Nigel's Wild Ride

English race-car driver Nigel Mansell speeds down the backstretch at Portland International Raceway in Oregon at 160 miles per hour, marveling at the scenery. "You should see this," he radios to his crew as the straightaway stretches along a concrete wall and his Lola climbs to 170 mph. "There's quite a lovely view of a snow-covered mountain." His eyes are pointed down the road toward the turn approaching at 180. Carl Haas, the car's owner along with Paul Newman, also marvels--that Mansell can sightsee and provide color commentary at 180 mph. Mansell had never been to Portland, yet he is second fastest in practice, using his two sessions to learn the track. There's only one problem: his competition, the Penske-Chevy driven by the fastest man in practice, Indy 500 winner Emerson Fittipaldi. The car was designed and constructed in the Penske racing shop in England and Fittipaldi had declared this latest in a long line of winners to be the best Penske chassis ever. If Mansell wanted to steal pole position from Fittipaldi he knew that he would have to drive, for at least one lap, like a motherflogger--or, more precisely, like a Lola-flogger.

As the qualifying session progresses, both drivers shave tenths of seconds off their lap times. With two minutes remaining, Fittipaldi's 1:01.007 is quickest, and Mansell has only one chance left. In fact, he's been saving his tires for this last-minute shot. When he drove for Ferrari, Italian fans had dubbed him il leone, the lion, to describe the way he grabbed each challenge with his teeth. Now he keeps his turbocharged Ford-Cosworth engine screaming near its 13,000 rpm limit on its hot lap. As the Lola squirms under the power, the chassis tries to snap sideways; if Mansell twitches the steering wheel a split second too early or too late, a fraction of an inch too much or too little, control will be lost. That's called ten-tenths driving. He takes the checkered flag and hears his crew chief shout "P1" over the radio. His final lap is at 1:00.902, and he is on the pole by a tenth of a second.

The Budweiser--G.I. Joe's 200 at Portland was Mansell's sixth Indycar race, and qualifying was at least his fifth brilliant performance. Afterward, he held Haas captive on a golf cart at the far edge of the team's canopied infield compound. Mansell's bushy eyebrows were bouncing up and down, his mustache was against Haas' ear, and his lips were flying as fast as his Lola had flown through the chicane on his pole-winning lap. "Look at Nigel grinding on Carl," observed amused team coordinator Bill Yeager, watching out of one eye as he pretended to pay attention to his lunch. "He's already trying to hammer down his contract for next year, and he's hitting Carl while he's hot." Yeager, a 67-year-old legend who was one of Mansell's new American "mates," tried to hold back a snicker as the animated Brit rattled on. "Nigel's grinding on him," said Yeager, "just like he does to get what he wants on his race car. He doesn't back off until he gets it."

And sometimes Mansell will get it just for satisfaction, and then walk away. That's what he did in 1992, after winning the Formula I world championship with the Williams team. He claimed the title in breathtaking style by winning 14 poles and nine races in his Williams-Renault, more in one year than any Grand Prix driver in history. But he was not happy, claiming he had been manipulated by his car owner, Frank Williams, during contract negotiations for 1993. As Mansell was reading his retirement statement at a press conference in Monza, Italy to a worldwide television audience, a note was passed to him offering $5 million more to stay. But Mansell had been unredeemably offended. The world champion announced that his terms had just been met, but that it was too late. "It was the ballsiest move he's ever made, on or off the track," says Peter Windsor, the Williams public relations manager and Mansell's ally, who also quit over the matter. Says Mansell, "It was never about money. It was about playing fair and trying to win the world championship."

So Mansell swapped the champagneand-caviar ambience of Formula I for the backyard-barbecue flavor of the Indycar circuit and moved his family from their wet and windy estate on the Isle of Man to a sunny mansion on the Gulf of Mexico in Florida. In America, he wanted to meet new people and challenges, drive new cars at higher speeds and conquer new oval-shaped worlds. Or, as Paul Newman aptly put it, Mansell was about to embark on a "great adventure." He reportedly signed up for just under $5 million.

