4. Nigel Mansell passed out trying to push his car across the line
“This is the toughest place I’ve ever been to, without a doubt,” Nigel Mansell had said on the Friday in Dallas - but little did he know how much tougher his weekend was going to get. After qualifying his Lotus on pole, the determined Englishman shot into the lead at the start of the race and doggedly held the advantage until Rosberg squeezed past. It was from that point that Mansell’s race began to unravel. A couple of laps later he clipped a wall, a mistake which not only necessitated a tyre change - dropping him to fifth - but which quite probably led to the gear linkage problem which brought his black and gold machine to an agonising halt within sight of the finish. Instinctively Mansell leapt from his cockpit and, in a moment of incredible, almost irrational single-mindedness, tried to push his car across the line. But exhausted and dehydrated from toiling for nearly two hours in the blazing heat, the future world champion was always fighting an uphill battle and within a matter of metres collapsed dramatically to the ground. “I was so angry, I just kept pushing,” Mansell would later explain. “Then the lights went out and I woke up in hospital, on a drip in a bed packed with ice...”
Thanks for the history - have to say I wasn’t following F1 back in ‘84.
I guess I was thinking about his last stint with McLaren in ‘95. Where they had to “build a bigger car” for him to fit in...sort of recall him being lifted out of the cockpit after one race.