Nigel Mansell was always good with pain and injury. He had a habit of treating them as twin impostors to be dismissed as mere inconveniences.
When he shattered his right foot in a huge crash in Adelaide in 1991, he did everything he could to conceal the extent of the damage because he wanted to get back to his home in Florida as soon as possible.
Back in the States, a surgeon told him he needed a complex operation to rebuild the foot. He told him he would not be able to drive again for three months. Mansell said he did not have three months to give. He refused the operation and soldiered on.
When his Newman-Haas smashed into a wall at the oval in Phoenix in 1993, Mansell needed 148 stitches in a wound in his back. Ten days later, he was in Indianapolis, qualifying his car for the Indy 500.
He broke his back three times over the course of his career, he broke his neck once, he was given the last rites after a spectacular crash when he was still racing in karting.
He may not quite have reached Evel Knievel levels but he broke most of the bones there are to break. He was one of the last action heroes, a man whose commitment to his sport knew no equal.
Nigel Mansell is the last British action hero, once famed for putting his body on the line chasing Formula One glory
One moment saw Mansell crash out at Phoenix only to race with a wounded back ten days later
During his 15-year racing career Mansell won the world championship and 31 grands prix
We laugh wryly about those days now as Mansell, 71, walks gingerly through the hard, shiny tiled corridors of the Resorts World complex here at the northern end of The Strip.
He has had shoulder replacement surgery recently, a legacy of all those years before power steering when he used all his fearsome upper body strength to wrestle Formula One cars around fast corners and tight chicanes.
‘How are your feet?’ I ask him. ‘Broken,’ he says, laughing. ‘I can’t walk very far these days.’ He just had his gall bladder removed, for good measure.
Does he regret any of the risks he took, any of the injuries he ignored, any of the pain he braved, any of the insanely courageous moves he made behind the wheel, now that life is calling in some of the bills?
‘You can say that and be mean to yourself,’ Mansell says, ‘but if I hadn’t been that way, I never would have made it. I am happy with my lot.
‘I don’t regret anything. What Colin Chapman, the Lotus founder who was my mentor at the start of my career, saw in me was absolute commitment. I drive to the point where I couldn’t do any more.’
We sit down together in a restaurant to one side of the casino floor. It is called Junior’s. We complain to each other about the loud background music and the hard chairs and reminisce about the old days when Mansell was indestructible.
I only caught him at the end of his career when he was racing in the IndyCar Series in the States, before a swansong in Formula One when he was dragged back to Europe to fill the void left by the death of Ayrton Senna.
Mansell drove for Williams for two stints during his career, with the first starting in 1985
The driver later returned to the constructor in the wake of the tragic death of Ayrton Senna
On the Thursday before every race in the States in that 1993 season, at places like Loudon in New Hampshire and Nazareth in Pennsylvania, Mansell and his wife Roseanne took any members of the British press who had come to cover the event out to dinner. It was the way they were.
Nigel and Roseanne will celebrate their Golden Wedding anniversary in April. They have been together for 55 years and in a new book by veteran sports journalist Graham Nickless, who covered much of Mansell’s career, Mansell talks about what lies ahead.
‘It’s about trying to embrace what time we all have left,’ Mansell says in ‘Cheers to 50 Years on the Sporting Frontline’. ‘I don’t know who wrote the book “The Golden Years” but I’m not sure they know what they’re on about. But we’re very blessed and we’re embracing our lives as much as we can, like everybody else.’
It is still a thrill to be in Mansell’s company. He is here in Las Vegas for the grand prix as an ambassador for Bentley and he remains one of the most inspirational figures in the history of British sport.
He stood for daring and guts and a refusal to be intimidated by anyone and a rare mix of stardom and normality that made him one of the most popular sports stars Britain has ever produced.
Think of his duel with Senna in Barcelona at the 1991 Spanish Grand Prix when Mansell’s Williams and Senna’s McLaren did a 200mph dance down the main straight, side by side, cars twitching and throwing up sparks as they hurtled towards a right-hander, separated by a few centimetres.
Two of the greats. Two men insanely determined. For a while, it seemed that neither of them would yield and that there would be a cataclysmic crash. But Senna knew that Mansell would never yield. It was Senna who blinked first. It was Senna who backed off.
Think of Mansell’s famous around-the-outside manoeuvre at Peraltada, one of Formula 1’s most fearsome bends, as he pulled off one of the greatest overtaking moves in the sport’s history in his Ferrari to hurtle past Gerhard Berger during the 1990 Mexican Grand Prix. We should celebrate Mansell for that and for all he did for British sport at every opportunity we get.
