I saw in the news last week that Brazilian Formula One driver Bruno Senna has signed with British team Williams. This means there is a member of the Senna family back with Williams for the first time in nearly 18 years – since F1 legend Ayrton Senna, Bruno’s uncle, died in a crash in the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix.
I can’t believe that was so many years ago. I was pretty young at the time, but even then I loved F1 and it was such a tragedy. The event had been quite a complicated one, with several crashes and other incidents – and then, when Senna was leading the race on 1 May, on lap number seven, his car left the track on a fast corner and hit the retaining wall. It was going at 205 miles per hour at the time. Senna received medical treatment almost immediately, but died later in hospital.
There was lots of controversy surrounding the accident for many years afterwards, with Williams even being investigated for manslaughter. The cause was eventually identified as a steering column failure, which the Italian court ruled was due to bad design and ‘badly executed modifications’.
This is partly why some people are surprised that the Senna family has reunited with Williams, but such accidents are never clear-cut – and it was a very long time ago. With regard to his new opportunity, Bruno himself said that he believes ‘things in life happen for a reason’ and that everyone in his family is ‘ecstatic’.
By coincidence, this season is the first time that Williams cars will have Renault engines since 1997. In 1994, when Ayrton Senna both joined the team and lost his life, the team was known as Williams Renault.
I, for one, can’t help wondering whether we’ll see echoes of Ayrton Senna’s incredible talent in Bruno.