Day 120: Remembering Is A Strange Feeling

I’ve blogged on this day before – not today, but 30th April – I remember that because it was this 2004 post about Roland Ratzenberger. He was the up coming F1 driver who died the day before Ayrton Senna did at Imola 19 years ago.

This is the strange feeling. I remember that day so clearly – the whole weekend is still fairly clear in my mind when I think back. That may be because it was refreshed with the Senna film recently. Although I don’t feel that watching that altered the images in my mind, just reaffirmed the events.

I’m sure that next year there will be something massive to commemorate the loss of Senna, but I doubt that many others outside of the hardcore fan base of Formula One, for whom today’s date is hard wired into memory, will remember the other loss that weekend.

There have been many a big incident in Formula One in the years since, however no deaths of drivers have occurred since then. The death of arguably the sport’s most well known character at the time (this is before Michael Schumacher‘s domination of the sport moved the spotlight to him, 1994 was Schumacher’s first title winning year and only his third full season), brought the safety movement back to the forefront of F1 discussion. We must, however, remember that, while the drivers have been kept safe, two marshals have lost their lives since 1994: Paolo Ghislimberti at the Italian Grand Prix in 2000 and Graham Beveridge at the 2001 Australian Grand Prix.

Below are photos of some of the most horrific crashes since 1994, in most of them, the drivers walked away unaided.  None missed more than one race as a result of injuries, and no spectators or marshals were harmed. It is meant as a tribute to the engineering of the cars.

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