True Grit - The Johnny Herbert Story

The following article, by Mark Skewis, appeared in the 1st April 1999 issue of Autosport, and is reproduced here by kind permission of the author, who is also the magazine's editor. It celebrates Johnny's 10th anniversary in F1.

It's a cold winter's day at Silverstone, 1988. Johnny Herbert's career is on the line. Tension hangs as thick as the fog which envelops the deserted airfield. Not four months have elapsed since the Formula 3000 shunt at Brands Hatch which shattered the golden boy of British racing's legs. Nobody says it out loud, but everyone is asking the same question as mechanics lower him into the Benetton: can he still do it?

He cruises round on an installation lap, then drives three more. All of them slow. Worried glances are exchanged on the pit wall. The car tours into the pit lane and is pushed back into the garage. Its occupant stays slumped inside. Team boss Peter Collins, whose neck is also on the block, leans into the cockpit.

"What's the matter?" he asks. His blood chills with the reply.

"I don't think I can do it…"

"Will you give it another try?" implores Collins. Subdued, his driver agrees to have another a go.

Bang, bang, bang, in come the lap times. The invalid hasn't just beaten the bogey lap time. He's demolished it. The faces are brighter when the car rolls to a halt for a second occasion. "Got yer!" says Herbert, with a triumphant beam.

A decade on from that test, he is about to celebrate the 10th anniversary of his Grand Prix debut in Brazil. The intervening years have been strewn with tears and laughter. He has driven for six teams, been sacked twice by the same one, amassed 83 points and scored two victories. The first of those, an emotional success in front of his home crowd, remains the highlight. Of 130 races, though, he treasures the very first as the most important: Rio '89.

"I know I was nowhere near fit to race," he reflects. "When I got the sack mid-season, I went away and cried. Now I look back without regret because I know that the whole experience saved me. If I hadn't come back when I did, and got that result, I would never have had a GP career. I could have said, 'Give me two years and I'll be fit', but nobody would have taken a gamble on me then."

That he ever raced in Rio at all, never mind finished a courageous fourth in 106-degree heat, was something of a miracle. His F3000 shunt had inflicted appalling leg injuries.

"I'll always remember the surgeon coming out of the operating theatre in the early hours of the morning and talking to his parents," recalls Trevor Foster, his engineer at Jordan at the time of the accident. "He said, 'He'll be OK, but his sporting days are over.'"

Their son refused to believe it. Crucially, so did Collins. He finally persuaded Luciano Benetton to gamble and take up the option signed before the Essex hotshoe's accident. Incredibly, the driver was back in a racing car before he could even walk. Pale and gaunt, his appearance didn't inspire confidence. Twice Benetton issued deadlines for him to prove his fitness. Twice he met them.

His debut still burns vividly in his memory.

"If I drove normally, my clutch foot would really hurt for about three laps, then I'd get used to it," he says. "There was a bump on the back straight, and I found that if I relaxed my left leg, left it loose and let it bounce around in the cockpit, it would smack against the side of the car when I hit the bump. It would absolutely kill me, but somehow it took me through the pain barrier and numbed the leg for the rest of that run. I hit the bump deliberately on the installation lap before the race and it worked a treat."

What nobody realised at the time, least of all he himself, was that Rio's sweeping layout masked the full extent of his injuries. The next race at Imola quickly betrayed his inability to brake heavily.

"My initial reaction after Brazil was, 'This is easy'," he says. "I really believed that. I thought I could only get better and better, and that everything was made for me. I went to the next round overconfident and struggled like hell."

He scraped into the race 23rd, but, despite a subsequent fifth place finish at Phoenix in the US GP, the inevitable finally happened when he arrived for Canada. For the first time since Benetton had purchased Toleman five years earlier one of its cars failed to qualify. The axe finally fell, and it was almost a relief.

"I used to lie awake at night and think to myself that one day the pain would go away," he admits. "But all the time I continued to race and test it actually just got worse. When I was sacked, I had a sob, but I knew deep in my mind that it was for the best. I probably should have called time myself earlier. Upsetting though it was, I realise now that coming back when I did, and finishing fourth in Rio, saved my career. Without that, I wouldn't be in F1 today."

Having showcased his speed and bravery, his next quest was to prove his fitness. Not even a key role in a victory at the world's toughest race, the Le Mans 24 Hours, silenced the doubters. The man who assembled Mazda's squad for its historic '91 triumph, David Kennedy, admits he encountered tough resistance when he included the F1 refugee in his line-up.

"Mr Ohashi, the big boss, was asking me, 'Are you sure he's OK?'," he recalls. "I was saying, 'Yeah, yeah, of course', but if you saw him in the morning – when it took Johnny half an hour to get out of bed, and another half-hour before he could walk – you would have thought I was crazy. But whenever he was in the car, in the tests or for the race, he flew."

After partnering Volker Weidler and Bertrand Gachot to the first win a Japanese manufacturer had achieved in the French classic, Herbert collapsed on the car out of sheer exhaustion.

"By then his eyes were sunk right back in his head, and he looked as if a feather would knock him over," says Kennedy. "Mental and physical fatigue are your biggest enemies at that race. I asked the girls in the team to take Johnny away from the pits whenever he was out of the car, just to get his mind off things. He just thought he was really popular!"

Ironically, the Briton is popular, but he reveals that the crash changed not only his shoe size and his route to the top, but also his character.

"Before the shunt I had a miserable image because in 3000 I was shy and didn't talk to anybody," he says. "After it, I laughed because it was my way of dealing with things, my way of hiding the pain. The more it hurt, the louder I laughed – it wouldn't have made for very good PR if I had grimaced!

"At times, that laughter's been a handicap because people didn't think I was serious about the job, didn't think I wanted things badly enough. That all came from the accident. When I was struggling to walk, I tried to laugh things off. It was no use hiding in a hole and crying. "So when you see me smiling in interviews, even when things have gone wrong, remember that inside I might be ripping myself apart."

Eleven years on from the crash, a glance at his war wounds quickly reveals his ankles won't win any beauty contests. He suspected that much from the moment the first marshal on the scene reassured him that he was OK, then walked to the front of the car and promptly vomited. His feet have all the mobility of an oil tanker, but to compensate he learned to heel and toe by rocking his knees rather than his ankles. The advent of semi-automatic gearboxes, activated by paddles on the steering wheel rather than a clutch, was like a dream come true.

This article appeared in the 1st April issue of Autosport.
With thanks to Autosport ©. All rights reserved.
This page prepared 9th April 1999.