Karun Chandhok fulfills a lifetime dream of driving the revolutionary Williams FW14B that carried Nigel Mansell to the 1992 Formula 1 World Championship!
Karun Chandock, what a driver and what a man, evidently very emotional for him, really nice to see a driver with genuine appreciation of an experience like this he was almost in tears. Excellent video
I was there at the Williams 40th celebrations, on the outside of Stowe corner taking photos. I can tell you the FW14B looked and sounded something very special and got the biggest reception from the crowds.
1992 was my favourite f1 season by far. I had been cheering Mansell for years and that championship just kept eluding him, sometimes heartbreakingly so. It sure came togeather in 92 though. And that Williams was the most beautiful f1 car ever produced.
This is the car and driver that got me into F1. Around '95 I got me an SNES with "Nigel Mansell's F1 Challenge" which I found to be harder than the US/World release called "Nigel Mansell's World Championship Racing" and never stopped playing, I literally destroyed 5 SNES joysticks just to master it on its hardest setting. Fond memories of trying to emulate one of my F1 heroes. Back to the vid, nice to see a fellow dreamer getting to drive the real deal with the man himself :)
we all thought that thing was easy to drive since he had all the drivers aides , now we know the thing basically tried to kill you all the time, and you had to be totally fearless and commit 100 percent on every corner , with basically no feedback from the car, just trust and faith...I don't know how nigel even found the limits on that thing, probably pulled a Villeneuve , cornered faster and faster till he crashed, then knew the limit.. expensive, yes, but hat's off to Nigel.. It did get banned, not so much for the suspension, but rather the CVT they were going to put in it, FIA got all but hurt about that one, and shitcanned the whole Williams project..
For sure he would have beaten Prost, I don't understand why he didn't accept the contract even if it wasn't as much money he wanted. He would have taken his revenge when they were at Ferrari. I am french but Mansell is my all time favorite driver
In race Prost was one of the two or three most efficient F1 pilots ever. I always was a huge fan of Mansell's fighting spirit, but he was one step behind Prost.
Firstname Lastname , Prost was a superb driver but he would not have beaten Mansell in that car because it suited Mansell driving style more than Prost. It required total commitment in the technology and a lot of strength. Please remember in 1990 Ferrari was fully behind Prost in their attempt to take the championship. Mansell was no1 but Prost was made outright number on his arrival. Mansell was financially compensated for this. Have a look at the reliability issues Mansell had in 1990. Mansell had 9 DNF’s Prost had 3. You can’t score points if you don’t finish.
@@con8v11 Prost dominated almost all of his teammates because he was scoring points in every race. And don't forget ... Prost was extremely fast in the race. Almost everytime his teammates had to finish in first position to beat him, they had no other opportunity.
Excellent video. And what a driver, well done there mate. People think it was easy to drive these beasts around a track at speed, they also forget just how good Mansel actually was. 👍👍👍
Now that’s a proper F1 car, previously driven by a proper F1 driver......What an opportunity and I’m glad you enjoyed it Karun......as you say, you lucky boy!
This just showed up in my feed today. Great video, and thanks for underlining again that this was not some fire and forget car but that this generation of car with all the active driver aids could only be best exploited by drivers with absolute commitment. And the sound of that engine! Perfection.
I loved this era of F1 for the risks the engineers were prepared to take in the name of progress. Imagine standing alone and staking your entire season on a novel idea. It was a little bit like the wild days of Group-B development in rallying. They didn't always get away with it, but when success depended on a Chief Engineer's hunch and some pretty radical technological solutions, you really were taking a gamble with the cars, the drivers, the crew, and an awful lot of other people's money. It's hard enough to play it safe at this level of competition, so trying something original - and winning - is hugely impressive. The sport's rule-book is a million pages thick and gets rewritten every year, but teams will always find ways to innovate. That's what makes F1 interesting. But in the 80s and 90s the cars and the engines made it EXCITING. Equally amazing was the commitment of the drivers. Getting the best out of these 'low tech' monsters [compared to today's highly sophisticated machines) took a tremendous amount of skill, strength, and stamina. Great video. 🙂
What are you talking about? What is low tech about yaw control, traction control active suspension and ABS? TODAY'S F1 HAS NONE OF ANY OF THAT!! Blows me away every time I come across an F1 fan that thinks the cars of the early 90's were low tech and today's cars hi-tech when it's the other way around. These early 90's cars were the most hi-tech ever raced in F1 because just after this most of the systems were outlawed and in the early 2000s they took away the detuned ABS which itself was nothing compared to the early 90's ABS. Today's drivers beat the track records of yesterday's drivers and they do it with ZERO driver aids.
