The Last Corner

It is 2:17pm on a Sunday afternoon in the Emilia-Romagna region of northern Italy. The San Marino Grand Prix is on lap seven. The safety car has just pulled in. The race is about to restart.

Leading the field is Ayrton Senna — three-time world champion, the fastest driver Formula One had ever seen, a man so dominant that rivals spoke about him with something close to reverence. Behind him is Michael Schumacher, the young German who had spent the season challenging that dominance for the first time.

The cars accelerate through the first sector. Senna builds a small gap. They reach the Tamburello corner — a long, sweeping left-hander that drivers had taken flat out for years. At 190mph, Senna's Williams FW16 drifts wide. It doesn't correct. It continues straight on, off the track, across a strip of grass, and into a concrete retaining wall at full speed.

The car disintegrates. A piece of debris — later identified as part of the suspension — strikes Senna's helmet. He is motionless in the cockpit.

“He was the most complete driver I ever saw. When he arrived at a circuit, the whole atmosphere changed.”

Frank Williams, Team Principal, Williams F1

Ayrton Senna was airlifted to the Maggiore Hospital in Bologna. At 6:40pm that evening, he was declared dead. He was 34 years old.

The official cause of death was a penetrating head injury caused by the suspension fragment. But the question that haunted Formula One for the decade that followed was a different one entirely.

Why did the car leave the track?

Tamburello was not a corner that caused accidents. Senna had driven through it hundreds of times. The conditions were dry, the circuit was clear. There was no collision, no debris on the road, no obvious mechanical drama visible on television footage. The Williams simply went straight on.

In the years that followed, three competing explanations emerged. Each has serious people behind it. Each has serious problems with it. And three decades later, no single account has been universally accepted.