May 1st, 1994.

[-Fred-]

In a little less than 10 hours, it will be 9 years since the motor racing world lost one of its greatest champions. Ayrton Senna. He left our world early, too early.



Here's how i remember that day...

I was 13 back then. I remember getting out of my bed at 7:00 am, getting down to the basement so i could watch the race without waking up everyone. I remember being happy and eager for the race to start, because Ayrton was on pole, and Ayrton was my favorite driver, my hero. (he still is, in fact.) I had missed qualifying the day before, missed that tragic accident that took young Austrian Roland Ratzenberger away, and that other accident that sent Rubens Barrichello flying through a tire wall, seriously injuring himself.


There was something in the air that weekend. At the start, Pedro Lamy rammed into JJ Lehto, who was stalled on the grid, sending various wrecked car parts into the crowd. Second restart, and then... It happened.



I remember it all, happening right in front of my eyes. Ayrton had left the track in Tamburello, wrecking hard into a wall, and spinning back onto the track. A few seconds pass by Why isn't he getting out of the car? What's going on? Corner workers come by, arms wave in the air, ambulance and doctors arrive on the scene.


On that very instant, i realised what had just happened. At first, i was hoping he was only injured, and couldn't get out of the car by himself. Then i saw it. Taken from an helicopter shot, you could see a large amount of blood, mixed in the sandtrap...

I lost it, and shut the TV off. I couldn't do anything but cry, and cry i did. I've seen the crash a multitude of times since then, but i can't express the same amount of fear and sadness i had when i saw it happen live, in front of my eyes. It probably marked me for life. I had lost my hero, the person i saw as an inspiration, ever since i first saw him race.

Adeus, Ayrton.

 

[miata13B]

I pay my sympathies PunkRock towards Ayrton Senna. . . I am sorry you lost a hero in life, it is the worst imaginable thing to ever experience. . . My condolences and thoughts to know he is in a better place now .

 

[vat_man]

Man - I remember that so clearly. I was really keen for Senna to win that GP, after the disappointment of Brazil and the Pacific GP - it was still weird seeing that yellow helmet in the blue and white Williams.

I was still shocked by the news of Ratzenberger getting killed, which I'd only heard that afternoon. I followed Le Mans pretty closely and was pretty familiar with his efforts at Le Mans with Toyota.

I saw the whole GP - the start crash that finished off JJ Lehto's GP career, Alboreto's incident in the pits, and of course, Senna's crash. I went to bed with the reports of him being gravely ill, and the news that his heart had stopped in the helicopter on the way to the airport. I can remember Murray's voice changing after that bit of news, and it almost seemed a relief the GP was over at the end.

..and of course, I awoke at 5am the next morning to the news that Senna had died overnight. I spent most of the day in a haze, similar to what I'm feeling right now about Possum Bourne. Sometimes, motor racing sucks...

 

[SandStorm]

That's a nice avatar, Vat, nice way to remember Possum.

Senna - I was 11. I was fairly interested in F1 at that age, but I wasn't willing to make the effort to watch it - I figured that I'd find the result in the news.

I woke up the next day and turned on the TV, and they had a do on Ayrton. I thought, "Great, he must have won."

But then I saw his car, and him sitting in it, limp as a rag doll.

Absolutely tragic.

R.I.P Ayrton Senna.

 

[Flerbizky]

R.I.P. Senna !...

After may 1. I didn't watch F1 for almost 3 years..

Beautiful put PunkRock 👍

/F

 

[GilesGuthrie]

I remember it too. It was shaping up to be a real humdinger of a season. I have to say that whilst I respected his ability, I didn't like the man, nor his questionable tactics. I felt the same way about Michael Schumacher, in that his ability was so superior to that of those around him that there was no need for the on-track antics. Thankfully it's not something we've seen from MS much recently, although that may be to do with the superiority of the Ferrari.

I was watching the race in my girlfriend's flat on a black and white telly. She absolutely loved Senna. We'd seen his Brazilian unforced error and him being taken out at Aida, so this was set fair to be a good race. Imola in those days was a power track, and Williams had Renault engines. I really thought that Senna would win this one after being handed something of a beating in the past two.

I was scheduled to be working on the student newspaper that afternoon, and since I was manager of the schedules, I'd arranged it so that I would have time to watch the race.

It had been a pretty poor weekend for F1, having already lost one life, and with Barrichello being extremely lucky to survive his shunt in the Jordan. Plus Alesi was out after a neck injury sustained in a testing shunt. It was as if the F1 danger was really coming home to roost.

When I saw the shunt, and the immediate aftermath, I feared the worst. Actually, no, I knew. Something inside me absolutely knew he was dead. Right there at the track. Gone. Ayrton Senna had left the building.

I had to go up to the paper, and it was a sombre mood. I never saw the rest of the race, and didn't feel like watching the 'highlights'. I wrote his obituary for the student paper on a laptop in my kitchen that night, and then had to fight for six column inches in that issue. Oh the parochiality of students!

F1 certainly hasn't been the same since he left. It's taken an awfully long time to come up with replacement talent, although I think that the big three young guys are probably ready to take us through this decade in style. No offence to those who have competed in F1 these past nine years, because it's still bloody hard, and it's still bloody dangerous, and it's still absolutely fantastic to go and watch (as I can attest, having been to 6 GPs in the last three years).

It doesn't seem like nine years ago, but it does seem like nine years' worth of stuff has happened since. F1 still rocks.

 

[liquidyellow]

I remember that day oh so well I can see it so clearly now. I had to work the whole day so I got my parents to tape the race for me but listening to the radio later that afternoon the news flash came on and I learned that Ayrton had been gravely injured in the race, well I was just blown away Senna had been my hero since 88, totally one human being who I respected big time, as I sat in silence eventualy the report came through of his death and yes I shed more than a few tears that week. I was just embarking on a foray into motorsport myself at the time and I thought to my self, is it worth it? Well I thought Ayrton would have carried on even more determined so I would too, well I had the best times of my life racing all inspired by the great man.

R I P Ayrton

 

[TsLeng]

R.I.P

 

[Pupik]

I remember the day before, on April 30th, a co-worker who was into F1 told me that someone had died in practice...he dcouldn't remember the naem. It was Roland Ratzenberger, of course. Some how, I feared it was a rookie driver. Later, it turned out, that he'd made a mistake, and was driving around with a braoken front wing that broke off at very high speed, on a corner with almost no run-off.

I thought, that's terrible...I'd been watching F1 for 7 years, and nobody had been killed in action all that time. Poor Roland was just making his break in F1, happy to be in at the rear of the grid.

Senna's accident was something else...this fellow was an amazing driver; I didn't always respect his driving tactics, but I gained a lot of respect for him in the last years of his career. He made silly mistakes here and there, and every so rarely his car failed, and could be seen taking off the yellow helmet and tossing the gloves down angrily and looking somewhat annoyed at everyone looking at him.

But after the dust settled, the car stopped moving, he didn't move. I figured, "he's really angry, he wants to win this championship and he's DNFed 3 times already...", but then, it was..."okay, get out of the car, you don't want another car to hit you"...and then, "HEY! MOVE! WILL YOU??!?!?", shouting at my TV set.

The image of Senna, not moving in his car, slumped over just a little to the right is a haunting sight that unfortunately passes my mind every time Imola and Senna are mentioned in the same breath.

F1 hasn't been the same. A lot of regulars from his era had moved on by then; the new school was set to take over. The cars and rules changed dramatically. Formula One was literally no the same sport anymore.

One racing era had definatlely passed into another.