The Italians see the lion in Mansell, while the British fans, who adore him, call him their English bulldog ("Our Nige" is how the London tabloids tagged him after he won the 1992 world championship). He drives the same way he negotiates: He just doesn't back off. Not for the turns, not for the curbs and most definitely not for his competitors. It's a style and strategy that has put Mansell at the top, though he has often driven against traffic. Since his days as a kid racing go-carts in the Midlands, he has crushed vertebrae in his back, broken his neck once, smashed his left foot and absorbed a bloody blow to his head from a fence post. That injury drew a priest, whose final prayers stirred young Nigel out of unconsciousness long enough to tell the padre to sod off. Mansell's trail is littered with broken bones, crushed hearts, raging controversies, sagged spirits and small tragedies (as well as demolished race cars). But for every downstroke there has been an upstroke. If he had taken any other route he probably wouldn't have gotten where he is today.

He's champion of the PPG Indycar World Series, driver of the year and--almost incidentally--Indycar rookie of the year. In the 1993 season Mansell won five races, took six pole positions and set five one-lap track records in qualifying. He finished third in the Indy 500 after nearly winning it (he was named rookie of the year there, too). He also crashed three times, injured his lower back, sprained and then damaged ligaments in his right wrist and was involved in a handful of scrapes with cars that he felt had gotten in his way. He finished the season with 191 points to Fittipaldi's 183 and earned more than $2.5 million in prize money in addition to his reported retainer of nearly $5 million. No driver had ever won consecutive Formula I and Indycar championships. (Only Fittipaldi and Mario Andretti--coincidentally, Mansell's teammate with Newman-Haas Racing--have also won both titles.) Then he returned triumphant to England, entered an exhibition race for small sedans so that his fans could see him perform at his home track and subsequently crashed into a bridge abutment. Mansell destroyed the car, bruised three ribs and knocked himself unconscious once again.

Mansell, of course, was not entirely unknown when he arrived in the U.S. in 1993. No fewer than 90 international motor-sports reporters were waiting in Phoenix for his first session in an Indycar. He also found a following that had worshiped in the church of ESPN, whose Sunday sunrise service of live Formula I races had made Nigel Mansell a familiar name, if not a god, in millions of households. Most other Formula I drivers appeared to be coldhearted, with brains like the computer chips that control their cars' throttle, gearbox and suspension. Not Mansell. Although he sometimes drives as if he were superhuman--but never robotlike--he behaves in a decidedly human manner, and that makes him popular. How could fans not pull for a man who's either going to win or crash--his car, his body, his security--trying? You have to love a Grand Prix driver who once stopped on his way to a race to take an injured duck to the vet. Like a regular person, he drops, forgets and bumps into things. One time he had to sit out a race after a car ran over his foot. The man is accident-prone. After qualifying at a race in Cleveland last year, Mansell entered the press trailer on his face. His right wrist was severely sprained, yet he drove to third place the next day.

Sharks, snakes, heights and small cars scare him. He sometimes acts silly on purpose and is considered a cutup among his friends. He plonks his head in the basket of bread on the table while laughing at his own naughty jokes. He sneaks off to the golf course at every opportunity, coaches his son Leo's soccer team and likes a good game of snooker with his mates, as well as handball, judo, golf, shooting, swimming, tennis and squash. In Monaco, where he always drives spectacularly (he led his first Grand Prix there in 1984 and was leaving the field in his wake during a downpour, driving with abandon until he crashed), he sometimes stood out in other ways. Surrounded by the stylish and sophisticated Formula I set, he wore Bermuda shorts and a sweatshirt while holding his daughter Chloe's hand, carrying Leo on his shoulders and pushing baby Greg in a stroller. "My idea of a heavenly day off is to curl up on the sofa with Chloe, watch cartoons and take a nap," he says. When his wife, Rosanne, was in the hospital giving birth to Leo, Nigel stayed home to take care of Chloe. "A very special time in my life," he says. "I realized what being a mother is all about.

"I don't want to be a showman at home. I do enough of that on the circuit," he adds. "You're pumped up to be such a star. But I don't want to lose the reality of being human. At the end of the day, we're only flesh and blood."

"The key to Nigel is that he can't stand to be alone," says Peter Windsor. "He absolutely, positively can't stomach, detests and can't handle being alone. He always surrounds himself with people, not so much to be the center of attention but because he needs them behind him, waiting for him to perform. That's why his family means so much to him, and why he used to take his mates from the Isle of Man along to Formula I races, which drove some people nuts. Few understand the depth, sincerity and commitment of Nigel. If he's your friend, you couldn't ask for a better one."

