Johnny Herbert: F1 drivers use guidelines 'to get an an advantage'

Then there was the heroic Le Mans win with the banshee Mazda 787B in 1991 that left him so exhausted with dehydration that he collapsed and missed the podium. 

After Formula 1, he was second at Le Mans in three consecutive years (Audi, Bentley, Audi) and only retired from racing in 2012.

So, lucky? Yes, okay. But he knows all too well – and so does anyone who saw him on racing’s nursery slopes, before that cursed day at Brands Hatch in the summer of 1988 – it could have been so much more. 

Imagine Johnny Herbert with two good feet. Today, he loves heading back to where it started, trailering and spannering his own kart to run in open sessions at tracks such as Shenington. 

Being a driving steward

Dropped from Sky’s F1 coverage two years ago, he could simply fall back on his hard earned elder statesman status, but instead puts himself up for abuse on social media as one of F1’s regular driver stewards at grands prix. 

Why? “I enjoy it,” he says. “The ins and outs, the little games played by teams and drivers.” He’s learned to live with the trolls. That’s just as well because he has recently made headlines. 

He was the driver steward at the Mexican and Brazilian GPs, where we all saw the worst and best of Max Verstappen. 

Herbert and his steward colleagues handed out a pair of 10-second penalties to the Dutchman in Mexico for driving Lando Norris off the track. It was the right call – but when Herbert was later critical of Verstappen’s driving, the champion spoke of British media “bias”, and dad Jos – whom Herbert replaced at Benetton at the end of 1994 – waded in on “a conflict of interest”. 

We won’t repeat some of the abuse Herbert received here. He firmly answers the criticism, pointing out he never speaks publicly when the FIA shirt is on his back. “On my weekdays, I’m still Johnny Herbert with an opinion and that’s never going to change,” he says in answer to Verstappen Sr’s charge. 

“Should I be told to be quiet, as Jos has said? Well… no. He has his opinions, but he’s the father of the world champion. Should he [voice] an opinion about the team his son is driving for? Well, he can. He does. Is it right? I understand he only wants the best for his son.

 “My opinion is only based on what I know as a racing driver. Then again, some say I only won three grands prix; what do I know? Everyone else out there, ex-drivers and otherwise, have an opinion. Why can’t I? Because I’m a steward, I’m not allowed to speak? But I don’t speak at the race weekend. I speak about it after I’ve finished my professional job, when my life carries on as normal.” 

As for bias, he also has a point to make. On penalties handed down for racing incidents, the stewards follow strict guidelines laid out by the drivers themselves. “This is the thing: I don’t bring my 1990s self into the room and say ‘back in the day it was like this’,” says Herbert. “That doesn’t happen. I have to adjust to the modern day. You have all the rules and the guidelines and that is what you go by.”

The problem, he says, is drivers are not only driving to the guidelines: they are also playing to them. 

How Verstappen edged Norris off track at Turn 12 in Austin is a prime example. On the inside line, the Red Bull was ahead at the apex and therefore, according to the agreed rules, he did nothing wrong. So no penalty was applied. 

“F1 drivers have so much awareness and mental capacity to know exactly what’s going on, and when extra rules get thrown into the mix, they use the guidelines to get an advantage,” says Herbert. 

“This whole apex thing: the race is just to get to the apex first.” As for abusing track limits, Herbert admits it was less of a problem in his day when you had “kerb, grass, gravel”, or even “kerb, grass, catch-fencing” instead of acres of run-off. 

Since this interview, the drivers met at the Qatar GP to discuss tweaks to the guidelines in response to the questions raised by recent incidents. There’s irony in the Verstappen spat, given how much and how often Herbert has expressed his admiration for the Dutchman, whom he classes along with Lewis Hamilton in the “super-human” racing driver bracket. 

In fact, he’s deeply impressed by most of today’s generation. “F1 drivers have evolved. They are more complete than any from my era, including Michael Schumacher, because there are more tools for them to be perfect,” says Herbert. 

“Max is unbelievably near perfect. Lando will improve: we haven’t seen the best of him either. It’s been a good season for him to learn about the games when you come up against the very best. It’s a really good time.” 

