"Some you win, some you lose"

Tony Dodgkins wrote the following article about Johnny, which appears in the August 1997 issue of F1 Racing magazine. In the excellent and revealing article, Johnny talks frankly about how the 1988 F3000 accident has affected him, about other drivers, what he really thinks of Flavio Briatore, and how he happy he is at Sauber. The following extracts are used by kind permission of the Editor.

Friday evening, the Imola paddock. Johnny Herbert is celebrating his 100th Grand Prix. He gets to his feet to say a few sincere words:

"It's been okay, I guess. I've had a few ups and downs but overall it's worked out all right. I feel better now than for a long time. There's a good family atmosphere at Sauber, it's run fairly, I feel wanted and that's important."

The Swiss team, an underrated one, appreciate his words, and everyone wishes him well. Sincerely, too. No-one has a bad word for Johnny.

The best British talent since Jim Clark?

10 years ago he was being touted as the best British talent since Jim Clark. Herbert won the Formula Ford Festival in superb style in 1985, dominated the British F3 Championship in '87 and won first time out in F3000 in '88.

He astounded Benetton with a test in a turbo B187 on the Brands Indy circuit in which he lapped 0.3s quicker than regular driver Thierry Boutsen, despite never before having experienced more than 160bhp.

Herbert was world champion material; at that time you didn't mention Damon Hill in the same breath. Johnny was the golden boy.

The accident

But it all went out of the window at Brands Hatch on 21 August 1988 in one of the biggest multiple shunts ever seen at a British racetrack. Peter Collins already had an F1 option on Herbert for Benetton, and Frank Williams brought his motorhome to Kent that afternoon. Word was, there was a contract in his pocket.

"He turned up on the Sunday and he wanted to see me after the race," Johnny confirms. "We haven't met yet. I'm still waiting…"

After the race, Herbert was in Queen Mary's Hospital, Sidcup. His left ankle was snapped, and the right foot and toes suffered severe crush injuries. The prognosis Sunday night was that his racing days were over. Yet, seven months later, he took a Benetton to fourth place on his Grand Prix debut in Rio. [But, after five more races in which Johnny's competitiveness suffered because of his injured feet,] Flavio Briatore took over the Benetton reins from Collins, [and] Herbert was shown the door.

If Herbert had turned the ace of spades instead of the nine of diamonds at Brands Hatch in 1988, he could feasibly have four, maybe five, world titles to his credit by now. Pure fantasy? Not really.

Had he gone to Williams just when Renault was returning with its V10 and FW14 wasn't long coming, what then? There's every reason to believe that he would have got on it quicker than Mansell did in 1991, enjoyed the cakewalk years of '92-'93, salvaged one title out of the Schumacher years in '94-'95 and enjoyed the superiority of '96. Herbert was that good.

"The shunt killed all the Jim Clark stuff stone dead," he says. "In fact, I'm very lucky that we've got semi-automatic boxes and don't still have to heel and toe.

"If you think about the heel and toe, when I had normal feet the brake would stop say an inch before the throttle and the I'd roll on to the gas. But because I couldn't twist the ankle I almost had to do it the other way round. I had to change the pedals so that I braked until it almost passed the throttle and then move my foot across. It took a bit of adjusting."

So what about the braking now? We look down at his feet.

"I can't actually curl my toes. The actual ankles and joints are fine, but the way the right toes got smashed, all the ligaments have shrunk. My toes are flat and they don't move. So, although I'm braking with the ball of my foot, the pressure of the boot moves up to the tip of the toe. My pressure is all on the tip.

So there's still trouble generating enough force?

"No, no, the force is fine, it's the sensitivity. When I first raced again, during the last 10 laps or so, the tips were getting really bad. I made some insoles which took the pressure away. But the biggest help, definitely, is not having to do the heel and toe."

Herbert is brutally honest about not being the driver he was.

"I'm still not as good as I would have been if I hadn't had the shunt, for sure. In Formula 1 everything needs to be right. Michael Schumacher is the prime example. He came into F1 with a good team, he hasn't had any accidents since, he did well and it just builds and builds. Now he's the most confident person out there. As long as you feel mentally strong about yourself and you've had a good roll, it just keeps on rolling."

Damon and H-H

Herbert admits that it was a bit frustrating to watch Hill win 20-odd races but, again, he's philosophical.

"I can look back and say that if I hadn't had the crash I'd be in a better situation than Damon. But I've had the problem, I've got over it, I've won Le Mans and two Grands Prix anyway. If it had been the other way around with the feet that would have been it.

"Nowadays you have to be in a position where you feel very secure in a team. If you don't, things start to go wrong. Heinz-Harald, in a way, is an example. He still hasn't clicked at Williams. You keep hearing that some of them don't like him, they don't think he's the best tester in the world and so on."

Briatore and Benetton in 1995

Herbert knows exactly how that feels. He looks back on 1995 with a certain degree of resentment.:

"I'm a bit bitter towards Flavio because he said there would be a two car test team at Benetton and there never was. It was unfair that he expected me to turn up on Sunday and win a race.

"I used to waste days going to tests. At first, Michael did two days and I did two, then it was three and one and sometimes I was down to half a day. I thing the longest test I did all year was two days on Silverstone South. Doing a race distance. Great. I felt like Taki Inoue or someone. I think that's how it looked sometimes too, such as Hungary when the gap was two and a half seconds. I mean, that's just bloody ridiculous. In the end, it wore me down. In future, I'll get it on paper."

The dawning realisation takes a while. You mean to say that here was a Grand Prix driver with a leading team who didn't have something as fundamental written into a contract? It says a lot about Herbert's nature. Some would call it naivety - but to Johnny, Briatore said it so he took it at face value. Still, what were his agents, the International Management Group (IMG) up to?

