26 Sept 2011 – My Personal Top 10 F1 Drivers (# 10)
Last time I listed a few drivers who didn’t quite make my list of top 10 F1 drivers. Those guys were a mix of typical selections made by people who pick “best of” lists (Fangio, Ascari, Moss) based on reputation and achievement and drivers who probably would never have been considered anywhere close to the top of any lists bar the ones that are most subjective.
The drivers who didn’t quite squeak into my top 10 provide a handy illustration of the nature of this particular countdown: It relies not so much on statistics or any other kind of “objective” metrics as it does on more subjective criteria. This list is intended more as an enumeration of my favorite Grand Prix pilotes, not so much as arguments for these drivers’ places in the ultimate “best ever” lists.
(I will have to confess, however, that my top driver is often underrated in such lists.)
Anyway, I’m invoking the writer’s privilege here of shifting tactics a little bit. Instead of listing the #10 thru #7 drivers as I had originally intended, I’ll be devoting one blog post per driver. So today’s post will be exclusively about the #10 driver in my personal top 10 drivers list.
With all that preamble all dealt with, let’s see which driver gets the tenth spot.
I have to confess something.
I’m not a Nigel Mansell fan.
I was never a Mansell fan.
Two things I will admit, though, are that I wished that he had given Ayrton Sennaa stronger challenge in 1991, and that I was genuinely happy to see him finally earn the world championship that he’d been chasing for his entire career the following season.
Mansell's distinctive helmet livery, as done during his Ferrari years (Photo courtesy of anf1blog.com)
To be perfectly honest, Mansell never really captured my imagination on a consistent basis. He started his Formula 1 career as a Lotus driver, the last grand prix driver personally recruited by Colin Chapman himself. He drove a small handful of races as Lotus’ third driver in 1980 before earning a full-time ride with the team the following year. His stay at Lotus was unremarkable in terms of results, scoring five podium places (five 3rd places) in four years, no wins, and 38 world championship points. He did score his first career pole position while driving for the team in 1984, at the Dallas Grand Prix, the season’s ninth race.
But while Mansell’s results ledger whilst at Lotus was respectable at best (Lotus was in the doldrums in the early 1980s, the prelude to one final, all-too-brief resurgence after Mansell’s departure at the end of the 1984 season), he was acquiring a reputation as one of grand prix racing’s most dramatic performers. Mansell wasn’t good enough to rise above his rivals in the early 1980s, but more often than not he grabbed his share of attention for how he went about his racing.
Mansell was dramatic not in the way Gilles Villeneuve or Ronnie Peterson were before him, or Jean Alesi afterwards. His contemporary and 1985 teammate, Keke Rosberg, was more similar to these other drivers than Mansell was. These drivers had dramatic driving styles, a flamboyance and flair that was spectacular and very easy for spectators to appreciate. Mansell wasn’t dramatic in the way he drove; rather, he was just simply dramatic. You watched him, and you remembered not impressions of his style behind the wheel, but specific moments, the high points of a narrative.
For instance, even before he became a Formula One driver, you remember hearing about the time when he and his wife sold their house and most of their other possessions just so he could continue racing. You remember the story of his Grand Prix debut at the 1980 Austrian Grand Prix, when his Lotus’ fuel cell leaked into the cockpit and gave him significant (and painful) chemical burns to his lower body and legs. You remember the time when he took his first career pole, but ran out of fuel in Dallas in 1984; I can still see him pushing his empty Lotus to the line, then collapsing with considerable theatrics into the tarmac as soon as he crossed the line. And I’ll never forget how he qualified brilliantly for the Monaco Grand Prix earlier that final season with Lotus, overtook pole sitter Alain Prost early in the race, then threw the race away after losing traction on some painted street lines on the way up to the Casino Square.
He left Lotus and joined Williams in 1985. Mansell was a bit of an unknown quantity at the time; his years with Lotus were rife with unreliable cars and erratic performances. On occasion, Mansell’s performances teased you with hints of brilliance; there was no doubt that he was a fast, fearless driver who was capable of great results when inspired. Too often, though, he would make critical errors and remove himself from contention. And he never was a threat to win the world championship, with his best finish in the final standings being 9th, in 1984.
His Williams years saw him begin to blossom. In 1985 he took his first two Grand Prix victories, winning the European Grand Prix at Brands Hatch and the South African Grand Prix at the mighty Kyalami circuit back-to-back. He finished 6th in the Drivers’ World Championship that year, almost doubling his career world championship points total in one year (he scored 31 in 1985; as mentioned earlier, he had earned 38 from 1980-1984).