Mansell's early encounters with America, though colorful, were not auspicious. The first time he came here to race, at the Long Beach Grand Prix in 1981, he didn't understand that police take it personally when you run (continued on page 148) (continued from page 110) red lights and drive faster than they do when they chase you. "Fast" for Mansell, of course, was so normal it never occurred to him that night 13 years ago in California that the cops' sirens were wailing for him. He pulled over to let them by, but he and his wife, Rosanne, who'd been on many a wild ride with him, were instead offered a shotgun barrel aimed through the windshield and a .38 pointed at their heads through the driver's side. Nigel was yanked out of the car, thrown over the hood and frisked. He tried to explain that he was just an unaware British racing driver late for an appearance on the Queen Mary, though the only thing he had to prove it was a St. Christopher medal with his name and blood type on it. But the police, beginning to realize that these two frightened foreigners were more tourist than criminal, began to calm down and back off. Mansell got them four tickets to the race, and they wrote him four tickets but never turned them in. In fact, one of them later became Mansell's good buddy, visiting him at his estate on the Isle of Man. Nigel himself went on to become a local town constable, patrolling peaceful Port Erin when he wasn't off racing.

That was Mansell's first Formula I season. Three years and not a lot of success later, Mansell again found himself weaving through traffic on American city streets, this time in Detroit. On the first corner of the first lap of the Grand Prix he went for a gap between Nelson Piquet and Alain Prost, and when the gap closed there was a monumental wreck. He was blamed and fined $6000, a blanket conviction to which race drivers are permanently attached, though he believed the crash wasn't his fault. But he claimed to be glad he was singled out and punished because, he says, "It made me realize what I was up against" in the cruel, political world of Formula I.

A week later he found himself up against a concrete wall in Dallas, but only after he had taken pole position and led most of the race and before he passed out on the sizzling track while pushing his conked-out race car. It was the only Formula I race ever run in Texas, and the fact that it was held in Dallas in July had much to do with its demise. Cars, drivers and engines crashed, cracked and exploded on the cooked concrete, which broke into chunks and formed potholes bigger than armadillos. It was Mansell's kind of day. Strapped in a cockpit that approached 140 degrees, wearing fire-resistant underwear and a triple-layer, quilted suit, he threw his black Lotus around street corners for 45 laps. He drove faster and harder than the drivers chasing him could believe or accept, since he'd never won a Grand Prix. Winner Keke Rosberg accused Mansell of driving unprofessionally by blocking him, and it would not be the last of such complaints.

"I led for the first half of the race, until my tires turned to rubbish. Toward the end I clipped a wall and lost my gears," Mansell recalls. "On the last lap the car broke altogether, and I was so annoyed that I got out and tried to force the bloody thing to finish by pushing it. But my body had other ideas, and I blacked out. All I succeeded in was making myself feel like I had a hell of a hangover the next day."

But even unconscious, he had earned one championship point for sixth place. Surely his Lotus team had been impressed by such effort. "No," he replies with a small laugh. "Most of the people in Formula I thought I was a complete idiot."

That's the difference between the jaded, coldly pragmatic world of Formula I and the American Indycar circuit. Heart still matters over here, which is why Mansell feels that he's found a home. And he staked his claim from the drop of the season's green flag. He took pole position and victory in his first race, on a street circuit in Australia. Then, practicing on the tricky, dogleg one-mile oval in Phoenix, he officially joined the club when he became the second of two types of Indycar drivers: those who are going to hit the wall, and those who have. The flaming, tail-first impact at 180 mph punched a gaping hole in the concrete and coldcocked Mansell, leaving him in the smashed Lola with a concussion and lower back injury.

A month after his first back injury in 1979, Mansell had risen from his bed like Dracula from his coffin at sundown--just as driven and just as hungry--for his Formula I tryout with Lotus. Similarly, after the Phoenix crash, he had two weeks to steel himself for the next race at Long Beach. Each morning the week before the race, a doctor drained 100cc of blood from Mansell's black-and-blue lower back to reduce the swelling, and he had to be lifted in and out of his car. But he still put it on the pole and finished third in the race after enraging reigning Indy 500 champ Al Unser, Jr., who smacked the wall trying to squeeze past Mansell as they entered a turn. "I've never seen anybody block me as bad as Nigel blocked me," said Unser, suggesting that Mansell would eventually get his. Mansell responded that he was the world champion, and Unser should have known his reputation for aggressively defending his position.

