On 1 May 1994, I sat down in front of the TV with my dad to watch Formula 1. This had happened every couple of weeks during the F1 season for longer than I could remember. A happy father-son activity. I was 9 years old. And then Senna crashed.
“… and Senna! My goodness!…” was Murray Walker’s reaction when Senna’s Williams left the track and smashed into the concrete wall on the outside of the Tamburello corner. I can still hear Walker’s words as I heard them live 30 years ago. His surprise and shock is still real to me, and yet somehow it is still fresh each time I re-watch the accident.
“He’s dead” was my dad’s slightly bitter reaction. Not all that surprising coming from him. He had been following Formula 1 since the much-more-dangerous 1970s when he worked for Goodyear Tyres. If I remember correctly, part of his job was to hand out tyres to the F1 teams at Kyalami for the South African Grand Prix. He also helped to entertain some of the drivers’ wives during the races, which was more about distracting them from the prospect of suddenly being widowed than anything else. Death was just part of the deal in Formula 1. Dad was at Kyalami in 1977 when Tom Pryce was killed. If you don’t know about Pryce’s death and want to look it up, be warned: It was brutal and gruesome.
I wouldn’t believe it. How could I? I was just a kid and Senna was my idol. Big crashes happened all the time in F1 and the drivers usually just walked away from them. In this race, there had already been a massive crash at the start when Pedro Lamy’s Lotus walloped into the back of JJ Lehto’s stalled Benetton, and neither driver was injured. I don’t recall if I was aware of the death of Roland Ratzenberger the day before in qualifying, but I probably was. Watching qualifying live was part of the father-son F1 weekend ritual. But I didn’t really know who Ratzenberger was. He was new to F1 and in a back-of-the-field car. He would not have been on my radar. I had no real experience of death in my young life (apart from losing my grandfather when I was 5 and too young to really understand). Senna would be fine. He had to be.
Every time I re-watch Senna’s final crash, I hope that he’s going to climb out of the car, even though I know how the story ends. Hope is perhaps the most resilient of all human emotions, and the hopes of everyone watching that day have been embodied and immortalised in Oleg Konin’s heart-rending painting of Senna climbing out of his shattered Williams. Of course, Senna did no such thing.
After the crash, Senna was extracted from the car, worked on by the medical team and carried into a medical helicopter and flown to hospital.
The race eventually resumed, and I watched all of it, but with little interest. I was a Senna fan and Senna was out of the race. I have strong memories of the race leading up to Senna’s crash, but very little memory of the rest of the race. I do recall a wheel coming off a car in the pits and hitting some mechanics, another violent incident in an already too-violent weekend.
Hearing the confirmation, a couple of hours later, that Senna was dead just left me feeling hollow and empty. And that’s how I still feel when I re-watch that race. The 9-year old boy that was me lost some of his innocence that day and the joy of watching racing was tainted for a long time after.
In so many ways, Formula 1 has been divided into 2 eras by Senna’s death. Safety considerations were already a factor in F1, but became much more so after Imola 1994, to the extent that only Jules Bianchi has died from injuries sustained in a Grand Prix since then. Bianchi crashed in the 2014 Japanese Grand Prix and was in a coma until his death the following year.
Senna’s death also marked the beginning of the end of driver visibility. One of the most enthralling parts of watching Senna was how much of his craft could be seen from outside the car. His head, shoulders and hands were all exposed to the viewer, both at the track and on TV broadcasts. These days, F1 drivers are almost entirely hidden from view. The driver’s helmet is still exposed, but partly obscured from the sides by the high cockpit and from the front by the Halo. These are crucial safety developments, but they have the drawback of disconnecting the driver from the viewer, at least to an extent.
For me, Senna’s death split my F1-watching life into two. Then was F1 with Senna and now is F1 without Senna. Senna made his F1 debut in 1984, the year I was born. I don’t recall when I started watching Formula 1, but I do remember that I was often ill as a child and my parents would sometimes play VHS tapes of F1 races to help me feel better. My memories of those reruns are overwhelmingly in the red and white colours of Senna’s McLaren days. He was an ever-present god-like figure of limitless skill who worked miracles no matter the failings of his car. At least that’s how he seemed to me.
After Senna died, I didn’t really understand why the drivers continued. Senna was the benchmark. He was the one everyone wanted to beat. With him gone, why compete? Winning without Senna in the mix seemed like a default second place (I had similar feelings when Schumacher retired from Ferrari at the end of 2006). It took a while for my enthusiasm for racing to return to its former level, and that mostly happened as my awe for Michael Schumacher grew. He really was the worthy successor to Senna. And we really were all robbed of the chance to see Senna vs Schumacher play out on track. We got small glimpses, but never the developed rivalry that could have been.
Is it possible to miss someone I never met? Someone who died 30 years ago when I was just a child? It must be, because I miss Ayrton Senna. Today I miss him a lot.
Chris on F1 
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