Imola 1 May 1994

A quarter of an hour into first qualifying on Friday 29 April, Rubens Barrichello’s Jordan hit the kerb at the Variante Bassa, the chicane before the pits, and took off. It struck the top of the tyre barrier and the debris fence in front of a grandstand, rolled, and landed upside down. Barrichello was 21, and he had been on his first flying lap. He was knocked unconscious; Sid Watkins’s medical team, at the car within seconds, cleared his airway, and he was taken to the circuit’s medical centre.

Senna went straight there. Turned away at the front, he got in by the back, and found Barrichello hurt but conscious. Barrichello, speaking to Folha de S.Paulo from hospital, said that Senna had taken his hand. Afterwards, halting and repeating himself, Senna told the cameras of TV Globo that Rubens was all right: shaken, but with nothing broken, as far as he could see. Barrichello, with a broken nose, bruised or cracked ribs and a grazed arm, spent the night in the Ospedale Maggiore in Bologna.

Ele teve muita sorte de não ter sofrido consequências mais graves … É difícil se recompor imediatamente. Dá sempre uma desequilibrada no ritmo e requer tempo para você voltar a ter confiança para guiar no limite.

He was very lucky not to have suffered more serious consequences. … It’s hard to recover straight away. It always upsets your rhythm, and it takes time to get back the confidence to drive at the limit.

He had come to Imola, the third round of the 1994 championship, without a point from his first two races for Williams, while Michael Schumacher had 20. He went back out and set 1:21.548, 0.467 seconds faster than Schumacher managed that afternoon. Nobody beat it on Saturday: it was the fastest lap of the weekend, and his 65th pole position, the last.

He thought the result excellent in the circumstances, but did not feel that he had ever driven the car properly. In what Folha would call his last interview, he said that his Williams FW16-⁠Renault had been reasonable in the morning and impossible to drive in the afternoon: unpredictable, good through one corner and bad through the next. He had not done one calm lap; after Barrichello’s accident, he told The Independent, he had not been driving well.

Saturday: Roland Ratzenberger

Barrichello was back at the circuit on Saturday morning, his nose broken and his arm bandaged. He talked to Senna, and watched final qualifying from TV Globo’s commentary box before leaving for England.

Final qualifying began at 13:00. Senna had not yet set a time when, 18 minutes in, Roland Ratzenberger’s Simtek-Ford went off at the Villeneuve curve, the fast kink before Tosa. A lap earlier he had run over the kerb at Acque Minerali and damaged the car’s front wing, and he had not stopped. At about 315 km/⁠h (196 mph) the wing failed, and the Simtek went almost head-on into the outside wall. Watkins was at the car within half a minute. Ratzenberger was flown to the Ospedale Maggiore, and at 14:15, eight minutes after he arrived, he was pronounced dead.

He was an Austrian from Salzburg, 33 years old, although the papers of 1994 gave his age as 31. It was his third Grand Prix weekend: he had failed to qualify at Interlagos and finished 11th at Aida, and that afternoon he had been fighting Paul Belmondo for the last place on the grid. No one had been killed at a Grand Prix meeting since Riccardo Paletti at Montreal in 1982.

Senna had watched the replays on the Williams monitor. He took an official car to the Villeneuve curve, spoke to the marshals and looked at the wreck. At the medical centre Watkins, the sport’s medical delegate and his friend, told him that Ratzenberger could not survive. In 2008 Watkins told Motor Sport what passed between them.

After Ratzenberger’s accident on the Saturday Ayrton got into the medical centre at the back, jumped over the fence, and came in to ask me what was going on. When I told him he broke down, and wept on my shoulder. I suggested he should withdraw from the race. Actually, I said he should give up for good. He’d proved he was the best driver in the world, he’d been World Champion three times. ‘Give it up,’ I said, ‘let’s go fishing.’ Then he composed himself and said, ‘Sid, there are things we can’t control. I cannot stop. I have to go on.’ That was the last thing he said to me.

He did not drive again that day; Williams, Benetton and Sauber took no further part in the session. The stewards called him in over his use of the official car, and accounts differ over whether they reprimanded him.¹ Gerhard Berger, his friend and former team-mate, said that he had thought of stopping after Barrichello’s crash, and now asked himself whether to go on racing at all.

That evening a wedding party was in full swing at Senna’s hotel in Castel San Pietro; when the groom asked for a photograph, he agreed at once and posed with the couple. By telephone he told Adriane Galisteu, who was at his house in Portugal, that he did not want to race. Later, calmer, he told her, as she remembered it, “Don’t forget one thing: I’m strong, very strong”. Whether he truly thought of withdrawing cannot be known.

Sunday morning

Sunday was warm and sunny after days of rain. In the morning warm-up Senna was fastest, nearly nine-tenths of a second clear of his team-mate, Damon Hill, and he told his engineer, David Brown, not to change the car. On a lap recorded for the French channel TF1 he sent a greeting to Alain Prost, retired now and at Imola as TF1’s commentator, and told him that he was missed. Prost remembered that Senna had come into the crowd at the Renault motorhome that morning, which he would never normally do, to reach him, and that they talked.

