Mansell's debut Ferrari win: How its last British F1 hero won first time out

Barnard had started an F1 revolution at McLaren by using the first ever all-carbon fibre monocoque, and used the Scuderia as the platform for his next innovation – the paddleshift gearbox.

With Maranello ever mired in politics however (particularly in the recent wake of founder Enzo Ferrari’s death) it was difficult to get all on-side with his idea – save for Mansell.

“Fiat management came in and things got political,” recalled Barnard. “Enzo’s replacement – Vittorio Ghidella – was extremely nervous of running the paddleshift. He thought he was the next Enzo and so couldn’t afford to have a failure on his hands – I stuck to my guns.”

Ghidella decided to openly disobey Barnard’s Scuderia authority by ordering a traditional manual version of the car be made. “Nigel tried it at Fiorano, was a few seconds slower and said, ‘Oh, give me the paddleshift version!’”

Though Mansell was fully behind the new innovation, he only qualified sixth in Brazil, 1.4sec off the leading McLaren of Ayrton Senna.

The car had also been unreliable in testing despite its obvious potential, the Brit joking he’d booked an early flight home just in case – would the car even make it to the finish?

At the race start Senna and Gerhard Berger collided, leaving the two Williams cars of Riccardo Patrese and Thierry Boutsen leading with Mansell in third.

‘Our Nige’ soon hunted them down though, and by lap 16 seized a commanding lead, but at his second stop disaster nearly struck.

“Having been ‘Happy Nigel’ up to that point, he suddenly came on the radio in hysterics, saying the steering wheel was falling off!” remembered Barnard. “I said, ‘Christ Nigel, come in!’

“It turned out two of its three bolts had come out. This was pretty crucial. All the electronics for the gearbox went through the steering wheel. There was a tiny little multi-pin plug in the centre of the steering column which communicated the signals from the paddle shifts.

“Nigel came in, we got the spare which we hadn’t even tested, just jammed it on and he drove off!

“Myself and my chief mechanic looked at each other: ‘There’s just no way that’s going to work straight off the bat, without being tested!’ But it did, and we won!”

Thus the legend of the tifosi’s ‘Il Leone‘ hero was born. Reliability would stymie a 640 car that would exclusively finish on the podium, on the rare occasions it got to the end of a race.

Mansell would win one more race in 1989 – a classic 12th-to-first charge at Hungary – and another in Portugal the year after before leaving the team, but his place in Ferrari hearts had long since been sealed.