This weekend world motorsport marks the tenth anniversary of the blackest weekend in Formula One’s history, a weekend that robbed the sport of arguably it’s greatest talent and fans of the chance to see Ayrton Senna battling Michael Schumacher for the World Championship. NIGEL BURTON reflects on what might have been.

The sound from a television speaker fails to do justice to the maelstrom that is a Formula One racing car. Through the TV the engine sounds like a dull drone. Out there, on the track, it sounds very different.

You are strapped to a chassis buzzing along at 12,500rpm with the engine just behind your head as the car bumps and scrabbles for grip across the uneven surface of the track.

Even with earplugs, a fireproof mask and a crash helmet, the sound is deafening.

And the air is choking, full of petrol fumes, dust, stones thrown up by other cars and the rubber from tyres that are so hot they are on the point of melting. Blink once at 190mph and you have travelled 30 yards in the dark.
At 2.17pm on Sunday, May 1, 1994, Ayrton Senna had just begun the seventh lap of the San Marino Grand Prix behind the wheel of his troublesome Williams FW16.

As his car streaked past the finish line – a blur of blue and white – Senna was leading from Michael Schumacher in the Benetton-Ford. The three-times world champion from Brazil may have been in front but things weren’t going to plan.

Senna had complained bitterly about the handling of the Williams – a car stripped of the electronic aids that had made its predecessor appear to be cornering as if on rails. He was particularly critical of the way the chassis rode the bumps and its response on low-speed turns.

According to Senna’s teammate, Damon Hill, the early-season races had revealed the FW16 to be “virtually undriveable.”

Senna and Hill weren’t alone. Every other competitor had found that, to their cost, the sport’s new rule book made their cars skittish and tricky to drive.

Every other driver, that is, apart from Michael Schumacher, whose Benetton B194 appeared to be riding a magic carpet by comparison.

Senna, it now seems, had become convinced that the Benetton team had found a way to circumnavigate the rule changes that banned electronic performance aids. The discovery of traction-control software on the Ferraris only served to deepen his suspicions.

To stay ahead of Schumacher on that May Day Senna was having to drive at the very limits of even his extraordinary potential.

What happened next has been the subject of controversy ever since.

The on-board TV camera shows part of the story. As Senna’s Williams enters the Tamburello corner, the driver’s helmet suddenly pops into picture on the right of the screen. It’s hard to tell but he appears to be looking down.

Had he spotted something or was he craning his neck to see how close the Benetton was in his mirrors?

A split second later the car bottoms over one of Tamburello’s bumps, deviates from the correct trajectory but then seems to correct itself.

In the modern F1 car this is very bad news. A car that slides is a car that is aerodynamically less efficient because the wings that supply the downforce pressing it into the tarmac are pointing in the wrong direction.

radually – or almost at once – you can lose the grip that is stopping you from flying off the circuit.

This is what appears to happen a tenth of a second later when Senna’s car jumps again, only this time it doesn’t correct itself and plunges straight ahead, on to the grass and towards the unyielding concrete barrier.

At this point the in-car camera feed was cut by a director too slow-witted to notice Senna was about to crash.

The next couple of seconds would have been crucial to the people trying to make sense of the accident.

Senna hit the brakes and managed to scrub off a bit of the 190mph his Williams was doing when it left the road. It wasn’t nearly enough. He hit the wall with tremendous force, the car still doing 131mph, snapping a suspension arm that speared through his yellow helmet with terrible force.

Although Senna was flown to hospital still technically alive – and shamefully the race was re-started – he would never regain consciousness.
The death of Ayrton Senna had a profound impact. If it had never happened Hill would not have gone on to be world champion three years later; David Coulthard may have remained just a promising test driver; Michael Schmacher may not have re-written the record books as easily as he is doing now.

Was Senna right? Did Benetton hold an unfair advantage? Or was the Brazilian just seeing the first glimpse of the German driver’s genius?

When the sport’s governing body called in experts to examine the Benetton they found a curious thing. Buried deep within the engine-management software was an apparently secret program that allowed the B194 to make perfect starts by matching gear changes to engine revs.

To find it you had to call up the software menu, scroll down to the line below, put the cursor in exactly the right place and press just the right key on a laptop to turn it on. There was also a sequence of button presses and paddle shifts that would have allowed a driver to activate this launch control as he drove around a warm-up lap before the start of a race.

Was it ever used? Benetton claimed it was not. They said the program was so embedded that it was impossible to remove.

Benetton was at the centre of controversy later in the season when a pit-lane fire was caused because someone had removed part of the fuel rig to save time during a stop.

Had Senna lived it is doubtful Schumacher would have gone on to win the championship in 1994. After all, going into the last round Hill had closed to within a point and it is safe to assume the Brazilian would have racked up more points than the inexperienced Englishman.

How long would Senna have gone on? A year on and Williams had learned from its mistakes. The FW17 was a far more useful car. By common consent it was the class car of the field in 1995. Had he lived, Senna could have added two – possibly three – championships to his record.

We’ll never know, of course, because of what happened that fateful day. But consider this: Senna may have scored no points up until Imola but he had out-qualified Schumacher and he was leading when the accident happened. If he was going to go out he would have had it no other way.