Nigel Mansell Quotes

Many great people had been considered to be boring, like Nigel Mansell, but anyone who had read the racing driver’s autobiography, "Clutch Down, Dick Out", would know that perception was way off the mark.

Remember, it’s not how fast you go in a Formula 1 car that injures or kills you – it is how quickly you stop.

It was his dry Brummie drawl - that was Nigel (Mansell)'s secret weapon. He had such a deadpan way about him. If he was in the lead he'd start singing nursery rhymes over the radio. 'Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall . . .' Just amusing himself. On one occasion he was ahead, singing his nursery rhymes to himself, when suddenly he went quiet. Finally the radio cracked back into life. 'I'm going to lose.' 'Why?' 'The mirror's fallen off. That's a really bad omen, a broken mirror.' He was very superstitious like that. I'm glad to say it was mis-founded. He went on to win.

My dream of what I am going to be is my own projection into a hero, a personal projection par excellence. Dreams begin in childhood. When I was a child, I dreamt of becoming a racing driver. Perhaps nowadays a child dreams of becoming a cosmonaut or a Formula 1 driver like Nigel Mansell. Dreams begin in childhood and continue in other forms in adolescence: in some cases they remain with us all our lives. One form of life-long dream is that of the (as yet) unrecognized genius, the Van Gogh model, let us say. There are people who paint or write poetry all their lives, convinced that they are unrecognized just as Van Gogh was, but that one day… Others are for ever Don Juan: Ortega y Gasset says that there is not a man alive who does not believe that he was Don Juan, at least in his younger days, that he perhaps still is, or, if he was not and is not, that he could have been but did not want to be. There are hundreds of variants on these dreams, and it is they, these dreams, that create the real failures. These, I emphasize, are personal dreams: i.e. they are formed by my projection of myself into a model or ideal type of person.

He does possess a penetrating sense of humour. At the end of one briefing in Mexico, when Nigel Mansell had let the world know that he was suffering seriously from uncontrollable diarrhoea and needed to interrupt practice several times on this account, Prost drily asked Roland Bruynseraede, ‘If Nigel has to come in during the race will you show a brown flag?