Drama and controversy follow Mansell like cops with flashing lights and wailing sirens. In Formula I, he was often faulted for melodramatic behavior, whining and rash moves on the track. Last year he was accused of expecting other drivers to move out of his way, while insisting on the right to defend against a pass. He seemed to broaden the definition of "blocking," and his execution was both criticized and copied. The issue was addressed by Championship Auto Racing Team officials and drivers in meetings last year. They eventually ruled that swerving once to prevent being passed was a legitimate defense of a position; swerving twice was blocking, and it would be penalized. Mansell was satisfied.

After Long Beach, Mansell underwent surgery in which two tubes excavated his ravaged lower back before it was sealed with 100 internal sutures. Doctors could have done the job in a manner to reduce sensitivity and pain, but that would have deadened the seat of his pants, which needed to be bursting with feeling for the Indy 500. Two weeks after the operation he showed up late for rookie practice at Indianapolis' Brickyard, the mightiest and most daunting oval of all. The Indy 500 would be the first oval-track race of his career. After driving a sensational, intelligent and sometimes aggressive race for some 460 miles, he was in the lead when a yellow flag came out. With no experience as the leader on restarts, he didn't know that the driver needs to floor it before reaching the starting line--way back between turns three and four, in fact. Emerson Fittipaldi, who was behind him and driving in his tenth Indy 500, knew that trick. When the green flag fell at the starting line, Fittipaldi's momentum blew him past Mansell, and Arie Luyendyk was dragged along by Fittipaldi's slipstream. Mansell chased Fittipaldi and Luyendyk so furiously to the finish that his right front wheel once hit the wall at 200 mph, shooting a magnesium flame, snapping his head and leaving a black stripe on the white concrete. "Only one person lost that race, and that was me," said the man who's been accused of never taking blame for a loss. He congratulated and praised Fittipaldi for his second Indy 500 victory and apologized to his own crew for his lapse.

Mansell showered the Indycar circuit with his talent in the races that followed. On the tracks where he was expected to be vulnerable--the wild one-mile ovals dubbed "bullrings" for their head-spinning action and potential for the drivers to get gored--he demonstrated genius as he had never before done.

He drove intense and near-flawless races to win on short ovals in Milwaukee, New Hampshire and Nazareth, Pennsylvania, and he lapped all but his teammate Mario Andretti in winning the Marlboro 500 at the fastest oval on the circuit, Michigan International Speedway. His oval-track driving was summed up by ESPN racing analyst Derek Daly, who, in trying to capture Mansell's electric moves, exclaimed, "Nobody has told Mansell that it's not possible to do that."

As Editor-at-Speed of Auto Week magazine, Mansell wrote about the breathtaking New Hampshire race, where on his 40th birthday he outdrove daring young Paul Tracy in heavy traffic. He said of the race: "It was some of the purest racing I've ever done. You're busy every minute on a mile oval. When you come to a four-car train, your car turns to junk because of the dirty air. The race was one of the most exciting and bewildering of my life," he continued. "Exciting because it was the most thoroughbred racing I've ever done--passing, repassing and passing again in the space of a lap, running two and three abreast through the turns and, on one occasion, four abreast down the front straightaway. Bewildering because I could not believe the moves Paul and Emerson were making in traffic, or that I'd be doing the same things later."

Peter Gibbons, Mansell's engineer on the Kmart-Texaco-Havoline team, has worked with Fittipaldi, Michael Andretti and Rick Mears, with whom he won the Indy 500 in 1991. Says Gibbons, "Before Nigel got here, I had heard he was difficult to work with, but in fact he's a dream for an engineer. Our chief mechanic, Tom Wurtz, feels the same way. Nigel is very demanding; he knows what he wants. A lap time Nigel brings you is as fast as the car will go, and he's so consistent that you can evaluate your chassis and aerodynamic changes in tenths of seconds. That's an incredible gift. I've never seen that in any other driver on a road course, and only Rick Mears could do it on an oval. That's what makes Nigel's performance so impressive. You could just watch his learning curve during the Indy 500. For the first 100 miles he was just finding out what he can do with an Indycar, and by the last 100--boom--he was passing like he'd been doing it for 20 years. When you think that he didn't even know how to drive an Indycar before this season, you realize that he's still scratching the surface."

