It must have looked like a serious crash. Whenever they take a driverâs helmet off and his whole face is covered in blood you know that itâs been a significant blow. I was taken to the Royal Lancaster Hospital where I was found to be haemorrhaging from the ears and the nose. The scar tissue which is caused in the channels of the ears by an injury like that stays with you for life and I have actually lost some of my hearing as a result.
I remember drifting in and out of consciousness. It was rather like a dream. I also recall hearing a voice and as I came to, I caught a glimpse of a priest standing at the end of the bed. He was saying prayers and his last words were, âAnd what else can I do for you my son?â I realised that he was giving me the last rites.
My head hurt and I was struggling to keep awake. I vividly recall coming to the realisation that the situation was very serious. I knew I had to fight. I was not about to let life slip away from me. I summoned up the strength to speak ⦠and promptly told the priest to sod off. Then I collapsed back into unconsciousness. I had a battle going on inside my head, but I have such a strong will to live that I came through that traumatic experience and before too long I was out of hospital and back at home with my family. It had been a frightening period but I knew that I had to go on and learn from it.
That accident taught me that I should always check four fundamental things before I race: the steering, the brakes, the suspension and the aerodynamic wings. I check them because if any one of them were to fail I would have no chance of controlling the car and could be killed. Pretty much anything else on the car can go wrong and you can stay in control. But if you lose any one of those four key things, itâs curtains. If the suspension fails, youâre on three wheels while if the brakes fail, you have no stopping power. If your front or rear wing fails or falls off then you have little or no control; and if the steering goes then youâre a passenger on a high speed ride.
In the early days I had a lot of accidents I shouldnât have had. Iâve analysed every one of them because it is so important to learn. Accidents like the one I had at Morecambe werenât my fault, they were caused by failures on the machine. In large part this was because we never had the finance to get the best and safest equipment. In my early single-seater days many accidents were caused by component failures and even when I joined Lotus we had five suspension failures in one season.
Over the years I have been more down after accidents and retirements caused by mechanical failure than those where I was at fault. When something breaks and you crash, youâve got to take it personally because you are the one who is sitting in the car and you realise that you are under threat from some major unknowns. Itâs far easier if you make a mistake to accept it and learn from it. For sure if itâs a big error it might take a little longer to get over, but you can still rationalise it and put it out of your mind.
One of the worst mechanical failures I ever suffered was during the Canadian Grand Prix at Montreal in 1991. I was winning the race hands down, heading for my first win of the season, when the gearbox failed. It was a semi-automatic gearbox, which controls the gear selection electronically and was operated by pushing a lever on the back of the steering wheel. We had had a few problems with it at the start of the season, but we thought that those problems had now been solved. But coming through the hairpin on the last lap I couldnât find a gear to save my life. I had a box full of neutrals. The revs dropped and the engine cut out. That was it. To be leading the race by almost a minute and then to be forced to quit on the last lap was hard to take.
My engineer David Brown and I were trying to get over it as quickly as possible, when we read some truly idiotic suggestions in the press that I had switched the ignition off while waving to the crowd. It was a pathetic notion and it really hurt. Letâs face it, you donât push as hard as you can for 68 laps and then switch your own engine off. It was bad enough losing the race through mechanical failure, but to have insult added to injury in that way was too painful to describe.
That accident at Morecambe had been a wake-up call, but I bounced back and carried on racing karts. As I reached the end of my teenage years, I had won seven Midlands Championships, one Northern Championship, one British Championship and many other races. It had been a lot of fun, but my attention was beginning to wander onto single-seater car racing and onto Formula Ford in particular. It was clearly time to move forward on the road towards Formula 1 and the World Championship.
Almost immediately I ran into problems.
Chris Hampshire, a karting colleague: âThere are probably a hundred people who raced against Nigel in karts, who look at where heâs got to and say, âNow why couldnât I have done that?â Nigel had the determination to pull himself right up to the top. His will to win is enormous. He also had extraordinary reactions, much faster than most peopleâs. By reacting so quickly, he seemed to make more time for himself.â
My father didnât want me to go into single-seater racing. He had been right behind me all through my karting career and it had been his interest in karting that had got me started, but when it came to proper racing cars he decided to draw the line. Karting was fun, he said, but motor racing was serious. He had a good job and a comfortable, although by no means affluent lifestyle and he wanted the same for me. It was clear that he was hoping I would pursue a career in engineering as he had done. He was being realistic, trying to guard against what he saw as the likelihood that I wouldnât make it in motor racing. And knowing how competitive I was he thought that I would find it hard to bear the disappointment of failure.
After all, the odds against a lad from Birmingham going on to beat the worldâs best drivers and win the Formula 1 World Championship were huge. Every year thousands of young drivers start racing and join the ranks of the hopeful. Every season new teenage talents from Europe, as well as from countries further afield like Brazil, Colombia and Argentina, come pouring into England with pockets full of money to race in the most competitive starter championships in the world.
It was common knowledge in racing circles around the world that if you wanted to climb the ladder and get noticed by a Formula 1 team, you needed to race in the British Formula Ford and Formula 3 Championships. Britain has the most powerful motor racing industry and because most of the Formula 1 teams are based here, there is a huge network of information around the industry. A lot of the people who run teams in the junior formulae know people in Formula 1. Formula 3 team managers might tip off their friends in Formula 1 if they see a driver with special talent or someone who has reasonable talent and massive financial backing. For a young driver, being spotted by a Formula 1 team owner is what itâs all about.
Unlike the local kart scene, in Formula Ford or Formula 3 money can make the difference between winning and losing. The cars and engines were all similar, so a few extra thousand pounds could buy you better engine tuning, which in turn would gain you a few precious horsepower over your rivals.
The British series had sent many of its champions on to Formula 1 and it was into this ultra-competitive environment that I wanted to throw myself. Considering that this was the goal of many other young drivers, most of whom had plenty of overseas sponsorship money, the chances of me being successful were less than my chances of winning the pools.
I donât hold it against my father that he was against me trying. What I was disappointed about was that he motivated me to stick with my engineering job with the promise that if I reached certain goals he would support me in my racing career. Out of the goodness of his heart, because he really did love me, he promised many things which never came to fruition.
I had joined my father at Lucas Aerospace at the age of 16 as an apprentice engineer. By this time I was all fired up to race cars and was desperate to get on with the next stage of my career. Given a fair chance I knew I would be able