Race and classic pictures

Mansell finally becomes world champion!

It had started to look like it might never happen, but on this day in 1992 Nigel Mansell finally achieved his dream and secured the Formula 1 world championship!

He'd come close in the past: in 1986 he was runner-up by just two points to McLaren's Alain Prost, and the following year he missed out to his own Williams team mate Nelson Piquet. He was runner-up again in 1991, this time to Ayrton Senna, and it seemed like time was fast running out for Mansell.

But 1992 was a totally different story. He won the first five races of the season back-to-back, and then three more races in France, Britain and Germany. It meant he went into that year's Hungarian Grand Prix with a commanding lead in the championship.

He didn't win at the Hungaroring - Senna came out on top by 40 seconds. But second place for Mansell was enough to mathematically clinch the title despite being only the 11th race of the year. It was the earliest in the season that anyone had sealed the title since Formula 1 had moved to a 16-race format.

The race had started with a bang with a big accident that took out took out the Ligier team mates Thierry Boutsen and Érik Comas along with Fondmetal's Gabriele Tarquini and Johnny Herbert in the Lotus.

"Basically I got Ligiered again!", Herbert said afterwards. "Comas spun as he came out of the first corner, I think he was hit by Boutsen, and was spinning down the outside.

"Thinking he would go off the circuit, I started to go down the inside. But as I did that he started to move across the circuit. I thought I was going to get through but then he touched my rear wheel which knocked me into a series of spins over a kerb, into the air and out of the race."

There was an exit of a different type for the iconic Brabham name, which folded after this event. In the team's last outing, Damon Hill succeeded in finishing the race in 11th place albeit four laps off the lead.

Brabham's departure meant that there were only 30 entries for the next event in Belgium, so a pre-qualifying session was no longer required from that point on.

As for Mansell, he decided to quit while he was ahead and left F1 to race in IndyCar the following season. He subsequently returned to Grand Prix racing for a couple of guest appearances before deciding to retire for good.

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.