Herbert draws a line from the greats of the past to those of today: from Stewart and Lauda, to those he raced against – Senna, Prost, his old team-mates Häkkinen and Schumacher – to Hamilton and Verstappen. 

What he doesn’t say, but we can, is he could have been among them without that F3000 crash at Brands Hatch in 1988. I was there that day, just turned 14. I’d seen him win the Formula Ford Festival against the odds at Brands in ’85 and watched him blitz the ’87 British F3 championship. Many of us in the crowd felt sure he was a nailed-on future F1 world champion. Then it all went quiet. I’ve never felt so depressed leaving a race circuit.

Life-changing

Long before the internet, it was only the next day we learned he was still alive. “My life changed so dramatically,” he says. “When I was lying in hospital, I didn’t think so. Mentally, I felt the same. But the physical side had changed.” The two feet-on impacts, one with a concrete bridge parapet on the left, the other into a steel barrier on the right, disintegrated the front of his Reynard. 

“The left foot nearly got taken off and the other one, it hammered my heel,” he says. “My heel is actually around the side where my ankle should be.” His recall of what powers he lost triggers a cold shiver. 

“Back in those days, it was a stick shift, three pedals, heel-and-toe. It was all very easy, very natural before. I never even thought about it. I never looked at any distance boards, dark patches on the circuit or grass to visualise where I was going to brake or turn in. I just did it. It just happened. After the crash, that mental side was still there, but the physical side didn’t allow me to do it. I had to find ways of overcoming the problem. Sadly, now I had to have braking points, and braking points are not the fastest way, by a long shot.” 

Yet barely eight months after that crash, Herbert somehow made his F1 debut, for Benetton at the Brazilian GP in Rio. Team chief Peter Collins kept his iron-clad faith that Herbert was the real deal, and no injury – even one that left him struggling to walk – would stop him. 

“Just because the diamond has been scratched, it doesn’t mean it’s not a diamond,” said Collins, who later gave an eternally grateful Herbert another F1 lifeline at Lotus. In Rio in 1989, at a circuit that masked Herbert’s struggles with hard braking, he somehow finished fourth, just 10.5sec behind Nigel Mansell’s winning Ferrari. 

It’s one of F1’s greatest debuts, especially in the context of what he was dealing with. But Flavio Briatore, who joined Benetton that year, never believed Herbert was fit enough to race. 

After struggles at other tracks, he was dropped mid-season. His admiration for Briatore remains well under control all these years later, especially after the second spell at Benetton, when he claims the team treated him as second-rate compared with team-mate Schumacher. 

The British GP win and another inherited at Monza are some consolation, but little more than that. “The other thing I struggled with was throttle modulation, because again I didn’t have the feel,” he says. 

“Again, instead of through my toes, it was through my knee and my hip. It was never smooth enough, always a bit jerky and on and off, which disturbed the car. The only time I had it back to what I vaguely remember before was one race: Malaysia, 1999. That was the only one and I don’t know why. It frustrates the damn hell out of me, but it happened that weekend.” 

By then, he’d just claimed his third and final GP win, after an intuitive wet-weather drive at the Nürburgring for Stewart GP. One more year  at the team rebranded as Jaguar in 2000 and F1 was done with Herbert – from a cockpit’s perspective, at least. 

“All those little ingredients made it way more difficult,” he says, “but I can sit back in my chair now and say, considering the state of my feet, I gave it a good go. It wasn’t what I wanted or what I had before. But I still achieved a lot, considering I don’t have any ankle joints.” 

He chuckles as he recalls sitting with his wife Becky at home, when she might stretch out her legs and wiggle her toes. “I say to her: ‘You’re doing that on purpose, aren’t you?!’ A very simple thing I can’t do.” 

Glass half empty or half full? Herbert is inclined towards the latter, perhaps because the former might drive him insane. “No one today would touch me with a bargepole!” he says of his post-injury self. 

“I found a way but it was never perfect. The three wins I got: they weren’t perfect. But I’m glad I was able to find the strength and not give up. There were frustrating times. I was never going to be a world champion, but I was there or thereabouts.