1986 proved to be even better. Now teamed with Nelson Piquet (Rosberg moved to McLaren for 1986), he won five Grands Prix. He lost the drivers’ championship at the last race, the victim of a spectacular tire failure in the closing laps of the Australian Grand Prix. He was cruising at a safe fourth place when the tire burst on the Brabham Straight, running in a position that would have earned him enough points to clinch the title no matter what eventual champion Alain Prost and teammate Piquet did. Yet fate deigned to not smile on him.
The following year saw Mansell emerge as an even stronger contender. This time, the championship battle was, for all intents and purposes, an all-Williams affair. Prost and Senna were also in play, but in reality neither of them had a car that was as consistently good as the mighty FW11B. Mansell won the most races (six), but frustratingly also fell victim to more car failures than his other co-contenders (I remember him losing a wheel nut in Hungary, causing him to retire). He also occasionally made some bad decisions on the track, too, such as when he made a poorly-judged overtaking maneuver on Ayrton Senna at Spa-Francorchamps. The ill-advised pass saw both Mansell’s Williams-Honda and Senna’s Lotus-Honda spin off into the gravel trap at the les Fagnes complex. All told, Mansell retired from four of the fourteen Grands Prix he contested. That’s 25% of a full Grand Prix season lost to retirements.
But wait: 4/14 does NOT equal 25%. That’s because the 1987 season featured sixteen races. Mansell ran only fourteen on account of his accident during the 1987 Japanese Grand Prix. He made a mistake in the Esses and crashed his Williams-Honda, injuring his back and therefore ensuring that he would take no further part in the final two races. He lost his chance to beat teammate (and now fierce rival) Nelson Piquet, who lifted the champion’s laurels despite winning half as many Grands Prix as Mansell. Piquet did not score four times, but showed excellent consistency by finishing second seven times, thereby outscoring Mansell very easily (73 (Piquet actually scored 76 total points, but he had to drop 3pts due to F1’s rule of taking only the best eleven results of the season into account) vs 61).
Mansell and Williams lost their Honda engines in 1988; consequently, they were relegated to the status of also-rans in the year of total McLaren domination. Mansell’s contract with Williams ended at the end of 1988, and though the team wanted dearly for him to return, he had another option to consider.
Ferrari came knocking, and Mansell could not refuse the call. 1989 saw him teamed with Gerhard Berger, driving the beautiful John Barnard-designed Tipo 640, the first Formula One car fitted with the now-ubiquitous semi-automatic gearbox. The transmission was a brand new innovation, and inevitably it suffered through some serious teething troubles (pun not intended) throughout the 1989 season. Nevertheless, Mansell took a memorable victory in the year’s first Grand Prix (in Brazil), forever endearing himself to the Ferrari tifosi, who grew to love him. They even christened him il Leone, the Lion of England driving one of their beloved red cars.
Though Mansell could only finish 4th in the final standings (earning 38pts and winning only two grands prix), he continued to burnish his growing stature even further. Not only did he win on his Ferrari debut (incidentally, Murray Walker famously said that Mansell was the first driver in Formula 1 history to have a five wheel-change pit stop, as Mansell also changed his steering wheel – which housed some of the electronic control mechanisms for the revolutionary semi-automatic gearbox in his Ferrari – along with the four tires at one of his pit stops in Brazil), but he also pulled off one of the most exciting overtakes ever captured on video. Watch his breathtaking pass of Ayrton Senna in the 1989 Hungarian Grand Prix as they both came up to lap Stefan Johansson:
1990 saw him paired with Alain Prost. Initially pundits thought that they would be a strong combination for Ferrari, but in reality Mansell was no match for his more accomplished new teammate. Prost won five races to Mansell’s one.
What I remember of Mansell from 1990 are three huge moments. First, I’ll always remember his overtake of Gerhard Berger on the outside of the fearsome and dangerous Peraltada corner, the wickedly fast fifth gear final corner of the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez in Mexico. To me, this is THE signature positive Nigel Mansell moment. It demonstrates Mansell’s audacity, his sheer chutzpah, that so few drivers in the history of motorsports have. The second moment from Mansell’s 1990 that I will never forget is his retirement announcement at the end of the British Grand Prix. Borne from the frustration of having yet another race-ending car failure (this despite his Ferrari being sat on pole position for his home race), he theatrically threw his racing gear (gloves, balaclava, helmet) into the crowd and then convened an impromptu press conference to tell the press and the world that he was quitting F1 at the end of the year. This shows Mansell’s unparalleled flair for the dramatic. Finally, I will always remember the Portuguese Grand Prix at Estoril. Mansell beat his teammate Prost to the pole, then pushed Prost towards the pit wall at the start. This dropped Prost down the order, eventually finishing in third, but crucially behind title rival Ayrton Senna. By this time Mansell’s relationship with Prost had soured badly, with Mansell accusing Prost of indulging in intra-team polemics a bit too much. Mansell took his only win of the 1990 season and seemed ready to go into retirement.