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Although Mansell displayed abundant ability and a taste for raw speed at an early age, he was not a natural. He got where he is mostly, as he puts it, by "dogged determination and bloody-mindedness." The first time he got his hands on a four-wheeled vehicle--a gocart when he was ten years old--he crashed it into a gas pump while trying to take a shortcut. The birth of a career. Rosanne was with him every step of the way. She slept with him and cooked for him in freezing vans parked in the paddock at Formula Ford and Formula III races because they couldn't afford hotel rooms. She sold her new Mini to buy an old Maxi to tow Nigel's race car, and then spent hours holding flashlights for him in cold, dark garages while he changed the truck's clutch plates every week. While Nigel worked as an engineer by day and sold picture frames in pubs at night, Rosanne worked 80 or more hours a week demonstrating ovens for the West Midlands Gas Co. She turned her paychecks over to Nigel so he could pursue his conviction. Sometimes her pay went to hospitals, as it did the time he broke his neck before coming back to claim the British Formula Ford championship. His performance that year brought the offer of a paid ride in the same series the next season, but he turned it down because it wasn't a step up to faster cars. Instead, he and Rosanne sold their house and furniture, and with £6000 they purchased five rides in Formula III races, thinking it would lead to backing. "We must have been mad," Mansell says. "We were very silly. When the money dried up, the team kicked us out and said I was a wanker of a driver. We lost five years of savings in six weeks. We were left with nothing--no car, no house, no money."

But Mansell still had faith in his ability and he still had desire. He also still had Rosanne. With those three assets he found a job as a janitor. "I washed windows and Hoovered carpets, working three-day shifts. I never averaged fewer than 53 hours," he says. "That gave me three days a week to go around the country trying to find sponsorship." Four hundred letters produced 60 rejections. The rest never replied.

If the year had been a test of Mansell's determination, he squeaked by--literally, working a squeegee on office windows at five A.M. on English winter mornings. From this dark time came modest offers. One was to drive an underpowered Formula III car for £25 a week, for which he had to travel all over Britain and hustle auto parts. While he was elevating this car, and later a Formula II car, to positions higher than they deserved, he was noticed by Colin Chapman, the wizard of Lotus, who had made world champions of Jimmy Clark, Graham Hill and Fittipaldi. Mansell earned the job as test driver for Lotus, and on his first day, in his fourth lap on the extremely fast Silverstone circuit, he went quicker than anyone had ever driven a Lotus there--including Mario Andretti, who had won six races and the world championship for Chapman the previous year.

Recalls Mansell, "When I pulled in the pits, there were white faces all around. I thought, What the bloody hell have I done now? The manager leaned over me and said, 'I suppose you think you're bleeping clever, don't you?'"

The manager was kidding, but it set the tone for Mansell's Formula I career. In his first race the crew spilled gas down his back, and he sat in it until his engine blew. He had to be hospitalized for blisters on his thighs and buttocks. His life at Lotus was lovely for two years, but when Chapman died in 1982, Mansell's star went with him. The more he drove the next ten years, the more some people in Formula I thought he would never be the world champion Chapman predicted--because his driving was so unrestrained. The fans loved him for it--more than his team owners and managers and European motor-sports journalists, who had their own notions of how a Grand Prix driver should look and act. He was accused of evils such as having a turgid Midlands accent and the appearance of a vacuum-cleaner salesman. "Now they're swallowing humble pie," says Mansell of those who dismissed him, "and they want me back."

Mansell's body language has sometimes invited as much ridicule as sympathy or concern. After his victory in the British Grand Prix at Brands Hatch in July 1986, still the most memorable moment of his career, he took a victory lap despite a ban on such celebration--"for my fans," he said, of which there were 115,000, all of them screaming for Mansell. It had been a hot race under relentless pressure from Nelson Piquet, and Mansell's crew had forgotten to put a water bottle in his car. Observed Anthony Marsh, a British TV commentator and a Mansell admirer, "He was semiconscious during that lap, hanging out the car window like a rag doll, and loving every second of it."

Bad luck has plagued Mansell. When a rear tire blew near the end of the final race in Australia he was leading the championship by six points; he lost by two to Alain Prost. The next year he won eight pole positions and six races but crashed in practice at the next-to-last race in Japan and crushed a vertebra, ending his season flat on his broken back as second-best again, this time to Piquet. The Williams team lost its turbocharged Honda engines the next year, and Mansell chugged to ninth with a turgid Judd. Throughout his career he'd driven exclusively for British teams, but in 1989 he signed with Ferrari, lured by big money, big promises and high hopes. Mansell didn't find the speed he expected from the blood-red machines in Italy, but he did find a new cult during his two years there: the fervid Italian fans who hang from the trees around Monza and drop onto the track, dancing in celebration, when a Ferrari does well. It was those fans who crowned him il leone.

