Piquet Sr: Complex Character

Nelson Piquet is probably the most misunderstood - and underrated - of all world champion racing drivers. MARK HUGHES demystifies the enigma

Nelson Piquet. Senior. A triple world champion; winner of 23 grands prix. A great driver, one of the smartest ever to have sat on an F1 grid. So his former team- mate, Niki Lauda, was shocked to the core when Nelson told him he didn't expect to survive his racing career.

It's true that he'd entered F1 when the grim statistics told you it was still lethally dangerous, though it was less so by the time he left 13 years later. But why would an intelligent man, once he'd secured his titles and his fortune, have ploughed on season after season waiting for that horrible moment?

He was wrong, of course: he did survive his racing career, although he almost didn't. His horrific accident at Indianapolis in 1992 brought his front-line career to a close, even though he did return there in '93 to finish off the job he'd only just started. But it all illustrates the complexity of the man, the tension between his desire for absolute freedom in every aspect of his life and his addiction to this crazy sport. That complexity sometimes got in the way of assessing just how good he was.

It's important at the outset to understand that Piquet was from a wealthy and influential family. There was no struggle in his early life; things came easy to him. His father was a leading politician in Brazil's government city of Brasilia, and Nelson enjoyed a privileged childhood. It was expected that after his college education he would take up a business life, but Nelson's nature ensured that didn't happen.

He hated the idea of having anyone as a boss, and never liked to work harder than was absolutely necessary. You might say he was spoilt, except he had a pleasant, relaxed and amusing personality that people couldn't help but like - if they got to know him, for he was always low- profile, confident but not in any way extrovert.

He showed a talent for tennis in his teens and went to high school in California with the idea of pursuing a professional career in the sport. He was put off when he realised how hard the top guys had to train. Upon returning to Brazil he took up karting - using his mother's maiden name of Piquet and not the family name of Soutomaior - and in his sophomore year of '71 won the national championship. Further study in America - in management and engineering - kept his early racing career in check, and by the time he won the 1976 Brazilian Super Vee Championship he was already 24.

With Gordon Murray, with whom he formed close bond © LAT

He was gifted, but he'd been gifted at tennis too, and hadn't felt able to apply himself. Now he was well into his adult life and some stark choices had to be made. It was the making of him. Probably because the alternative - a respectable, conventional but dull life in business - was such an anathema to him, he made the decision to get serious about something for the first time in his life. Racing was his only route out, so he upped and headed for Europe and Formula 3.

He took personal backers he'd picked up in Brazil with him, but his family money meant he wouldn't starve either. This was a brave move that required a lot of sheer gumption to make work. It cost him his first marriage, but he did it. His talent did the rest. He was winning F3 races in Europe by the end of the first year (1977), won a British F3 title and made his F1 debut the following season.

He'd done enough to secure a Brabham drive alongside Lauda, and upon the latter's retirement at the end of '79 he was team leader there, on his way to future glories.

You need to know those circumstances to get a proper understanding of him. Because in F1, while frequently superb, he often left you wondering how much better he could be, if only he was willing to push himself a bit more. For him, it didn't seem to be about the man-to- man challenge, the ego-satisfying quest to always want to show he was the best driver. He went about it in a much smarter, almost cynical, way.

His ideal was to get himself as big a car advantage as possible, and if he didn't have that he often wasn't really too interested. "He loved to go to the grid thinking he had an advantage, that he'd screwed his rivals over," said his later team boss, Frank Williams. "That's what it was all about for Nelson."

Former Brabham design chief Gordon Murray says: "He was the cleverest driver I ever worked with." And that's some compliment, given that Murray worked also with Lauda, Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost. "I think he was much more of a thinker than Prost. Prost used to think he was a thinker, but Nelson really was. He'd double and treble-bluff - he was very good at the mind games. Psychologically, he was the best I've ever seen and very, very bright."

