Headed on collision course

More often than not, Formula One's world championship laurels are sorted, cut and dried by early autumn, and only occasionally…

More often than not, Formula One's world championship laurels are sorted, cut and dried by early autumn, and only occasionally they snarl at full lick and throttle right down, as they say, to the wire for the thing to be decided on the long season's last throw of all. Damon Hill is by no means the only British driver to have left it late for his world title.

Nigel Mansell won his solitary world championship in 1992 almost at a pottering Sunday afternoon spin, with 108 points to the 56 of his Williams team-mate Ricardo Patrese.

But fully six years earlier, Mansell had staged a championship curtain-call of compelling theatre. He had been fully expected to take the palm in the penultimate race in Mexico City, but, unaccountably, or inimitably, he goofed there. Then, in the final race at Adelaide, the title still his for the taking, he blew it again. Or, rather, his rear-left tyre did in a coruscating 200mph Catherine-wheel, so his fierce rival, Alain Prost, gleefully shook the podium champagne, winning by 72 points to 70. (But how Mansell in that split second and at such speed kept his wounded and crazily juddering car away from the straight wall was itself a breathtaking feat of driving skill almost worthy of the championship in itself).

Perhaps that deflating, two-race anti-climax of Mansell's 11 years ago in October 1986 only happened because his presumed crowning in Mexico coincided with Murray Walker's birthday. On the Friday, eve of final practice for Sunday's race, the BBC Television team who were staying at the old city's evocative Maria Isabel hotel threw a select and surprise dinner party for its popular veteran commentator and racebawler. It was a pleasure not only to be invited but to be escorted downtown by Mansell himself.

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When the candled-cake arrived on the sweet-trolley, the driver did the honours with a chirpily warm little speech, and then left early-ish for bed and the morrow, leaving Murray to mull over this and that and the certainty that his boyhood grand prix heroes, Tazio Nuvolari, Bernd Roseemeyer and Juan Fangio, were incomparably better than any modern driver since . . .

Mansell may have conscientiously hit the sack, but he hardly slept. He chose as his main course a dish of sliced meat, very rare. By dawn Montezuma had begun taking his revenge in a flood. At practice, his face sheet-white, Mansell did remarkably well to place third on the grid for the morrow - between so many excuse-me stops that the Williams crew painted arrows on the pitlane from the car-stop to the mobileloo.

Mansell had steadily dominated the second half of that season and underlined it a fortnight before Mexico with a sensational, 19-second victory drive in Portugal to take him 10 points clear in the championship. Only Prost and Nelson Piquet could catch him, and only then if two disasters befell the Brit at Mexico and Adelaide.

Third on the grid - but 21st to get away. Was it the continuing stomach bug, or just a bungled missed-gear which might happen to you or me at traffic-lights in an Escort? "The light goes green and it's nightmare time," remembered Mansell. "I flip the clutch, accelerate, and nothing happens, I'm just left holding a bunch of neutrals. The field roared past me and I braced myself for a shunt. Mercifully, nothing hit me - but the field had gone. I got her into second and chugged off after them, cursing and feeling a right idiot."

His resulting pursuit was electric. From half a lap behind, Mansell's Williams picked them off one by one. No loo-stops now. It was thrilling stuff. By the end he had dramatically reeled-in all but four (young Gerhard Berger, taking his first Grand Prix win), so he was in the points and all he needed, whatever Prost or Piquet did, was nothing more than a nice-and-easy third place at Adelaide to be champion.

And all went precisely to plan in South Australia - for 63 of the 82 laps, that is. Prost had punctured early on, but Goodyear had assured their two Williams cars, driven by Mansell and Keke Rosberg, that no tyre-changes would be necessary. The latter made the running and Mansell pootered along securely in third place, which was all he needed.

On lap 63, Rosberg had a blow-out and the Williams pit frantically called in Mansell for a change. But before he could do so, as he began lap 64, his rear-left exploded on the straight at full-pelt and, as he fought the crazily bucking tube for his life, the incandescent cascade of sparks died. And with them, so did his world championship. Actually winning it six years later would be nothing as dramatic as his losing of it.

Mansell's tyre-burst meant that it was to be 16, not 10, years between British world titles. In 1976, in the shadow of Mount Fuji, once again it had come down to the final race of the series - Niki Lauda on 68 points, James Hunt on 65. The world was rooting for Lauda, back in his Ferrari after a miraculous escape with horrible burns in the race at Nurburgring when a clear leader in the championship. Now the winner would take all, it mattered not who was second.

The shadow of Mount Fuji? You could not even see it on race morning, nor even the "wire" that it had all come down to. It bucketed down. The track was awash. Hunt and Lauda said they would race if they had to. They began in atrocious conditions and, crucially, Hunt rocketed from the grid to take the lead, with Lauda back in fourth.

With the spray like a car-wash for all the others behind, only Hunt had any reasonable vision. Lauda called it a day after just two laps, life itself seemed more rewarding than another world title. His boss, Enzo Ferrari, called him a coward.

Hunt stayed in front for the business part of the race, then cruised in carefully for the two championship points he needed. Hunt 69, Lauda 68. Master James was king.

Hunt's immediate British predecessors, that grand triumvirate of Jim Clark, Graham Hill and Jackie Stewart as well as, briefly, the quicksilver John Surtees, had each through the previous decade and more taken each other down to the wire, almost turn and turnabout it seemed.

Which is how it was in 1958 when two British drivers dramatically broke the utter world championship dominance of the incomparable Argentine Fangio. The final race of the season was held in the dust and glare of Casablanca. The brilliant natural, Stirling Moss, needed an outright victory in his Vanwall to take the season's laurels; his friend and compatriot, the dashing, devilmay-care Mike Hawthorn, had only to finish second for the championship.

For the first time, and from faraway, Formula One motor racing grabbed the British nation by the ears. Moss dramatically led from start to finish, as he had to; Hawthorn covered him line for line and bend for bend throughout. Hawthorn's silver medal on the day won him the gold for the season and Britain's first world title - but the gilt-edged day was scarred in black when, on the penultimate lap, Moss's Vanwall partner Stuart Lewis-Evans hit a barrier, was engulfed in a fireball, and was to die of burns six days later.

The British certainly had a crash course in the excruciating dramas of motor racing on that sun-battered Moroccan day in October 1958 - the more so less than three months later on a cold and crispy January 22nd in Surrey, where the road dropping down from the Hog's Back met the Guildford by-pass. I was a cub reporter then on Guildford's long gone Surrey Times. We got the phonecall just before lunch. A senior reporter took me in tow. I swear the wheels of the smashed 3.4 litre Jaguar were still turning gently, making a mockery of the still body lying full-length, slightly twisted, across the back seat. He had been late for lunch with his Guildford accountant. It was the Farnham garageowner - and world champion newly retired - Mike Hawthorn. He was dead. His bow-tie was still at a jaunty angle. He was 29.