Honda made Nigel Mansell a winner. And he has never forgotten the debt he owes the company in facilitating his growth as an F1 driver and his eventual success winning the FIA Formula 1 World Championship in 1992.

Mansell, newly bearded, still buzzing after only minutes earlier driving Honda’s 1986 Williams FW11 up the hill at the 2025 Goodwood Festival of Speed, is nonetheless relaxed as we seek crucial shade behind the team’s garage and steal time from his busy schedule to remember some of the old days.

His relationship with Honda began in 1980 when Ron Tauranac invited him to drive his Ralt RH6 Formula 2 car in four races. Nigel was at that time finally breaking through after years of struggle in Formula 3 which followed his domination of Formula Ford in 1977. People were finally taking notice of him, not least Honda. Now they had an engineer at the wheel, capable of giving very precise feedback. And in 1981 and ’82 the team went on to win the European F2 Championships as a result.

“It was great with the Ralt and Ron,” he says immediately, his face lighting up. “It was a great opportunity to do a lot of miles and test this and that. It was very, very funny. Ron once said to me, ‘Look, I can only give you two choices. One, you can have a really good car and not so good engine, or you can have a not so good car and a good engine.’ And I said, ‘Well, why don’t you put the good engine in the good car.’ But anyway, we came fifth at Zandvoort in my third race and second at Hockenheim, behind Teo Fabi’s March-BMW, in my fourth and last outing. That was a good result.”

How Mansell and Honda were reunited five years later is an interesting tale of sheer determination and commitment on his side, and the failure of a key relationship within a team. The great Colin Chapman was a huge fan of Nigel’s, noting immediately his feedback and innate speed, but also the manner in which he raced, with nothing left on the table. He joined the Lotus team for 1980, made his F1 debut in Austria, and impressed so quickly in 1981 that after Monaco Chapman doubled his retainer. But when Chapman died in December 1982, Mansell’s relationship with team boss Peter Warr was, at best, unhappy. Warr favored his team-mate Elio de Angelis, leaving Nigel feeling undermined.

“Someone came in and tried to emulate Colin,” he said, preferring not to name Warr. “Obviously, didn’t like me at all. He cut part of my salary in his first year, which is not the right thing to do when I’ve got a contract, but there you go.”

By 1984 he knew that Warr wanted Ayrton Senna to partner de Angelis, and started looking elsewhere. Williams were looking for a replacement for Jacques Laffite and Nigel was the obvious candidate, but Frank Williams was prevaricating. That upset Nigel.

“It wasn’t hardball,” he smiles. “It was very polite, actually. I was on a shortlist of five or six people – which I didn’t think was a shortlist – and either someone wants you to drive for them or they don’t. So I politely asked a friend, journalist Peter Windsor, just to say to Frank on the weekend of Zandvoort, ‘Please take me off the list. I’d rather drive for somebody who wants me.’ They were the exact words I used. And then I came third there, behind the McLarens of Alain Prost and Niki Lauda and ahead of Elio, and then [Williams team manager] Peter Collins came and saw me in the evening on the Sunday and said, ‘Look, Frank’s made his mind up. He'd like you to drive for him.’ Peter had always supported me when he was at Lotus, but I think my initial response was, ‘No, no, it’s okay. I’m fine. Thanks.’

“And Peter just said, ‘Get over yourself! It’ll be a great move for you.’ And he was right. Obviously, it was a great thing to do.”

Honda’s RA163E and RA164E V6s had been a handful for Keke Rosberg at Williams in 1984, and in this era of increasing data-logging and engine mapping and management extracting huge horsepower from the turbocharged engines was a tricky task. As a result, the cars were edgy to drive.

“Martin Brundle said it so well years ago. That was the only era of cars that tried to kill you on every corner. Because eventually you had well over 1000 horsepower in qualifying, but you didn’t have control when it chimed in. So, it could be in a split second, sometimes almost instantaneous, or it could take two seconds. The problem was, if it was a lag of two seconds you’ve already moved further on the circuit, and if it chimed in in the wrong place, it could cause a mighty accident!”

Williams’ first all-composite chassis, the FW10, was a big improvement on the aluminum FW09, but the light-switch power delivery of the RA164E was still edgy to begin with.

“Keke will vouch for it: when he had a massive accident in Estoril, it chimed in in the middle of a fast corner when it wasn’t supposed to. Yeah, he didn’t appreciate that! And of course, it happened to me on the warm-up lap going to the grid there. So, yeah, it made us all look a bit stupid at times.

“But we were developing all through 1985… Keke and I seemed to have different engine specs every race. We had A, B, C, D, E, F-spec engines, and we were jumping up, sometimes a hundred, two hundred horsepower at a time. Before you knew where you were, you were at a thousand horsepower and then by the end of the year and the beginning of the next we had even more horsepower, with 1050 horsepower or more and overtake boost to race with. It was unbelievable.”

By Brands Hatch in 1985 the situation was better thanks to the RA165E engine. “Honda had sorted out different size turbos for different circuits. And I guess we’d got in our brains how to push the pedal down and ask for the lag to be there just then, and not too early or too late.”