Not long after the end of the 1990 season, however, Mansell had a change of heart and decided he wanted to continue on in F1 after all. Some people theorized that he staged the retirement announcement to terminate his contract with Ferrari without penalty whilst secretly arranging another ride. Luckily for him, Williams decided to jettison Thierry Boutsen, thereby allowing Mansell to return to the team with which he had his greatest successes. Now driving the Williams-Renault FW14, Mansell entered the 1991 Formula 1 season with optimism.
Though the FW14 had a few teething problems (again, due to a new-for-Williams semi-automatic transmission, ironically repeating his experience with Ferrari in 1989), by mid-season Mansell and the Williams-Renault were the combination to beat. He won three consecutive grands prix in the middle of the season, and ended up the year with two more victories, bringing his career total up to 21. He was Ayrton Senna’s strongest challenger for the 1991 title, but Mansell lost far too many points to Senna due to his car’s unreliability and his own mistakes: I’ll never forget Mansell stalling his Williams exiting the hairpin in Canada just a few hundred meters from the end of the race, costing him the win, as well as his mistake in Japan that saw him sliding out into the gravel trap because he tried to follow Senna too closely, which cost him critical front downforce.
1992, though, saw Mansell finally winning the world championship he had so fiercely desired. Armed with an evolved FW14B now featuring a fully-reliable semi-automatic gearbox and stunningly effective active suspension which controlled the car’s sophisticated aerodynamics, Mansell dominated the 1992 season. He reduced grands prix to demonstration runs. He won nine grands prix (then a record) and took the pole position an astonishing fourteen times, a record that still stands to this day.
Mansell won his one and only F1 Drivers World Championship in 1992 (Photo courtesy of carazoo.com)
But it’s not so much for Mansell’s dominance on the track that I remember his 1992 campaign. I remember three classically Mansell moments: His duel with Ayrton Senna in the closing stages of the Monaco Grand Prix, his last-corner crash-and-feign-injury shenanigans early in the Canadian Grand Prix, and his dramatic retirement (again) press conference at Monza just before the Italian Grand Prix. In Monaco, Mansell had to pit late in the race for what he suspected was a slow puncture, which lost him the lead of the race to Ayrton Senna. Senna drove a masterful defensive race for the remaining laps, precisely placing his McLaren-Honda on the piece of the track that Mansell needed to execute the overtaking maneuver. At Montreal, was not on pole position for the first time that year and was again chasing Senna when he botched an overtaking maneuver going into the final third gear right-left chicane; Mansell then feigned unconsciousness for a few laps, staying in his Williams (perhaps trying to force race officials to halt the race, therefore possibly giving him the chance to rejoin with a healthy car) while the field roared past at full racing speed. Eventually, Mansell was persuaded to climb out, whereupon he told anyone who’d listen that Senna had “pushed him over” into the gravel trap, when video replays showed no such thing had occured. Finally, when it became clear that Alain Prost was returning from a year’s sabbatical and joining him at Williams for 1993, Mansell decided he didn’t want to team with Prost and announced he was calling it quits at the end of 1992. So much drama surrounding just one person.
Mansell’s ultimate retirement from Formula 1 was postponed, however. He went to the USA to compete in CART in 1993 and 1994 (winning the championship in his first try), before returning for a few events in 1994 as Damon Hill’s teammate. He even managed to win the 1994 Australian Grand Prix, his final victory. He finally ended his grand prix career the following year with McLaren (a truncated season which saw him either quit or get dismissed due to the McLaren-Mercedes’ poor performance).
It’s impossible to be indifferent to Nigel Mansell: You either love him and his racing, or you don’t. My own feelings about Mansell are not as clear-cut; it’s not a case of just black or white. Mansell takes my breath away in ways few drivers ever have. When he pulls off such brave maneuvers (like his epic Peraltada overtake, or his “Silverstone Two-Step” in 1987, or his awesome battle against Jean Alesi in a Suzuka monsoon in 1994) he is almost unique. But then I don’t care for his penchant for excessive dramatics. I could do without his Brett Favre-like prima donna tendencies vis-a-vis retirement. I don’t care for his theatrics.
Here’s my bottom line as far as Nigel Mansell is concerned: I respected his great bravery tremendously, but I could do without his tendency to indulge in melodrama on and off the track. He will always be considered as one of Formula 1’s most colorful and memorable characters, but apart from his prowess at overtaking (which, to me seemed more a function of his bravery exceeding his rivals’ and not so much an indication of his transcendent skills), there is precious too little of Mansell for me to give him more than just the respect he is due.
