>>63170076As for the part with the card tricks, it's a sad one. After his Le Mans accident in 2010, he seems to have suffered a bit of mental damage, which caused his words to come out as "gobbledegook" (as he himself said) whenever he spoke, which depressed him and just about destroyed his ability to communicate for a while. He didn't even get out of the house for a long time after that because he didn't want to embarrass himself or have others think that he was a vegetable now.
Eventually, his wife Rosanne convinced him to go out to a close friend's party, where they had a magician doing various tricks and being cool. The tricks struck a chord with Mansell and he inquired about them quite a bit. Eventually, he privately told the magician (Max) about his new circumstances and asked whether there was any way in which magic would help him recover. Max even brought him into the Magic Circle, and Mansell, with his help, started learning and practicing a lot of such tricks, which turned out to have an amazing effect on his brain, helping him "relearn how to think" (as Max said). Nigel ended up doing 3 years of practice in 12 months, and through that practice and doing his own shows, his recovery hastened so much that his confidence returned almost instantly. He's perfectly okay now, but he still does magic shows to this day, both to normal people, but also especially to children who normally don't speak and engage at all.