His victory there – his first in F1 – was the start of his F1 career as a regular front-runner.

“It was awesome,” he says immediately, remembering the exhilaration. “Somebody reminded me just this morning that back then we were racing Keke, Nelson Piquet, Alain Prost, Ayrton Senna, Niki Lauda. There were multiple World Champions racing you all the time. It was tough to win. And even some of the drivers that weren’t World Champions, like Gilles Villeneuve, Jacques Laffite and Carlos Reutemann… there were so many fabulous drivers and to beat them all was a hell of a task.”

He had always believed that he could do that, and win, but when he crossed the finish line at Brands, in front of his home fans, it was a massive moment of validation after the years of struggle. “You know, they say it’s a monkey off your back. But it wasn’t a monkey. It was all the doubters were off your back.

“And I think the thing is then, you’d got the equipment underneath you and you’d go from strength to strength. Patrick [Head] and Frank and Honda gave Keke and me a car, and we had a great run for the rest of the year with some more wins. South Africa was a blast, except we almost went off at the first corner. Someone dropped oil and we went around and almost had a big whoopsie. But then Keke had one later, and so I won against straight away… That was wonderful!”

Another change in the Mansell camp had come earlier in the year, in Canada: the use of a Red Five on the nose of his FW10. How did that come about?

“Through the Red Arrows, basically. Red Arrows actually flying in Red Five. Five was one of my racing numbers in karts, as well as number 44 when I represented England at a very tender age of about nine or 10. There’s pictures of me and a kart with number five on. So, it was one of my racing numbers and we took the Red Five and we celebrated it. And it worked for us very well.”

Looking at Honda’s FW11 at Goodwood, recently so painstakingly rebuilt by Williams Heritage, so many memories came flooding back. So much muscle memory…

“Oh my goodness! It’s a beast!” he laughs. “It’s still ready to throw you off the track at any time. But the FW11 was one of the gorgeous cars. The power was more progressive even though there was a lot more power [thanks to the RA166E motor]. We had a lot more opportunities to swap turbos from small to big, depending on the circuits. You had very large turbos on circuits with long straights; the response to engine was slower, but you had a lot more horsepower, a lot more top-end speed. On shorter circuits they introduced a smaller turbo. So, it cut down the response time more, which made it easier to drive, but you always had to blend it. It was never this or that. You had to try a couple of them before you got it right.

“You had four settings for the fuel. The biggest thing setting up with the fuel was the right foot, but you had to have different settings. In the 1986 Canadian race Patrick was running me and he kept coming on the radio, ‘Back off, back off, when I was leading the race, and I backed off; I fell to second place, then third, then fourth, and I got really ticked off. But I listened to him, and I backed off. Then he said, ‘Right, go for it now,’ and we ended up passing everyone again and winning the race. So, it was absolutely fantastic, but we had to be very careful with the fuel.”

It was a fantastic period for him. He was a winner, and had proved to himself and the world what he could do. He was in a team that loved him and working with an engine manufacturer who also believed in him and were continually updating their power units.

“Yeah, you’re right. But there was one big drawback. All my team-mates were World Champions, the outright number one drivers, and I was the number two. And as you well know, if a number two driver out-qualifies or out-races a number one driver, they’re not happy. But they had to get used to it. And we rose to the top eventually.

“I could have won two World Championships with Honda. I wanted to pit for new tyres in Adelaide in 1986 but the team said it was okay. Then in 1987 a small mistake going into Turn 1 in qualifying at Suzuka had serious ramifications. I got the right tyre on the kerb coming out very quickly and it launched me into the barrier. I was unlucky that the car came back down flat. If it had come down on one of the wheels, it wouldn’t have been that big a deal. But it came down flat on the kerb and I had the estimator at 87G up the spine. It just crushed my spine. I couldn’t breathe. Not fun. I didn’t feel my legs for three or four months. Paralyzed, not good. And I’d already broken my back in 1979…

“But looking back on my time with Honda and Williams, I smile. We won 13 races, and it was an amazing journey. Initially the engine was almost undriveable, like an on/off switch, and there was no subtlety to the power coming in. So, it was incredibly dangerous. You had your heart in your mouth a lot of times, and some of the circuits we drove on then were very, very dangerous, like concrete walls everywhere. But they were incredible times, because when you can achieve something like that and still survive, you look back and you think… Well, some of the drivers today have no idea what some of the drivers of the past had to put up with. So, it was a great achievement, and I owe a lot to Honda for all their great engineering and development work in helping to tame those cars.

“It’s funny, we both left F1 at the end of 1992, for different reasons. And when I’d gone back to Williams and we had finally won the World Championship that season, I’d implemented many of the lessons I’d learned with Honda back in 1985 to 1987 in that successful campaign.

“I think what Honda’s done in recent years with Red Bull is terrific. They’ve won so many World Championships. They’re a fabulous manufacturer, and they put their heart and soul into it. They’ve got a wonderful racing spirit. Soichiro Honda once said that without racing there would be no Honda. I think that summarized them perfectly.”