Forthright, demanding, paranoid and sometimes downright stubborn, Nigel Mansell has been described as a pain in the backside on more than one occasion. Whether or not he deserved that label, it was certainly applicable in a literal sense to his Formula One debut at the Österreichring in 1980.
Mansell came from the school of hard knocks. His was no overnight success story. He had served his apprenticeship in Formula Ford and Formula Three and was so determined to make it to the top that he accepted a Formula One test drive for Lotus even though he had a broken back at the time! Defying the pain, he showed enough speed on that test to persuade Colin Chapman to give him a chance. And so it was that Mansell came to line up in the 1980 Austrian Grand Prix.
Going into the race, Australian Alan Jones had a clear lead in the championship race courtesy of wins in Argentina, France and Britain. The Österreichring was the fastest circuit of the year (Spa being out of favour between 1970 and 1982) and in practice six drivers were fined a total of 30,000 Austrian schillings (about £11,000) for ignoring a red flag when Jochen Mass spun. René Arnoux put the turbo-engined Renault on pole, breaking his own lap record by a colossal five seconds, from team-mate Jean-Pierre Jabouille and Jones’s Williams. Twenty-fourth and last on the grid was N. Mansell at the wheel of the exceedingly moderate Lotus-Cosworth 81B.
If Mansell thought things could only get better, he was mistaken … sorely mistaken. A few minutes before the start the Lotus mechanics put the final touches to his car, including topping up the fuel tanks. Almost immediately he began to feel ‘an intense burning pain in my backside and down my legs’. He realised that fuel had been spilt over him, whereupon the mechanics asked him whether he wanted to get out and live to race another day. But Mansell had waited so long for this opportunity that nothing was going to deny him, and he insisted on racing. In an effort to dilute the petrol, the crew tipped a bucket of cold water down the back of his seat. This had the desired effect for a while but after ten or so laps Mansell could feel the return of the burning sensation. The pain grew progressively worse. He likened it to being slashed with a knife. His agony lasted until lap 40 out of 54 when the engine of the Lotus blew up in sympathy. For the only time in his career, Mansell was relieved to be out of a race.
‘The decision to race was the right one,’ he said later. ‘It showed I wasn’t a quitter. But the problems started when I got out of the car and discovered that my hamstrings had shrunk where they’d been immersed in petrol for so long. Afterwards I had to have them stretched.’ Scarcely able to walk, once home he went straight to hospital in Birmingham for treatment on the red raw blisters which covered his backside.
The race provided more pleasant memories for 37-year-old Parisian Jean-Pierre Jabouille who, after failing to finish in his previous nine Grands Prix, picked up only his second ever championship victory (he had won in France in 1979). Although team-mate Arnoux was the more fancied of the two Renault drivers, he was delayed by making three pit stops to rectify tyre trouble. This allowed Jabouille to build up a healthy ten-second lead over Jones, only to experience mechanical difficulties over the closing laps. Jones reduced the gap dramatically and at the final corner was right up behind the Frenchman, Jabouille hanging on to win by less than a second. Carlos Reutemann came third in the other Williams, while the unlucky Arnoux could finish only ninth despite breaking the lap record again towards the end.
Second place put Jones 11 points ahead of Nelson Piquet with four races to go, although the outspoken Australian was less than happy with his pit crew, claiming that they failed to keep him properly informed of the narrowing gap between himself and Jabouille. Had he known, he said, he might have been able to put on an extra spurt and snatch victory at the death.
Similarly for Mansell, it was not a race he would forget in a hurry. In fact for weeks to come he would be reminded of it every time he sat down.