"Yeah, well, maybe you might say it could have been put in through their experience. I wouldn't have thought of it but maybe they could and should have done. I relied on Flavio to do it, which was a silly move."

I remember trying to interview Herbert's father Bob when Johnny had won the British Grand Prix in 1995. He was so choked he could barely get the words out. Wife Becky and mother Jane were struggling too, all the people who had shared his ups and downs. Herbert himself was the coolest person in the place.

"But he backed in," someone said, and the same expression was repeated when Johnny triumphed again at Monza. It was palpable nonsense, even if Schumacher and Hill weren't on the track at the time. Herbert started driving when he was 10 and when someone achieves success after all he's been through, they fully deserve it. The shame was that the caustic atmosphere at Benetton took the edge off.

"They wouldn't have got the constructors' championship if I hadn't been there," Herbert points out. "There was talk of replacing me and the wins were a bit like sticking one up the team. And up Flavio.

"They weren't expecting me to win a race. Flavio and Michael used to do their jumping around bit and all the cuddling. Flavio was there when I came down off the podium at Silverstone but you could just see in his face it wasn't honest at all.

"Then I won Monza. It was the long walk from the parc fermé down to the podium. He pulled a sort of little sneer. He went onto the podium, took his trophy and went. That was it. He didn't even say a word. But I was chuffed. I'd set the second quickest lap anyway and you don't expect a golfer who hasn't hit a ball to go out and win the Masters."

And then, of course, there was the business of the telemetry, with Herbert not permitted access to Schumacher's data.

"I think that only started because in Brazil I qualified fourth, just behind him. We went straight to Argentina and it all started there. He came up to me and said: 'This thing of the data. There's probably things that you do special which you don't want me to see, and there's things I do that I don't want you to see, so has Ross [Brawn] spoken to you about changing it?

"I understand it from Michael's point of view. I think what he does is how a racing driver needs to be - very selfish. He doesn't give the other guy a chance to get close to him.

"But Flavio should have told him it was a team effort. My engineer would sometimes call up his data and I'd be looking at it out of the corner of my eye while he was on the other side of the desk. Pathetic really. But he never left the room. Even if you stayed there till 9.30 at night he'd still be there. Later on in the season I could see the data but by then I wasn't a threat."

When his relationship with Lotus turned sour, Herbert had looked to Benetton as his saviour, which made it all the more soul-destroying.

"The good thing was that Becky came to all the races that year because she had a feeling it was all going to be hard. She was someone I could actually have a one-to-one with, because sadly I couldn't discuss it with anyone else in the team."

No-one?

"No. Ross tried to be very good at the races but that's always too late. It's not at the races that championships are won. They're won away, testing. It means confidence.

Better times with Sauber

"After Benetton I thought maybe I should get out. I'd lost all motivation for Formula 1," [Johnny continued]. "But last year, with Heinz, when I'd been worried I might be into the same situation again, Peter Sauber did everything in such a fair way. I could accept that I did get beaten, sure, but my confidence came back and I was getting better and better. At the end of the year I was giving him a very tough run. This year, the ball is starting to roll again."

You can see it in his driving, too. The Sauber is always knocking on the door of the top half dozen in qualifying, Nicola Larini was nowhere near him and Herbert’s motivation is fully charged.

"The whole thing can change so damned quick. We could suddenly come good this year or next, I could start winning grands prix and then suddenly I’m back in the frame. Nigel [Mansell] was 39 when he won the championship so, at 33, there’s still time for me to get a chance.

"Benetton won’t necessarily be with me for the rest of my life. I’m getting much more respect this year but I’m the same guy. I haven’t changed. Heinz-Harald leaving has put me in a good position. They are focusing very much on me, I feel relaxed, happier and very confident.

"That’s what you’ve got to say about Damon. He’s done very well mentally. He has been able to cope with it all. From my side I always knew that if I could get back to a situation where I was wanted in the team I could do better than I did at Benetton, even if I wasn’t in as ultimately competitive a car. Which is what I feel has happened."

Herbert, then, is happy with life. He’s managing his own affairs now for the first time, with some wheeling and dealing from Rod Vickery, who looks after Eddie Irvine.

"I’ve learned you don’t need a manager, you need a guy who does the contract. IMG have done it in the past, so I know how it works. I’ve got an ex-IMG guy in Monaco who does my accounts. They do Gianni Morbidelli as well, Emanuele Pirro, and a few other guys. So I’ve got no fees for the contract, I take the money and that’s it, but it’s taken me 33 years to get there!" He laughs: "If I’d had my head now when I first started, I’d have been fine. I’d probably have been a millionaire!"

A point to prove?

You often wonder why a driver keeps going when the motivation is at the kind of low ebb Herbert’s was in 1994-’95. He had a wife and two young girls. But, he says, thoughts of security didn’t take over.

"I hadn’t earned massively. It was okay in Japan but I was never in the situation and I’m probably not quite in it yet. Give me another year and then maybe, but that’s not the issue. It’s all about being happy in what you do. It was the same with Becky at home because she was frustrated for me with the Benetton situation. I couldn’t do anything. People look at you and think you’re a total wally.

"But the same love of the sport which kept me racing after the accident is what keeps you going. Now the rollercoaster is on the way up, I still I’ve got a point to prove and I’m going to prove it."

As one of the most decent, uncomplicated blokes in the paddock, you can’t help but hope he manages it. And anyone who saw his magnificent pre-Brands talent knows, only too well, it would make a supremely fitting pinnacle to his career.

Many thanks to F1 Racing magazine for permission to use this article.
Article © F1 Racing magazine and Tony Dodgkins. All rights reserved.
This page prepared 31st July 1997.