He helped make his Brabham BT49 the best car on the day at Long Beach in 1980 and won his first grand prix - from start-to-finish, pacing himself back to the guy in second, doing only as much as he needed. But other times that year you wondered how hard he was pushing. In Brazil he finished an attrition-aided second, but had earlier lost out in battle to the vastly substandard Ferrari T5 of Gilles Villeneuve.

In Spain he collided with Mario Andretti after qualifying barely any quicker than Prost's much inferior McLaren M29. At the next race, in France, he qualified behind Prost. At Brands he finished second to title rival Alan Jones, but looked for all the world like he'd backed out of a fight with the Williams, like he didn't have an advantage over it, so wasn't interested in getting stuck in.

Exhausted after winning on the road in 1982 Brazilian GP © LAT

Piquet took two more very polished and mature wins that year and finished a close runner-up in the championship, but it was hard not to think that he could've taken it had he possessed the fight of a Villeneuve or a Didier Pironi - or a Jones, that year's champion. The Aussie always looked like he had more desire for that title. Yes, Piquet was good enough to be fighting for the world crown in his first year in a competitive car, his second full season of F1. That was his level.

How much he gave of himself in applying that level is open to question. Early in '79, when he still had a reputation to make, he'd been stunning at the Brands Race of Champions, finishing a charging second and lapping under the pole time in the cumbersome Brabham-Alfa. Very rarely was that naked fire seen thereafter, in its place calculated application of a big talent. He was lazy, basically, but could do outstanding work when he had to.

He was indulged in this at Ecclestone-era Brabham. This was the perfect team for him. Laid-back, but paradoxically deeply competitive, no interest in PR, a pay-driver number two who was no threat and could give no perspective to Piquet's performances. All Piquet had to do was work with Murray in making the car even faster.

He could be himself here, his playful nature a big hit with the mechanics. "He was part of the family of that team," says Murray, "and that fun side of him made him hugely popular, but it was misleading in a way because he matured very quickly as a driver."

He won the '81 world championship, and this time there were moments of real steel. At Imola he took a great victory. Running an early fifth, he closed on and passed all those ahead of him. When he clinched the crown in Las Vegas he was barely conscious inside the car, yet knew he had to beat Carlos Reutemann no matter what. He was helped by the fact that Reutemann bizarrely seemed not to want to win the title that day.

Regardless of how much his rival's below-par performance helped, Piquet showed grit in taking it. His talent made it easy to forget, too, that he was still relatively inexperienced - and there were a couple of reminders of this in '81, notably his pressure error at Monaco when being chased by Jones, with whom he'd had a war of words after an incident in the previous race. What stands as perhaps the classic Piquet career victory came in Argentina, when the Brabhams had a huge advantage by being the only cars with a ride height that lowered below the regulation 6cm when out on track. He loved that! Because it made it so easy.

Other drivers might have been embarrassed, but not him. It was the diametric opposite of drivers like Villeneuve or Nigel Mansell, who wanted only the same chance as the others and to be able to make the difference themselves. Piquet looked on guys like that as some lower form of intelligence.

The canniest pairing ever? Piquet with Niki Lauda © LAT

For '82 and '83, Brabham took on Riccardo Patrese as Piquet's team-mate, thereby denying Nelson one of his key luxuries of a slow team-mate. But he was well enough established there, carried enough weight as world champion, worked closely enough with Murray, that he was still the team leader. Patrese would occasionally be faster, but not usually, and it was this that really set the seal on Piquet's stature.

The '82 season was spent trying to get the turbocharged Brabham-BMWs reliable enough to be able to use Murray's radical reinvention of the planned mid-race pitstop. It was classic Murray-era Brabham off- the-wall thinking, just like fan cars, surface cooling and hydraulic ride-height control - and one of the things guaranteed to fascinate Piquet in that it offered the chance of having a huge advantage over the others.

It all came together the following year. Using something akin to rocket fuel, the BMW had a massive horsepower advantage in the late stages of the '83 season, but Piquet had to overcome a big points deficit to Renault's Prost. This was the perfect scenario for Piquet: a competitive advantage but massive pressure.