One of Mansell’s greatest moves involved a fearsome overtake of Gerhard Berger (right) to win the 1990 Mexican Grand Prix
Throughout his career Mansell was supported by his wife Roseanne – they are set to celebrate their Golden Anniversary next year
Mansell was, of course, the last Englishman to drive for Ferrari. He spent two years at Maranello and his courage became a universal language. The tifosi nicknamed him Il Leone. The Lion. Next season, another Englishman, Lewis Hamilton, will drive for the Scuderia after so many years of success at Mercedes.
Mansell is a huge admirer of Hamilton. If there are some who think that Hamilton’s powers are waning, that he will be outperformed by teammate Charles Leclerc and that a record eighth drivers’ world title is beyond him, Mansell is not among them.
‘I think that what Lewis has done by deciding to join Ferrari is the most magical thing he could have done,’ Mansell says. ‘The team is ultra-competitive. They could go for the championship next year.
‘I don’t care what anybody says about Lewis. He is a class act. I have always been a fan of his. I was a lone voice for a while. He has made me feel very proud that I saw an incredibly talented young man who came and took the F1 scene by storm.
‘It won’t be easy going against Leclerc but I think it will be healthy. Some people might see Lewis as an underdog but I think those people would be making a huge mistake if they do that. I think he will surprise everybody. It might take him a couple of tests to get comfortable but I see a total resurgence at Ferrari.
‘That is not to say Charles won’t give him a run for his money and he has some weekends where he does everything perfectly. But you have to do it more consistently. Lots of people win races but putting championships together is a different story.
‘I will go out on a limb and I will guarantee that, if Lewis can find his motivation, he has got another championship in him. Easily. Never say never in this game and next year should be very competitive. Ferrari have done a good job and I think it will be incredibly exciting.’
Mansell’s eyes light up when he talks about Hamilton and about Lando Norris, who pushed Max Verstappen hard this season before Verstappen’s bravura performance in Brazil earlier this month moved the Dutchman in touching distance of the championship.
Mansell holds the honour of being the last Englishman to hold a permanent seat at Ferrari
But the British driver will be joined in the standings soon by his compatriot Lewis Hamilton
Mansell has been impressed by the rise of fellow Briton Lando Norris (centre at Mexican GP)
But the past crowds in on us, too. The good times and the great moments but the moments of loss, too. The passage of the years has not dulled the horrors that Mansell witnessed when he was a young racer. If anything, they have become more vivid.
Mansell was not far behind the Ferrari of Gilles Villeneuve when it was involved in a catastrophic crash during qualifying for the 1982 Belgian Grand Prix at Zolder. Villeneuve was thrown from the car and killed.
‘Oh God,’ Mansell says. ‘It stays with you for the rest of your life. As you get older, it gets worse. You reflect. Now I can visualise Gilles’ car coming down and I was not far behind, and it went across the track in front of me and he was flung out of the cockpit and I knew he was dead.
‘I don’t think you ever recover from that. We had a few years on the trot which were really awful. Then there was Riccardo Paletti, who was killed five weeks later at the Montreal Grand Prix when Didier Pironi stalled at the start and Paletti smashed into the back of his Ferrari.
‘I started off to go and see if I could help and Colin Chapman got me in a headlock and said “you are not seeing this, if you see it, you will never get in a car again”.
‘After the restart, I was slipstreaming Bruno Giacomelli on the first lap and he was crying in the cockpit of his Alfa Romeo. He decided half way down the straight to back off at 190mph. I hit him and my car went through the air and I broke my arm and ended up in the same hospital as Paletti. That was a godforsaken day.
The 71-year-old still has haunting memories of Gilles Villenueve’s crash at Zolder in 1982
But it was the death of his friend and rival Senna (right) which he says almost finished him off
‘I saw Elio de Angelis killed in testing at Paul Ricard in France. Alain Prost and I tried to get him out of the wreckage of his car but it was on fire, crackling and exploding, and there was just no way. We come from a different time. We had to get on with it. Thankfully, today’s generation of drivers are protected from most of those horrors.’
When lunch is over, Il Leone gets up and walks back to the lobby to see me into a taxi. It is 30 years ago this month that he won his last F1 race, the Australian grand prix in Adelaide, in the Williams seat that had become available after the death of his friend and rival, Ayrton Senna, earlier that season.
Just for a moment, melancholy overtakes him again. ‘After everything else, Ayrton’s death just about finished me off,’ he says. Britain’s last action hero pulls his baseball hat low over his eyes and turns away.
Cheers to 50 Years. On the Sporting Frontline by Graham Nickless out soon. Pre-orders at grahamnicklessbooks.com
