Читать книгу Mansell: My Autobiography - Nigel Mansell - Страница 16

5

LEARNING THE BASICS

My father was quite a keen member of the local kart racing scene and he encouraged me to take an interest. We went down to watch a meeting at the local kart track and I remember being drawn in by the spectacle of these little machines buzzing around the twisty track. Some were being driven with more enthusiasm than skill, others looked more purposeful. Watching them exit the corners you could see the difference in speed between the ones who were really trying and those who were just out for fun. I felt I understood quite a lot about it straight away and I couldn’t wait to get out there and see what I could do. I was hooked.

The great thing about kart racing in the late sixties and early seventies was that it was completely uncommercial. It was purely a family thing. The people involved were all very friendly and there was always a real community spirit about the local kart meetings. The whole family would turn out on a sunny Sunday afternoon, including mothers and sisters who would take turns to hold a spanner or cheer on their boy, when they weren’t doling out lemonade and egg sandwiches.

Money didn’t seem to make the difference between winning and losing back then. If your family was a bit better off than the next one you might have a few more engines or a couple more sets of tyres. But money wasn’t a decisive factor. You could always go out in whatever kart you had and if you won, you had the satisfaction of knowing that it was more due to your efforts than anything else. I found that very satisfying.

Our first kart was a pretty crude piece of equipment, powered by a lawnmower engine. We bought it secondhand at a cost of £25. It wasn’t up to much but I was terribly excited about it and spent as much of my spare time as possible driving it round dirt tracks in an allotment near where we lived. It wasn’t very fast, but the important thing was that it needed no pedalling and it was thrilling to press down my foot and increase the speed.

A few other children had similar machines and we used to race them whenever we could escape from the house and our school homework. Before long I could beat everyone around the allotment and I was ready to go into properly organised local competitions, like the one I had visited a few months before.

Although the minimum age for a licence was 11 years and I was barely ten, we managed to get around the problem and I got my first licence. I was ready to go racing and based on my form around the allotment I felt confident that I would win my first race with ease.

Not surprisingly that first race was something of an eye opener. My primitive kart was hopelessly outclassed by the other machines and I watched in dismay as the field streamed away from me down the straight in the preliminary heats. I had my foot to the floor but I was going nowhere fast. To add insult to injury my engine stopped and I had to pull off the road. I sat there wondering what had happened. When I looked back I saw my engine lying in the middle of the track. The kart was so old that the bolts holding the engine in place had sheared. It was so humiliating. We got the engine welded on properly and went out to see what we could do, but it was a hopeless situation. The other children were so much faster that I felt I was standing still.

I had been naive in the extreme. There was far more to preparing a kart than I had imagined. That first race gave me a shocking lesson in the school of karting set-up. The other children’s karts had both of the rear wheels driven, whereas ours only had drive to one wheel. Not only that but they had a box of different sized sprockets, so they always had the right gearing for each track, whether it was slow and twisty or fast and sweeping. Also I knew nothing at the time about minimum weights. The power to weight ratio of a kart is critical and so the trick was to get the kart down to the minimum weight permissable in the rules, while tuning the engine to give maximum power. Our poor underpowered kart was 40lbs overweight, so we really didn’t have a prayer.

Most of the children were much older than me; some were as old as sixteen and I felt upset and humiliated by the sharp shock I had received. I went away at the end of that day a much wiser ten year old. I knew that I had a burning desire to race karts and my desire to beat everybody had been heightened by the experience. I was down, but I was determined to fight back.

I knew that we would never be competitive with the equipment we had so I put a lot of pressure on my father to get a newer and faster kart. Because karting was still uncommercialised, the cost of upgrading our equipment was not prohibitive. Looking back, I’m glad I was racing karts when I was. I shudder to think what it would cost today to buy competitive equipment.

My father was not rich and I had to justify the cost to him. I think he could see that I was very determined to race and that we needed better gear if we were to compete.

I knew even at that age that I was very competitive. No matter what field you compete in and no matter at what level, if you are born with the will to win then you know it from a very early age. At school you can see people around you who win and enjoy it, they really thrive on it. I was like that for me from the word go. By contrast you see other people who win or lose and it doesn’t really matter much to them either way. That is an admirable quality to have, but if you are a racer and you want to be successful as a driver, then it is completely the wrong attitude.