What a car what a season i still idolise that car years later... I went to silverstone for the race in 1993 wish I had in 1992... emotional?? I'd be the same...
The most charming (and dominant as well) F1 monoseat ever made. I'm brazilian but Nigel Mansel was always my favourite driver. That was a perfect fusion: Nigel, the red five and the legendary FW14b. As example, that didn't work with Riccardo Patrese. Miss those year a lot!
Two things to add: The most advanced car ever was the Fw15C that even was using a CVT gearbox. That was the best car ever. Just Prost never dear to drive it as fast as Nigel did. Two: To drive it fast you had to have balls of steel and put your foot down as downforce was increasing exponentially when more power was applied. That was something only Mansell was able to do back then.
Mansell's team mate that year was Ricardo Patrese who finsihed 2nd in The Championship beating Senna - Tells you just how good this car was and how Mansell was handed the title on a plate - Titled clinched at the Hungarian GP in August 1992
The one thing that I always appreciated about Nigel as a sportsman was he never got involved in politics - like Elvis, he always kept his political opinions to himself.
As much as I love Nige especially as a kid and still do as an adult, let’s not get carried away here. He’s a wiley old fox - you can bet your bottom dollar he shared his political opinions quite often, but usually when the mics stopped recording and no jornos were in earshot so he wouldn’t get slated by the masses……..In a way, it’s much like his fiscal savvines. He like other F1 drivers from the past used the exact same loopholes that Lewis Hamilton used and yet somehow all the greats (Mansell, Hill, Clark etc etc) all seemed to have avoided any public backlash. Guess it’s ok to break the rules, live abroad for tax reasons if your from a certain back ground 🤷♂️🤷♂️🤔😉😂
i wish they could release the full seasons on dvd/blu-ray, but i think as they were advertising cigarettes they would have to find a way to blur that out? Maybe that is the reason? Anyone know?
Mansell should have been World Champ at least 3 times, but so many issues prevented this. Had he the best car more often. He could have been world champion many times over. Thank God for the FW14B. I wish he was Senna's team mate at least once. That would have been very interesting.
Nigel even refused to drive the active car at first, saying it gave him no feedback but rather a floaty feeling. Adrian Newey asked him to trust the electronics and give it his best. Nigel did that. At every race lap after lap he tried to find the car's limits. And won.
Im interested in that initial turn in floaty feeling with the active before it settled. Patrese could never get used to it, wonder if Chandok noticed it?
I think that’s why he talked about commitment. If you did not put faith in the active suspension you would be relatively slow. After Silverstone qualifying Patrese went up to Mansell and grabbed him by the balls as he wanted to see how big they were!! Like him or loathe him Mansell had total commitment in any car, good or bad. His second place at the British GP in 1988, in a Judd powered Williams proved what a bloody good driver he was. The wet is a great leveller.
That’s why Senna wanted so badly to drive for Williams at that time. He knew they had mastered the technology and that McLaren were falling behind. Just that when he did get his chance, the technology in question was banned. If he lived on I’m sure he would have beaten Schumacher in 94 because as Damon Hill showed, the 94 car was getting better and better as the year went on
@@dazzla84_ssfc yep once williams came out with the fw16b, they levelled the performance gap with benetton. The B spec car allowed Damon to go head to head with schumi in the wet! So yes if senna had the B spec from the beginning it would be close but senna would have gotten his 4th title
@@dazzla84_ssfc No that is not the reason. The reason Senna wanted to madly to race with Williams was as follows and not many know about but is a well known story: For 1990 Williams offered a 2 year deal to Senna and to Prost. BOTH declined the offer. Then they signed Alesi. Then Alesi signed for Ferrari. Then they called Mansell. And Mansell signed a 2 years deal with Williams. Before 1992 Ayrton Senna was also called from Williams to sign for them. He again rejected and stayed at McLaren. For 1993 at the end of Nigel's 2 years deal Renault+Elf put so much pressure to get Prost onboard. They signed Prost, they willed to Sign Senna. Prost vetoed Mansell and Senna and later only Senna. That is the story. Senna made the wrong decision by not signing for 1991-1992. His fault. Nobody else's.
Does anyone remember Mexico back in those days? The bumps on the track? The in-car footage was like a constant Earthquake and cars would fail very often. But these days the tracks are super smooth.
Maybe Karun’s own F1 career didn’t pan out, but he got to drive the FW14B at Silverstone, in the presence of Nigel Mansell. I think I’d rather have that than a World Championship.
I do believe Nigel, after that crash at Le Mans 2010 is not willing to drive much. Is a shame because he should drive his car. But I think he does not will anymore.