The German Sunday paper Welt am Sonntag carried a column under his name that day. The Williams, it said, reacted nervously to Imola’s surface, and Ratzenberger’s death had confirmed his fears about inexperienced drivers.

At the drivers’ briefing a minute’s silence was held for Ratzenberger. Érik Comas, who sat beside Senna, remembered that for the first time everyone was talking about safety, and that Senna told him they could not carry on like this. Afterwards Senna, Berger, Schumacher and Michele Alboreto agreed to meet at Monaco, a fortnight later, to press for safety: the first step towards reviving the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association.

Before the race he spent a long time in the garage looking at his car, in silence, while a TV Globo cameraman filmed him. On the grid, against his habit, he sat for several minutes with his helmet and balaclava off. When the crowd cheered Berger, the Ferrari driver, Senna turned and smiled at him.

The start

The formation lap began at 14:00, and Senna led away from pole with Schumacher behind him. Further back, JJ Lehto’s Benetton stalled on the grid, and Pedro Lamy’s Lotus, unsighted, ran into it. Wheels and debris flew over the fence into the main grandstand, and several spectators and a policeman were hurt.

The race was not stopped. The safety car, an Opel Vectra, led the field for the laps that followed, with the racing driver Max Angelelli at the wheel and the FIA’s Charlie Whiting beside him. Both men remembered Senna drawing alongside and gesturing for more speed; Whiting remembered telling him that they could not go any faster. The worry was the tyres: laps at that pace cooled them, lowering their pressures and, with them, the height of the cars. The Italian investigation later discounted the safety car’s pace as a factor.

The safety car pulled in at the end of lap 5, and on lap 6 the race began again, Senna leading Schumacher. On that lap, Schumacher said afterwards, the Williams bottomed and nearly went off at Tamburello.

The race went on

At 14:55, 11 minutes after he reached the hospital, the race was restarted over the remaining 53 laps, the result to be decided on the aggregate of the two parts. Damon Hill took the restart after Patrick Head and Adrian Newey had studied the data and told him they could see nothing wrong with his car. Berger led on the road for several laps and then retired. Schumacher won, from Nicola Larini’s Ferrari and Mika Häkkinen’s McLaren.

About 10 laps from the end a rear wheel came off Michele Alboreto’s Minardi as it left the pits, and struck mechanics of Ferrari and Lotus; one of the Ferrari men broke his leg. When the crowd ran on to the track at the finish, it was to celebrate a Ferrari in second place. There was no champagne on the podium, and neither the crowd nor the drivers on it knew how grave Senna’s condition was.

There is no satisfaction at all for me, … This win certainly should make me satisfied, but for me too many things happened this weekend to let me feel that.

The next day the Italian authorities closed the circuit, impounded Senna’s Williams, Ratzenberger’s Simtek and Senna’s helmet, and opened an inquiry into culpable homicide, the Italian equivalent of manslaughter.

The inquiry and the trials

On 4 May Max Mosley, the president of the FIA, said that Senna had gone into Tamburello at about 310 km/⁠h (193 mph); why he had lost control, Mosley said, it was not possible to say. The inquiry was led by Maurizio Passarini, a deputy public prosecutor in Bologna. In February 1995 his experts, under Professor Enrico Lorenzini, a former dean of engineering at the University of Bologna, reported that the steering column had failed. To lower the steering wheel for Senna, the column had been cut and a section of thinner tube welded in; Patrick Head said the work was done before the season, and other accounts put it later. Fatigue cracks had begun to spread in it before the race. The car’s black box came back from England damaged and unreadable. The prosecutor suspected tampering; it was never proved.

At the end of 1996 six men were sent for trial for culpable homicide: Frank Williams, Patrick Head and Adrian Newey of Williams; Federico Bendinelli and Giorgio Poggi, who ran the circuit; and Roland Bruynseraede, the FIA’s race director. The trial opened on 20 February 1997 in the ballroom of a workers’ club in Imola. Senna’s family, represented by a lawyer, did not join the proceedings as civil parties and attended none of the hearings. Their only wish, their lawyer said, was to know the truth: why the car had gone straight on at Tamburello.

The prosecutor asked for one-year suspended sentences for Head and Newey only. On 16 December 1997 Judge Antonio Costanzo acquitted all six, the Williams men because they had not committed the act and the others because the act did not happen; but he accepted that the failure of the steering column had caused the crash. The appeal court in Bologna upheld the acquittals in November 1999. In January 2003 the Court of Cassation set them aside for Head and Newey and ordered a new appeal, while Frank Williams’s acquittal became final.

In May 2005 the new appeal acquitted Newey, and found that Head had been at fault but that the case against him was time-barred. On 13 April 2007 the Court of Cassation rejected Head’s appeal for a full acquittal. The crash, it confirmed, had been caused by the failure of the steering column, the result of badly designed and badly executed modifications for which Head was responsible. The offence remained time-barred, and Head was never convicted.

It is a legal finding. Williams’s engineers have argued from the data that the steering was working until the impact, and engineering opinion is still divided. Adrian Newey, who has written that the modified column was a bad piece of design whether or not it caused the accident, said in 2011 that a puncture from debris on the track was the likeliest single cause.