16 Sept 2011 – My Personal Top 10 F1 Drivers (Part 1: Who Didn’t Make The Cut?)
Earlier this year, I wrote a three-part blogging miniseries on my personal Top 10 NFL Quarterbacks. (Parts 1, 2, and 3) The compilation of my ten favorite NFL quarterbacks came as a result of a random flood of thoughts deep into 2010-2011 NFL playoffs whilst driving down to my parents’ house one weekend.
It’s been forever (well, four months away feels like forever) since I wrote anything in this blog. I’ve been terribly busy, writing and editing every day of the week to produce good content for CMHD.tv Blog (see my contributions to this blog here). But I’ve managed to get ahead of schedule just enough to be able to eke out some time to update some of my other blogs that also desperately need updating.
Though the 2011-2012 NFL season has just got started (and my beloved San Francisco 49ers started off the Jim Harbaugh era the best way possible by beating the Seattle Seahawks in Week 1), I decided not to reprise my weekly NFL Pick ’ems from last season. I have to confess that I didn’t just pick games and possible outcomes out of the ether when I did those; I actually did try to put some thought behind all of those picks. In other words, duplicating that effort would result in even a bigger slice of my private time, all of which is so precious to me.
Anyway, enough of this preamble. I decided that my return to my sports-exclusive oriented blog should be about one of most favorite sports of all, Formula One. I thought it would be interesting to count down my personal top ten favorite F1 drivers.
Before we get to the drivers who occupy spots #10 thru #7, I figured I’d give you some drivers who missed the cut, and briefly explain why I didn’t include them in my countdown. Particularly keen readers will notice I have not included currently-active drivers, as their careers are still ongoing. I’m very certain that some of today’s great stars – Fernando Alonso, Lewis Hamilton, Jenson Button, and Sebastian Vettel – will someday take a place or two (or three) in my Top 10.
So who didn’t make the cut?
- Juan-Manuel Fangio: El Maestro, a five-time World Champion, seems like an automatic choice to any top ten discussion of F1 greats. But he didn’t make my list? Why? Well, to be perfectly honest I simply haven’t seen enough of his driving. This absolutely isn’t his fault, as he ruled F1 in the 1950s. There is precious little film footage available from this era, and I find myself feeling deprived of not being able to see how this great master practiced his craft.
- Alberto Ascari: The last Italian World Champion was a fascinating man, but, as with Fangio, I’ve seen almost next to no film of this master at work. He beat Fangio to the world title twice (I’m not counting Giuseppe Farina, the first F1 World Champion, who is universally considered to be nowhere close to Fangio in terms of driving ability), and he possibly could have added more to his tally of world championships had he not died at l’Autodromo Nazionale di Monza in 1955. The Variante Ascari at Monza is named in his honor.
- Jack Brabham: This taciturn Australian is a three-time world champion, the first driver to score a title hat trick since Fangio. Though he won three world titles, the name Brabham is probably more synonymous not for Sir Jack, but for the now-defunct Brabham F1 Team. Sir Jack Brabham remains the only F1 driver to win a world title in a car bearing his own name.
- Stirling Moss: Moss is considered the greatest F1 driver never to have won the World Championship. Though a near-fatal accident at Goodwood in 1962 put paid to the best portion of his racing career, he is still remembered fondly and admired as an all-time great, particularly by those fortunate to see him race at his peak. Though I hold him in the highest esteem, I simply couldn’t add him to my top 10, as I never saw him race. That’s my loss, for sure.
- Gerhard Berger: This Austrian is eternally associated with Ayrton Senna, as the two shared the McLaren team from 1990-1992. Berger was overshadowed by the great Brazilian, but who wouldn’t have been? People may have forgotten that Berger was a very fast driver himself. Not only that, but he also had a very strong work ethic, never refusing opportunities to test the car. I never thought of him as a potential World Champion, but he is undoubtedly one of my own favorites.
- Riccardo Patrese: Like Berger, Patrese was never seen as a potential World Champion. But I liked Riccardo very, very much. He had the reputation of being a very good test driver, able to provide to the designers and engineers high quality feedback. Not only that, but he seems like a genuinely good chap, a very down-to-earth character inhabiting a world with so few of those.
- Niki Lauda: Niki was the hardest cut to make. I admire this great three-time World Champion from Austria like I do very few others. Honest to the point of bluntness, he ruffled the feathers of many of the F1 world’s most powerful figures. He also remains one of the greatest symbols of courage in F1 history: He survived a fiery near-fatal accident at the fearsome Nürburgring in 1976 and came back to race at Monza an unbelievably scant six weeks later, his wounds still fresh and bleeding. He just lost the 1976 world title, but won his second crown the following year (he won his first in 1975). Seven years later, he won the closest championship ever, beating Alain Prost to the 1984 Drivers’ World Championship by an unbelievable half-point (0.5)!
Joe-Pinions: Sports 
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