Winning is pretty much everything. Once you’ve realised that, it dictates the whole way you look at competition. If your equipment isn’t up to scratch, you do everything you can to upgrade it. No-one in our family was wealthy, but my grandparents used to give me equipment for my birthday and at Christmas. I remember putting pressure on them one year to give me a new engine.

Although winning is everything, that is not to say that you have to be a bad loser. I think you can be a good sportsman and be a gentleman and lose gracefully without losing your competitive edge. It’s a subtle difference, but an important one. Psychologically you approach competition believing only that winning is everything and losing doesn’t exist.

If you lose, there are always reasons why you have lost. This is where you’ve got to be honest with yourself and think, ‘This is the reason why I lost today’, rather than ‘The car, or the engine, let me down.’ It is important to be positive and to look for constructive reasons why you failed to win, but above all it is important to be honest with yourself. This is something I learned very early on in my competitive career. One of my strengths and probably at the same time one of my weaknesses is that I am very straightforward. I am honest with myself and with other people. I call things as I see them and sometimes that upsets a few people, as I would discover later in my career.

I won with my new kart and as the years progressed I moved up through the different junior karting categories. It was a thrilling time for me. The competition was fierce, but the atmosphere in the paddock was friendly. If you were short of a piece of equipment, you could always rely on someone in the paddock lending it to you.

All of my spare time and my school holidays were spent working on my kart and racing it. I can remember putting the kart in the boot of the car and going off to the little track at Chasewater testing. My father and I used to make dozens of trips like this. We would test engines and pistons and run bits in at Chasewater, then go back home and rub the pistons down and hone the barrels, then go back to the track to try it again. My father and I were extremely close in those days and I think in a way he was re-living his childhood through me, because he had a very bad time in the Second World War.

The karting became pretty serious as I began to race further and further afield. To start with it was the length and breadth of Britain, then when I was picked for the English team we began travelling to the continent and across the North Sea to Scandinavia. I was doing what I wanted to do, satisfying my competitive urge and loving every second of it.

Unfortunately, things were not quite so straightforward at school. Although the teachers did not object to me missing school to represent the country in international races, some of the other children at the school didn’t like it at all. They were jealous and resented my success. One morning the headmaster announced in morning assembly that I would be going to Holland for two weeks to race for England. I was to be given a special two-week leave of absence from classes. The school hall buzzed with an uncomfortable mix of approval and resentment.

Although the trip sounded pretty exotic, in reality it meant that I would be well behind with my schoolwork when I got back and would have to put in many extra hours. Some of the other children didn’t see it that way. They were jealous and they wanted me to know that I shouldn’t consider myself special. There was an uneasy atmosphere in the playground later that morning and then suddenly I got hit on the back of the legs with a cricket bat. I went down and when several others joined in I was beaten up quite badly.

So I learned another important lesson: that no matter what you do you cannot please everybody and there will always be some who want to undermine your success. Their attacks, whether they be with a cricket bat in the school playground or, later on, with words in the press, always hurt. They are motivated by jealousy; people who said that you would never be any good and who are forced to eat their words when you go out and prove them wrong. It is a reaction against success achieved against the odds, a denial that somebody from within their midst could be successful and get the attention and the rewards that success brings. This is a negative side of human nature which I have run up against many times in my life, but which I don’t believe I will ever understand. Sadly it is one of the prices you have to pay if you single-mindedly pursue your goal. It comes with the territory.

The karting trips abroad were great fun and often my father and I would be accompanied by my sisters Sandra and Gail. We would pack the car onto the ferry and set off on another adventure. I enjoyed meeting and racing against children from other countries, although it was always nice to come home once the job was done. The races were enjoyable and we had our fair share of successes. I had a few accidents too, but mostly these were harmless spills. Because the karts didn’t travel terribly fast, parents were never too worried about their children getting hurt. I had one accident where I took off and flew into the branches of a tree. The chassis buckled under the impact, but I was perfectly alright. Not long afterwards I had my first serious accident.

It was an accident that shouldn’t have happened, but in those days in kart racing there wasn’t the quality control in the manufacture of components which there is today. Also the thoroughness of scrutineering and inspection was way behind today’s standards. Unbeknown to me, the steering column on my kart was cracked when I started the race. I was coming down the hill on the fast kart track at Morecambe, travelling at probably 100mph and approaching a slight left-hander. I turned the wheel and the steering just snapped. I realised that I had no steering and at that speed there is no time to scrub off speed before you go off. I was in big trouble. I took off over a kerb and somersaulted. There was a huge impact and the back of my helmet struck something hard. I was knocked unconscious.