After the 1990 season he announced that he was quitting--the joy of driving had been lost in the mud of Formula I politics and double-dealing. He was offered a lot of things to change his mind, and today, when he's asked which racing accomplishment he's most proud of, he replies that it was getting all those promises in writing before he went back to Williams in 1991. In 1992 the Williams-Renault was superior, and the circuit belonged to Mansell. His nine victories put him third on the all-time list with 30, behind Alain Prost's 44 and Ayrton Senna's 36.

"I could make a list as long as my arm of the people in motor racing who will never admit they were wrong when they said I would never be world champion," he says. Such a list would probably include the people he's fallen out with and doesn't think much of today: former Lotus manager Peter Warr, team owner Frank Williams and his designer, Patrick Head, and especially drivers Senna, Piquet and Prost, with ten world championships and more than 100 Grand Prix victories among them. All were once Mansell's teammates except for Senna, whose rigid claim to ownership of any spot on the track makes Mansell's seem downright mannerly. Senna is the only one Mansell has thrown against a wall, though he's come close to strangling the mouthy Piquet more than once.

If Mansell was a misfit in Formula I, it's because he lacks some special skills common to Senna, Piquet and Prost. "On a scale of one to ten, they're a ten in political maneuvering," he says. "I'm a one or a one and a half." The secret to success in any form of motor racing is simple--get the fastest car--but execution of that rule, especially in Formula I, often can involve opportunistic manipulation. "In Formula I it's considered a weakness to be straightforward and accommodating, which I always tried to be," says Mansell. "You can't even sit down and have a direct conversation. Everything you're told is a lie. But if you ask me a question, you don't have to wonder if the answer is true or not. I'm always me. What you see is what you get."

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Talking about Mansell, Carl Haas chooses his words carefully, as if to avoid being quoted. "He's complicated," says Haas. "I think any really first-class driver is selfish and demanding. I think that's partly necessary. I haven't met any top driver who doesn't have periods of being difficult. But I think I'm able to understand and deal with Nigel's needs better than the last team he drove for in Formula I. He needs loving care."

"It's nice to feel wanted again," says Mansell of his new team. "What motivates me more than anything is the type of people around me. Coming to America to race Indycars has been like joining the club. When I went to Long Beach right after the crash in Phoenix, I couldn't believe the number of drivers who came up to wish me well. And the fans have been absolutely wonderful."

Indeed, a race weekend doesn't pass without several fans informing him that another baby has just been named Nigel, nor without Union Jacks waving from the grandstands at the start and finish of each race. When he's chauffeured on the back of a golf cart from the pits to the team's motor coach, fans stream along behind with outstretched programs and T-shirts for Mansell to sign, shouting things like, "Thanks for coming over and showing us how to drive, Nigel!"

The only problem with all this attention is that it's been hard on the ego of his senior but still hungry teammate, Mario Andretti. Their relationship has come full circle since Andretti was the golden boy at Lotus 14 years ago and Mansell was the distant and overlooked number three. Texaco commercials show Mansell and Andretti sharing a laugh, but on and off the track, the two are distant. Snapped 54-year-old Andretti, last year's Driver of the Quarter-Century, when asked for the umpteenth time about the impact of Mansell's arrival: "I've accomplished a hell of a lot more than he has, so what am I worried about?"

Meanwhile, Mansell ended his season on the sidelines, after coming together with rookie Mark Smith while lapping him in the final race on the Laguna Seca circuit in Monterey, California. Earlier in the race he had knocked the rear wing off the car of another rookie, Scott Sharp. Mansell wasn't too hard on Sharp for not moving over fast enough for him, but he angrily accused Smith of chopping him off. Witnesses, including those who watched from Mansell's own in-car camera, saw a picture that was much less clear. The contact jerked the Lola's steering wheel and reinjured Mansell's right wrist.

The next night at the PPG Indycar World Series banquet he collected his accolades and shook left hands. All was forgiven. A big silver championship trophy and $2.5 million will do that. And the people who had had their fill of Mansell during the season were now gracious: He'd won the Indycar World Series through hard work, determination, courage and an unprecedented display of skill. Even Mario was smiling as he collected his check for sixth place in the standings. "Nigel," he said, "once you get the hang of these ovals, you should make a pretty good Indycar driver."

"Cars, drivers and engines crashed, cracked and exploded. It was Mansell's kind of day."