The Day The Earth Stood Still

There are those moments that'll stay with you forever. Of all the seconds that came before that instant when you heard the news or experienced something, and all of the seconds that came after it, you'll remember that one, single split-second when the earth stood still, as if it had just happened - what the weather was like, who was there with you and what you were doing.

Nothing would ever be the same again. There's the time before what had happened, and the time afterwards. Pre-9/11 and post-9/11. Pre-birth of my sister and post-birth of my sister. That kind of thing. Pre-formation of the Belgian gov - eeeeer, no.

All of this to say: everybody's got those moments, and they're different to each one of us. I'm sure most of you don't remember where you were or what you were doing when you heard that the legendary F1 driver Ayrton Senna had gone.

I remember it like it was yesterday: on May 1st, 1994, on a beautiful spring afternoon, eleven days before my 11th birthday, I was standing on the bridge over the pond in the garden of my parent's house when my dad came out and told me the news.

We had been watching a couple of hours earlier when Senna, leading the pack in the seventh lap of the Italian Grand Prix, shunted straight into the wall at the Tamburello corner - that same infamous corner where the likes of Nelson Piquet and Gerhard Berger had crashed and walked away.

It was immediately clear that something had gone wrong. There was no fire, the monocoque of Senna's Williams seemed intact and no other cars were involved... it was just that the man with the yellow helmet didn't move.

Back in those days, with helmets not being resistant to 800°C heat and with cars not being quite as strong as the carbon-fibre fortresses they are now, drivers not moving after a heavy impact was an ominous sign. My dad, who was (and still is) a diehard Senna devotee, now says he immediately knew that things would never be the same again. His passion for F1, which had started some twenty-odd years earlier, died that very instant.

My passion for Formula One was only burgeoning, though I felt tears well up when I realised Senna was gone as I had grown fond of him the couple of years that came before - especially as I watch my father jump for joy each time the Brazilian took home his McLaren in first position.

(I still, to this day, envy Dad as he had been able to obtain a paddock pass back in 1990 for the Belgian Grand Prix. He pretended to be a camera man, carrying with him  the Sony HI8 he normally used to make family clips - which was enough for the FIA officials to let him wander around in the Francorchamps pit straight from garage to garage, even talking to Jean Alesi and Thierry Boutsen. (Again: things were different in F1 back then.) He can still recall the moment when he was on the inside of the La Source hairpin when Senna came thundering down the main straight. Dad says he stared straight into the Brazilian's eyes when he slowed down and curled around La Source. Damn.)

So anyway, the reason I felt like digging all of this up is because of a beautiful article I read today in F1 Racing (the world's second best magazine next to SLAM). It's written by Matt James and it tells the story of how erstwhile Williams team manager Ian Harrison experienced the 1994 season, including that fatal 1st of May when one of the most charismatic sports icons ever passed away.

It's a special story because never before has the modal F1 fan gotten such a close insight into the day that changed his favorite sport forever. Numerous documentaries have been made, countless words have been written and too many people have vented their take on things - but up till now (at least until this much-anticipated documentary sees the light of day), no-one has taken me this close to that first day of May '94 as Ian Harrison did.

An excerpt from this journalistic masterpiece reads as follows: "I remember looking at it (Senna's crash; DM) and after probably about ten seconds I just started saying: 'Move, move.' We'd seen Ayrton twitch inside the car and that represented movement. So there was hope. Initially. (...) Then there was nothing. It just stopped. It became obvious that there was a bit of an issue but nobody knew how serious it was."

Not only do you get a testament of the aftermath of the crash unfolding through the eyes of a Williams insider by reading this story; it also tells you how much Formula One has developed since then. In 1994, pitstops were just being re-introduced, as was the use of the Safety Car. Pre-race meetings were a lot more simple than they are today and strategy was much more of a Fingerspitzengefühl affair than it is today.

In the end, Harrison is adamant: "It happened because it was one of the first times a Safety Car was used; the tyre pressures were low, the car was running low anyway and it was full of fuel. If you looked at the in-car footage from Schumacher's Benetton you could see the car was bottoming out really bad from the restart. It was probably a combination of all those things that caused the shunt. I'm not an engineer but I think the thing bottomed out and Ayrton lost the front end."

He goes on to proclaim that Senna probably would've won the 1994 World Championship. Sadly, we'll never know. And I'm pretty sure that aye lot of F1 fans don't know who was World Champion that year, having stopped entirely watching Formula One post-Senna's death...