It must have looked like a serious crash. Whenever they take a driver’s helmet off and his whole face is covered in blood you know that it’s been a significant blow. I was taken to the Royal Lancaster Hospital where I was found to be haemorrhaging from the ears and the nose. The scar tissue which is caused in the channels of the ears by an injury like that stays with you for life and I have actually lost some of my hearing as a result.

I remember drifting in and out of consciousness. It was rather like a dream. I also recall hearing a voice and as I came to, I caught a glimpse of a priest standing at the end of the bed. He was saying prayers and his last words were, ‘And what else can I do for you my son?’ I realised that he was giving me the last rites.

My head hurt and I was struggling to keep awake. I vividly recall coming to the realisation that the situation was very serious. I knew I had to fight. I was not about to let life slip away from me. I summoned up the strength to speak … and promptly told the priest to sod off. Then I collapsed back into unconsciousness. I had a battle going on inside my head, but I have such a strong will to live that I came through that traumatic experience and before too long I was out of hospital and back at home with my family. It had been a frightening period but I knew that I had to go on and learn from it.

That accident taught me that I should always check four fundamental things before I race: the steering, the brakes, the suspension and the aerodynamic wings. I check them because if any one of them were to fail I would have no chance of controlling the car and could be killed. Pretty much anything else on the car can go wrong and you can stay in control. But if you lose any one of those four key things, it’s curtains. If the suspension fails, you’re on three wheels while if the brakes fail, you have no stopping power. If your front or rear wing fails or falls off then you have little or no control; and if the steering goes then you’re a passenger on a high speed ride.

In the early days I had a lot of accidents I shouldn’t have had. I’ve analysed every one of them because it is so important to learn. Accidents like the one I had at Morecambe weren’t my fault, they were caused by failures on the machine. In large part this was because we never had the finance to get the best and safest equipment. In my early single-seater days many accidents were caused by component failures and even when I joined Lotus we had five suspension failures in one season.

Over the years I have been more down after accidents and retirements caused by mechanical failure than those where I was at fault. When something breaks and you crash, you’ve got to take it personally because you are the one who is sitting in the car and you realise that you are under threat from some major unknowns. It’s far easier if you make a mistake to accept it and learn from it. For sure if it’s a big error it might take a little longer to get over, but you can still rationalise it and put it out of your mind.

One of the worst mechanical failures I ever suffered was during the Canadian Grand Prix at Montreal in 1991. I was winning the race hands down, heading for my first win of the season, when the gearbox failed. It was a semi-automatic gearbox, which controls the gear selection electronically and was operated by pushing a lever on the back of the steering wheel. We had had a few problems with it at the start of the season, but we thought that those problems had now been solved. But coming through the hairpin on the last lap I couldn’t find a gear to save my life. I had a box full of neutrals. The revs dropped and the engine cut out. That was it. To be leading the race by almost a minute and then to be forced to quit on the last lap was hard to take.

My engineer David Brown and I were trying to get over it as quickly as possible, when we read some truly idiotic suggestions in the press that I had switched the ignition off while waving to the crowd. It was a pathetic notion and it really hurt. Let’s face it, you don’t push as hard as you can for 68 laps and then switch your own engine off. It was bad enough losing the race through mechanical failure, but to have insult added to injury in that way was too painful to describe.

That accident at Morecambe had been a wake-up call, but I bounced back and carried on racing karts. As I reached the end of my teenage years, I had won seven Midlands Championships, one Northern Championship, one British Championship and many other races. It had been a lot of fun, but my attention was beginning to wander onto single-seater car racing and onto Formula Ford in particular. It was clearly time to move forward on the road towards Formula 1 and the World Championship.

Almost immediately I ran into problems.

Chris Hampshire, a karting colleague: ‘There are probably a hundred people who raced against Nigel in karts, who look at where he’s got to and say, “Now why couldn’t I have done that?” Nigel had the determination to pull himself right up to the top. His will to win is enormous. He also had extraordinary reactions, much faster than most people’s. By reacting so quickly, he seemed to make more time for himself.’