Looking back now, it amazes me how we won through. I didnât have a great deal going for me, beyond the love and support of my wife and the certainty that I had the natural ability necessary to win and the determination not to lose sight of my goal. I did many crazy things that I wouldnât dream of doing now, because I felt so strongly that I was going to be the World Champion.
I have no doubt that without Rosanne I would not be where I am today. She has given me strength when Iâve been down, love when Iâve been desolate and she has shared in all of my successes. She has also given me three lovely children. None of this would have been possible without her.
Over the years there have been many critics. Hopefully they have been silenced. Even if they havenât found it in their hearts to admit that they were wrong when they said I would never make it, perhaps now they know it deep down.
I have always been competitive. I think that it is something you are born with. At around the age of seven I realised that I could take people on, whether it was at cards, Monopoly or competitive sports and win. At the time, it wasnât that I wanted to excel, I just wanted myself, or whatever team I was on, to win. I have always risen to a challenge, whether it be to win a bet with a golfing partner or to come through from behind to win a race. I thrive on the excitement of accepting a challenge; understanding exactly what is expected of me, focusing my mind on my objective, and then just going for it. I have won many Grands Prix like this and quite a few golf bets too.
As a child at school I played all the usual sports, like cricket, soccer and athletics and I always enjoyed competing against teams from other schools. But then another, more thrilling, pursuit began to clamour for my attention.
My introduction to motor sport came from my father. He was involved in the local kart racing scene and when he took me along for the first time at the age of nine, a whole new world of possibilities opened up. It was fast and exhilarating, it required bravery tempered by intelligence, aggression harnessed by strategy. Where before I had enjoyed the speeds my mother took me to as a passenger, now I could be in control. It was just me and the kart against the competition.
To a child, the karts looked like real racing machines. The noise and the smell made a heady cocktail and when you pushed down the accelerator, the vibrations of the engine through the plastic seat made your back tingle and your teeth chatter. It was magical. It became my world. I wanted to know everything about the machines, how they worked and more important how to make them go faster. I wanted to test their limits, to see how far I could push them through a corner before they would slide. I wanted to find new techniques for balancing the brakes and the throttle to gain more speed into corners. I wanted to drive every day, to take on other children in their machines and fight my way past them. I wanted to win.
At first I drove on a dirt track around a local allotment, then I went onto proper kart tracks. The racing bug bit deep. I won hundreds of races and many championships, and as I got more and more embroiled in the international karting scene in the late sixties and early seventies I realised that this sport would be my life. Where before I had imagined choosing a career as a fireman or astronaut, as every young boy did in those days, or becoming an engineer like my father, now I had an almost crystal clear vision of what lay ahead. My competitiveness, determination and aggression had found a focus.
I also used to love going to watch motor races. The first Grand Prix I went to was in 1962 at Aintree when Jim Clark won for Lotus by a staggering 49 seconds ahead of John Surtees in a Lola. I saw Clark race several times before his tragic death in 1968 and I used to particularly enjoy his finesse at the wheel of the Lotus Cortina Saloon cars. He had a beautifully smooth style and was certainly the fastest driver of his time. I can also remember rooting for Jackie Stewart when he was flying the flag for Britain. We went to Silverstone for the 1973 British GP, when the race had to be stopped after one lap because of a pile up on the start line. Iâll never forget watching Jackie in his Tyrrell as he went down the pit straight in the lead and then straight on at Copse Corner. I thought: âThatâs not very goodâ but it turned out that his throttle had stuck open.
Throughout the sixties and seventies as I tried to hoist myself up the greasy pole and move into their world, I followed the fortunes of the Grand Prix drivers. My favourites were James Hunt and Jody Scheckter, while I particularly liked watching Patrick Depailler and Ronnie Peterson, who were both very gutsy, aggressive drivers with a lot of style.
I never saw him race but I had a lot of respect for the legendary fifties star Juan-Manuel Fangio. To win the World Championship five times is a remarkable achievement. I have read about him and met him several times and I only wish I could have seen him race. Iâm told it was a stirring sight.
As I turned from child to adolescent and into adulthood I absorbed myself totally in motor racing, becoming totally wrapped up both in my own karting career and in the wider field of the sport. I am very much aware of the history of Grand Prix racing and I think that nowadays it is a lot more competitive than it was in the days of Fangio or Clark, although Iâm sure that the people competing in those days would dismiss that idea.
People like to compare drivers from different eras and discuss who was the greatest of all time, but the cars were so different that it makes it impossible to say who was the best; you just have to respect the records that each driver set and the history that they made. What I think you can say is that anyone who is capable of winning a World Championship in one sport could probably have done it in another discipline if they had put their minds to it, because they all have something special in them which gives them the will to win.
I had that will to win and I knew all along that, given half a chance, I could make it to the top. Against the wishes of my father, I switched from karts to single-seater racing cars in 1976 and thus began the almost impossible seventeen year journey which took me to the Formula 1 World Championship in 1992 and the IndyCar World Series in 1993. Along the way I suffered more knocks than a boxer, more rejections than an encyclopedia salesman.
In our sport it is often said that truth is stranger than fiction. The most unbelievable things can happen in motor racing, especially Formula 1, and in my case they frequently did. I can laugh now at my childhood vision of a racing driverâs life, it seems hopelessly naive in comparison to the reality.
We began writing my autobiography at possibly the worst time I can remember for trying to explain why I am a racing driver. My rival in many thrilling Grands Prix and a driver whose ability I respected enormously, Ayrton Senna, had just been killed in the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix. It was a crushing blow. The last driver to have perished in a Grand Prix car was my old team-mate Elio de Angelis in 1986, another death which hit me hard. I had seen many drivers get killed during my career, but for some of the younger ones it came as quite a shock to realise how close to death they could come on the track.
It had been twelve years since anyone had died during an actual Grand Prix. There have been huge advances made in safety since those days which certainly helped me to survive some horrific accidents, but when Senna and Roland Ratzenberger were both killed in the same weekend the whole sport was left reeling. There had been many terrible accidents in the preceding twelve years, but the drivers had got away mostly unharmed. Racing had been lucky many times, now its luck had run out.
Every time I thought about it, shivers ran down my spine. It was difficult to comprehend that Ayrton was dead; that he would never be seen again in a racing car. Ayrton was always so committed. Like me, he explored the limits and we had some thrilling no-holds barred battles where both of us drove at ten tenths the whole way. A mistake by either driver in any of those situations would have given the race to the other. It was pure competition.
He won half of his Grands Prix victories by beating me into second place and I won half of mine by beating him. We are in the Guinness Book of Records for sharing the closest finish in Grand Prix racing, at the 1986 Spanish Grand Prix, where he just pipped me by 0.014s as we crossed the finish line; a distance of just 93 centimetres after nearly 200 miles of racing. Some of the battles we had are part of the folklore of racing.
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