He was now a far more complete driver than the sometimes patchy performer of '81. He put on the blinkers - and he went. He was superb at handling these early big-boost monsters, conjuring speed while looking after the tyres, his mind still pin-sharp despite an engine forever trying to deliver you to the kingdom of heaven.

"The pressure in those last few races was immense," says Murray. "He had to win the last three races - and basically he did, even though the last one was only in principle in that once Prost had blown up, Nelson then backed off and gave the win to Riccardo. Delivering like that was deeply impressive and it helped psychologically destroy Renault and Prost. There are so few drivers today that could do what he did there."

Brabham went into a decline subsequently, and Piquet began to resent Bernie not paying the market rate for a double world champion. And so in '86 he joined Williams for big bucks - and the promise from Frank Williams that he would be number one, with the incumbent Mansell as support. Frank probably didn't pay much attention to that last point. It would've been just a way of enticing Piquet in, and he'd let the stopwatch determine who was quicker.

Given their respective reputations at the time, it would've been reasonable if Frank had expected that Piquet would establish himself as team leader by performance alone. Except it didn't turn out quite like that. For one, Frank suffered his terrible road accident and was simply not around to honour what he'd promised. For another, Mansell was way more of a handful than probably even Piquet expected. Nelson had got himself into the fastest car - but had a driver of at least equal speed and a far more combative in-car attitude on the other side of the garage.

Indy 500 practice shunt in 1992 caused bad leg injuries © LAT

What's more, the team showed absolutely no interest in reeling Mansell in and giving Piquet his promised team leadership. So Piquet began the double and triple-bluff (tricking Mansell on set-up, diff choices etc), and the mind games (publicly calling Mansell thick, verbally abusing Nigel's wife etc). This stuff rather hurt his image. He was no quicker than Mansell and, as they battled each other, so Prost sneaked through and won the title.

But a little indication of what Piquet normally held in reserve came with his stunning pass on Senna's Lotus at the '86 Hungarian Grand Prix. Having failed to make a move down the inside stick into turn one, he came by on the outside next time, crossed up on full opposite-lock well before the apex, now in front of a doubtless incredulous Senna. Jackie Stewart described it as the equivalent of looping a 747. It was all the more remarkable for being so un-Piquet-like.

In '87, Nelson suffered a huge shunt at Imola. He was never quite the same driver again, and many years later admitted that his depth perception under braking was never quite as sharp thereafter. But he still won that year's championship, even if Mansell was more often quicker.

When Honda then left Williams, Piquet didn't hang around - and instead went for a super-money offer from Camel to be Senna's replacement at Lotus. He drove there in '88 and '89. Lotus provided him with uncompetitive cars - and he lost interest. No way was he a guy to put his neck on the line to finish fourth instead of fifth. After the commitment of Senna, the Lotus boys were underwhelmed, especially so on those occasional days where he was barely even quicker than Satoru Nakajima. It was like he had no pride.

Benetton's Flavio Briatore rescued Piquet's career by offering him a shrewd deal, with a low retainer but very big points bonus. In 1990 and '91 we began to see glimpses of vintage Piquet. He took a couple of consecutive wins at the tail end of '90 and was delighted to benefit from Mansell's last-lap faux pas to win at Montreal in '91. Then came Michael Schumacher - the rookie who instantly blew him off in the same car.

After a couple of races of this, Piquet went to Adelaide for the last race determined only to outqualify Schumacher, ignoring any set-up work for race day. He did it - by 0.217sec. Nelson Piquet, in his final grand prix at 39 years old, outqualified Schumacher in an identical car. Benetton's Pat Symonds didn't have the heart to tell him that actually Michael had missed a gear towards the end of his best lap, and had been set to beat Piquet's time.

In a way it didn't matter. For '92 Piquet asked for such an outrageous fee that Briatore, with Schuey on board, politely declined - which was almost certainly what Piquet had intended. A smart guy to the end.