Best of British: Hill & Mansell's magnificent achievements on both sides of pond

As it did on Sunday, the Indianapolis 500 has often clashed dates with the Monaco Grand Prix, which has been a recurring pity for brilliantly versatile drivers of the past such as Jim Clark and Mario Andretti, Formula 1 world champions who won at Indy but never in Monte-Carlo. Clark skipped Monaco in 1965, having won the previous grand prix, in South Africa, and surely would have won at Monaco too had he entered the race, for he won the next five grands prix in a row: Spa-Francorchamps, Clermont-Ferrand, Silverstone, Zandvoort and Nürburgring. Missing that Monaco Grand Prix worked out for him though, because he won the Formula 1 world championship in 1965 at a canter, and, in giving Monte-Carlo a swerve, he was able to win the Indy 500 that year too.

Andretti entered the Indy 500 every year from 1965 to 1994, skipping it just once (1979) and winning it just once too (1969). He missed Monaco to race at the Brickyard quite often in his early Formula 1 years, even as late as 1976, in which year he did every other grand prix, and thereafter he sometimes entered both Monaco and Indy in the same year, even using Concorde to expedite the commute, but, despite those supersonic efforts, his best result at the Principality was only fifth (1977).

Mansell sought sanctuary at IndyCar and won the championship first time out. It was a magnificent achievement

It should be noted that Graham Hill managed to win the Indy 500 once and the Monaco Grand Prix five times, which is pretty special even if we disregard the fact that he also won the Le Mans 24 Hours once too.

The Indy 500 has clashed with other Grands Prix, not only Monaco. As I write, which is to say on Monday 29 May, I note that on this day (or, for devotees of Twitter, #OnThisDay) 29 years ago, in 1994 in other words, it clashed with the Spanish Grand Prix. At that time there was no doubt as to who were the UK’s two premier racing drivers: Nigel Mansell and Damon Hill. Mansell had won the Formula 1 world championship for Williams in 1992, only to be (in)famously jocked off by Alain Prost, who in 1993 drove the Williams FW15C, one of the most dominantly competitive Grand Prix cars of all time, to his fourth Formula 1 world championship. Unable to find a 1993 Formula 1 drive that suited him, Mansell sought sanctuary at IndyCar, which championship he won first time out, for Newman-Haas, a feat that his notorious petulance made most racing journalists of the day reluctant to praise as abundantly as nearly 30 years later I belatedly now do. It was a magnificent achievement.

Things then began to go less well for ‘our Nige’. Having won five IndyCar races in 1993 – on his series debut at Surfers Paradise then at Milwaukee, Michigan, New Hampshire and Nazareth – he failed to win even one in 1994. Nonetheless, in the three races leading up to the 1994 Indy 500, he had finished ninth (Surfers Paradise), third (Phoenix) and second (Long Beach), so his form curve was good. He qualified his Lola-Cossie T9400 seventh at Indy, placing him on the inside of the third row of the Brickyard’s three-by-three starting grid, but his average lap speed was a clear 4mph slower than what pole man Al Unser Jr had managed in his Penske-Merc PC23 and was indeed slower also than the best quali laps posted by two other Lola T9400 drivers: Raul Boesel, who had qualified second, and Lyn St James, sixth, who had recently celebrated her 47th birthday.

As soon as the race started, it quickly became clear that the Penske-Mercs of Unser Jr and Emerson Fittipaldi were the two fastest cars. For Mansell, that intel would soon prove academic, for, just before half-distance, he was punted out of the race by fellow Lola driver Dennis Vitolo. Mansell climbed out of his broken car to safety but was then tackled to the ground, NFL-style, by marshals conspicuously over-eager to come to a superstar’s aid. He was taken to the medical centre but angrily discharged himself. At the end of the year he bade farewell to Stateside racing.

On the same day, 4500-odd miles due east across the Atlantic Ocean, the inheritor-elect of Mansell’s ‘best Brit in F1’ crown, Damon Hill, was in Barcelona, suddenly thrust into a leadership role at Williams, four weeks after the death of the team’s number-one driver, Ayrton Senna. There was a spooky symmetry at work, for Damon was trying to do the same job for Williams as his father Graham had done for Lotus, 26 years before, and in the same country too. Clark had been killed on 7 April 1968, in a non-championship Formula 2 race at Hockenheim, and, in early May, Team Lotus had arrived in Madrid, where the heartbroken squad’s only driver, Graham Hill, would compete in the Spanish Grand Prix at Jarama.

He qualified sixth, his Lotus 49 outpaced by not only pole man Chris Amon’s Ferrari 312/68 but also the BRM P133 of Pedro Rodriguez, the McLaren M7As of Denny Hulme and Bruce McLaren, and the Matra MS10 of Jean-Pierre Beltoise. But it was very hot on race day, and attrition played its part, as did Lady Luck, and Hill took one of the most popular – and emotional – victories in Formula 1 history. Two weeks later he won at Monaco too, from the pole, and by the end of the season he had earned his second, and Team Lotus’s third, Formula 1 world championship. It was another magnificent achievement.