‘No one dies in Formula 1 these days,’ I’d proclaimed
We were between Amersham and High Wycombe, negotiating the section that’s a (little) bit like Eau Rouge at Spa. It’s 1994, so Mum’s at the wheel of her Mk2 Golf. I’m 16 and thinking about how I’ll roll through here prioritising corner-exit speed in a few years’ time. Maybe hang onto fourth; maybe grab third to keep it spinning.
The radio, previously background noise, tells us of the death of Roland Ratzenberger. The world goes quiet, aqueous somehow, like the beach bit in Saving Private Ryan. The Austrian had suffered a violent accident during qualifying, and all afternoon we’d wondered. ‘No one dies in Formula 1 these days,’ I’d proclaimed, with the confidence that comes so easily to ignorant 16-yearolds. What a stupid thing to say.
Even now, three decades on, Imola 1994 still feels like a collective nightmare from which I keep hoping we’ll all wake. Barrichello’s crash in practice set the tone, terrifying the paddock and the world beyond with the spectre of the possibility of an F1 fatality. We’d grown complacent, technology our crucifix held at arm’s length to ward off the unthinkable. After the wheeled fuel tanks of the ’60s and ’70s, and the bigwinged, mega-boost monsters of the early ’80s, carbonfibre chassis had become commonplace, fires were no longer a fact of racing life and, mostly, drivers crashed and walked away.
The race began with more carnage in the form of a start-line shunt. And then, with the restart, we witnessed Senna’s last moments. The pressure had been building on him since the start of the season, his ’94
Williams a quick but nervous minx of a car where its predecessors had virtually driven themselves. I’d got serious about F1 with Mansell’s steamrollering of the ’92 championship, then watched in frustration as my hero Ayrton battled the sublime ’93 Williams in his underpowered, relatively crude McLaren. Then 1994 was supposed to be glorious. Instead, perched on my bed watching a dumpy Bush TV on a wall mount, I watched his Rothmans FW16 spear off, half-destroy itself against the wall and come to a rest. Everything stopped; everything. That’s why it felt different. You could hear it in dear old Murray’s voice and you could sense it. Senna’s head, in that yellow helmet that worked like no blue flag ever could when it came to clearing backmarkers out of his way, appeared to move for a moment and then just didn’t, no matter how hard I tried.
What followed was unthinkable yet inevitable; two lives in one weekend, and it could have been more. At the next race, Monaco, I watched as the drivers lined up for a minute’s silence, Mum hoovering my room noisily, fortunately – the hard-working vacuum cleaner drowned out my snotty sobbing. For most teenagers in the ’90s Kurt Cobain’s death was their JFK moment. For me it was Senna, a man for whom racing appeared to matter more than anything. For him every session was a kind of crusade into the uncharted lands between the possible and the impossible, on the track and in the mind. Given that, perhaps an early death was inevitable. But still I wish he’d spoken quietly with Frank and Patrick, packed his bag and walked that Sunday morning, out of the paddock and into the rest of his life.