Senna's Day

F1 legend Ayrton Senna died 23 years ago today.

Please click on this link if you don't know who's the guy,

Ayrton Senna

Since there's nothing really interesting to write today, I'm going to pay tribute to Senna, my favourite F1 driver of all time.

Really, the Pas' decision yesterday to severe ties with PKR doesn't interest me. Anyway, I had witten about it in my last post. So predictable.

Back to Senna.

I was still a kid in 1994, but had been following the F1 races after becoming fascinated by Senna's duel with his arch rival Alain Prost at that time.

Those days there were no live telecasts of the races, yet I religiously watched the recordings despite already knowing the results of each race from the news.

My aunt, a fellow F1 fan who was staying with me at that time woke me up the morning after the San Marino Grand Prix accident at Imola.

"Senna died," she said.

At first I thought she was mistaken.

'No lah, That's Roland Ratzenberger," I said in reference to the Belgian driver of Simtex team who died in a crash during qualifying the day before the race.

It was a really bad weekend at Imola. Rubens Barichello who was driving for Jordan at that time was also badly injured in an earlier accident.

"It's Senna. He's really dead," insisted my aunt.

I jumped out of bed and rushed to the living room to watch the news. TV3's morning bulletin was still carrying news of Senna's death.

How Senna died was quite unbelievable to me at that time.

He was going through the high speed but easy Tamburello corner when everything went wrong. The Williams car just went straight into the wall and Senna died upon impact.

It couldn't be Senna's mistake. Something was definitely wrong with the car.

At that time I used to play the Microprose F1 game on my aunt's Pentium-powered PC. It was the best of its kind then.

Tumburello corner is the first one after the start of the lap. They built a chicane there to slow it down after Senna's accident.

So, I know a bit between an easy and difficult corner.

I actually memorised every corner of each F1 circuit while playing that game. It was necessary as I had to take each corner using the right gear and be ready for it before I reached there. I also learnt about taking the best racing line when driving from the game.

I didn't go to class that day.

Instead, I took a walk to the nearby 7-Elevan and bought all the newspapers to read more news about Senna's death.

I was living in Section 6 Shah Alam at that time. The 7-Eleven is the one near the market there.

Lots of memories from back then.

I mostly lost interest in F1 for a while after that.

That was until F1 came to Malaysia in 1999. This year, it will be its last. But that's another story for another day.

I'm closing this posting with a video tribute to Senna,

The last segment of the video clip was moments before Senna's car went out of control and crashed at Imola 23 years ago. It seems as if only yesterday.