croesus

Nigel Mansell won 9 of 16 races in 1992 and became Formula 1 world champion. Three days after he clinched the title, he says Williams asked him to take a pay cut, because Ayrton Senna would drive for nothing. A year later, Senna was charging McLaren $1 million a race. In the video below, Mansell says the only thing he didn't get from Williams was a three-year contract, and that he "wasn't the first driver they did it to." In 1990 he announced his retirement at Ferrari, after Alain Prost joined the team and Mansell lost his priority status. Williams talked him out of it. He says he asked for guarantees on engines, fuel and testing money, plus three years. He got all of it except the third year. In 1992 he took 14 poles and 108 points, and clinched the title in Hungary in August with five races still to go. His contract ended that same season. Prost had reportedly already agreed to drive for Williams in 1993, and Senna wanted the seat badly enough to offer to drive for free. Mansell says he had agreed terms with Frank Williams before Hungary, in front of a witness. Then the call came: he'd have to take "considerably less" than he was earning that year. On September 13 at Monza, aged 39, he read out a statement retiring from F1, citing "circumstances beyond my control." Just before the press conference, Williams told him they now accepted his original terms. He read it anyway. The second half of the clip is a 1992 interview with a man who says he'd been negotiating with Williams himself. Many people blamed that for Nigel leaving. "From inside, it is not," he says. The reasons go back "months and months." Senna didn't get the Williams seat for 1993 either. He stayed at McLaren, which could only guarantee him $5 million, and drove race by race: $16 million for the season. Martin Whitmarsh later said it was the only year in his 24 years there that McLaren lost money: £1.5 million. I think the third year is what cost Mansell. A three-year deal would have run through 1993. Instead his contract ran out the season he won, so he had to negotiate as champion against a rival offering to race for free. One of his 1992 Williams chassis, which he won five races in, later sold at auction for £2.7 million with fees. Was Mansell right to walk away as champion, or did he overplay his hand? I post one old money story every day, told simply.