy how concerned I was for the subject of my bedroom posters at the time.

I ask Steve whether Nigel was right to race at the time, at least, by popular medical opinion.

"No, it was OK," Olvey insists. "But it took a lot of stuff to put up with it. We tried to do all we could to reduce the pain but he kept playing golf too."

Mansell interrupts again.

"The worst thing was when we qualified at Indianapolis and I was pulling a lot of G. I had 148 stitches in my back and every time I went round one of the turns I felt it go, well..."

He makes a sharp buzzing sound.

"...and my back just gave. That wasn't a nice feeling. I literally felt like I was falling apart."

Desperately trying to get the conversation back on track, I asked Nigel about that one race before all the back-ripping pain started.

After his shock departure from Williams the year before, Mansell made his mark in IndyCars big style. His first race around the streets of Surfer's Paradise on the Gold Coast of Australia, he took pole. Oh yeah, and won too.

"It was magical that was. It was one of the highlights of my career because I was a learner driver and had never raced there before. We got pole, we got black-flagged, we go out and we still end up winning.

"I got a black flag for overtaking on a yellow but that was nonsense. Anyway, they pulled me in the pits and I still went back and won. I was elated, it was one of my finest drives. You only ever have one chance at ever winning first time out.

"I remember I did it with Ferrari in 1989 in my first time in the car and no one has still done it."

Olvey enlightens me how much the American fraternity were shocked by the Birmingham man's debut.

"We knew he was world champion when he came over there but that race knocked our socks off," Olvey recalls. "Basically it was a big surprise. Some of the other drivers were taken back by it and were like 'holy shit'. They then realised that they would have to work harder."

Nigel continues eating, but a Grand Prix Masters press officer comes along and hands him a piece of paper. It is a print out of a web story done by a BBC journalist that day, previewing the Qatar race and Mansell's son progress in Formula BMW.

"I'll get into trouble now," he shows me the piece of paper. "I only say something as a bit of a joke and then they print it."

He then quotes himself from the article: "I haven't done enough training so to finish would be enough and to win another race would be fantastic. It'd be amazing to do that at Silverstone, although I think I might have to sneak in a more powerful engine!"

"Oh God!"

Note to self: maybe don't write anything Nigel means as a joke. Probably shouldn't have reiterated something he didn't want written in the first place either.

I force the subject back on to American racing.

"Obviously I wasn't there, Nigel and I don't know the insides of the Williams politics, but what made IndyCar a real attraction to you?"

"I was living in America," he responds. "That was really good. My children were being brought up in schools there.

"I have no idea who made the first contact with Newman or Haas. Maybe he (Haas) was reading in all the press what Williams were doing and motor racing is a very small community. Like the airline industry. They heard I was going to get screwed and I didn't even ask where he heard from.

"People will make up their own minds, but when you win a world championship and you are only offered half the salary then I don't think that's very smart. But that's all history and water under bridge. What I look back on is making history and that was very special.

"I've got so many good IndyCar friends and it is like a second home to me.

"I look back at that time and it would have been lovely to defend the title in the manner that I won it but you know I don't make up the politics and what people do. We opened up another page of history and the people there were marvellous. The first year was better than the second year.

"When they realised I was quick they weren't too happy having their asses kicked."

Mansell won five races in his 1993 IndyCar Championship season, but what was most surprising, was that four of those wins came on ovals. As a European, Mansell had not raced on ovals before, yet he won four of the five races he started that year.

"I'd never seen on oval in my life. Yet, Milwaukee we won, New Hampshire, Nazareth and the Michigan 500.

"Oval racing is pure racing because you can be lapping people quickly at hellish dangerous speed. A lot of people still get killed on ovals.

"For a European to go on ovals and go anticlockwise and momentarily you get dizzy and have lots of neck problems. So there is a lot of interesting things you have to overcome.

"But if you want to be professional in any sport, you have to take a deep breath and say you got yourself into this. Don't make the numbers up, just try and do something.

"I rewrote some of the overtaking manoeuvres there. The famous one I did was Indianapolis. On national TV they said 'This Mansell is up high and he's trying to overtake on the outside - has nobody told him he can't do that?', and a split second later the other guy said 'no one's has told him and he's just done it!'"

But the Indianapolis 500 was the one race he didn't win.

"It didn't get away, it got took off me," Mansell says, still with a hint of bitterness.

"I was winning it until the last four or five laps and they threw a yellow because Lyn St James stopped in the wrong pit.

"But she was in the pits, yet they still threw a full course yellow. And then I got jumped by Emerson Fittipaldi and Arie Luyendyk on the restart. It is just one of those things.

"It was very disappointing they threw a yellow for that - if something had happened on the race track then fine."

The following year he qualified one place higher - seventh - but was only classified 22nd after a bizarre crash with amateur driver Dennis Vitolo.

"Dennis Vitolo almost killed me. He almost killed me. Me. We were on a full course yellow for a lap and a half and we weren't even on the track. And he came down the back straight closing speed of 140mph.

"He hit four cars behind me so hard he flew through the air and I was the unfortunate one he landed on top off.

"The guy does one race a year - a complete amateur. People like that should be banned. If you can have an accident after a full course yellow a lap behind a safety car then you have got to be an idiot."

Good to see that Mansell has lost none of his colourful opinions on his career, then.

But '94, his title defence wasn't as successful as the previous year. He never made victory lane again and was let down by an number of reliability problems.

"It was just difficult for me in the second year, because Mario Andretti was in retirement and half the team were partying at every race and we were trying to defend the championship.

"And then no one anticipated what happened in 94 [in Formula One]."

Mansell's former rival and then Williams driver Ayrton Senna was killed at the San Marino Grand Prix, and after David Coulthard came in as an able substitute, Mansell was brought back from across the pond to race in four races in Formula One; the French Grand Prix in mid-July, and then the final three races of the year.

"I thought my career was going to finish in IndyCar and I signed up for another three years, and obviously Carl (Haas) sold all my rights and contract to Formula One. Hence I came back and I was in Formula One for a small amount of time."

"Did you do that against your will," I ask.

"I wasn't happy about it, no. But in 1994 there wasn't a Formula One world champion on the grid when Ayrton died. Michael hadn't won his first championship, and it wasn't until the final race of that year that Formula One had a new world champion and it was either going to be Damon or Michael.

"I won that final race in Australia and had pole position by almost a second."

Time is nearly up with Nigel and I've finished my dessert. Being the ultra competitive man he is, Mansell, at 52, is back on a more racing friendly diet as he intends to beat the GP Masters field.

So I ask him one final question, asking him to look back on his American dream, and sum up what it meant to him.

From when he took the IndyCar title on September 19, 1993 until Alain Prost took his final Formula One crown in Estoril on September 26, 1993, Mansell was the current champion in both Formula One and IndyCar.

"I always quote Gerhard Berger, who always said that when we are gone, history will depict how successful we are. Well, only four people have won both titles, and no one held both simultaneously, did they?"

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