Adrian Newey interview - Senna crash etc....

damn newey was charged with manslaughter in senna's death? that's nuts never knew that

 

I've been reading a few iterations of this interview this morning. Sobering stuff and it clearly still affects him to this date. It sounds as if he has found closure regarding the subject, but that doesn't have to make it any less painful.

 

Awesome article.
I really identify with him somehow.
Especially the part about "how old are you ?"

 

When you think about each and every year each team is building new prototypes.
Especially with constantly changing rules.
While entertaining and fun (if you get it right, hell if not) I dont see how they can be expected to design and build bulletproof safe cars especially dealing with these speeds and battle for weight ballance.
That it bothers him today is a testament to his ethics.
Enzo and Collin did not carry that burden.

 

Ouch! I hear what you're saying, but Gilles & Jimmy respectively affected them deeply - Colin in particular was close to shutting it down.

Cheers,
Ian

 

The 94 car was designed around the traction control system, it was crap without it.

 

First Passive Suspension Williams since the 91 Car, until Newey refined it to be the FW14B by the French GP.

 

Colin was even harder-hit after Mike Spence was lost at Indianopolis, I've read- it was a one-two punch in a 30-day span.

 

I think a lot of team owners have the thought cross their minds of shutting down or selling out after one of their drivers is killed in one of their cars, I think it may just be nature forcing you to second-guess yourself.

 

Nice insight. It's quite clear he feels responsible for Senna's demise.

 

Not to be cold, but the tire puncture thing just doesn't hold water. The steering colum failure however does...it holds A LOT of water in fact.

The onboard video clearly shows the steering wheel falling into Senna's lap just before it cuts. The fatigue cracks (which Newey admits existed - and this is the first I've read anyone from Williams confirming this - see lots of photos though) and wheel sitting on the ground with half the steering column attached also point to steering failure.

Senna also looked down (again, just before the video cuts out) as the apparant wheel failure occured.

That, and having personally experienced a steering failure in a Formula car at speed - and I did the same thing - looked at the wheel saying WTF to myself), I'm convinced this is what happened.

 

Italy treats racing deaths the same as a traffic fatality.

An Inquiry is automaticaly opened.

F1 mag recently interviewed the Manager (not Newey) at the time.
The car was impounded forever too.

 

Well, Enzo WAS famous for caring for the widows......

 

The Italian investigators claimed the in car recorders were smashed with a hammer to make them unreadable before being handed over by Williams.

What appears to be the failure of the steering column
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What I heard as well.

 

Excellent post Sean, if you look before he goes off, that is exactly what he was doing. Tamburello is not a difficult curve for someone like Senna who had raced there for 10 years and had won that race before. It was steering failure.

 

There's no reason for Senna to go off with a puncture. The car looked nervous (as MS many times stated) for the first 3-4 laps before he crashed.

I can't find a video, but checkout Jenson's Spa tyre failure crash and see how he went off, compared to Senna. In Senna's case, the car just went straight....

P/S : Why did they destroy everything before handing back the evidence to Williams?

 

Brian, a lot of people believe that Williams destroyed the Black Boxes before handing them over to the Italian Authorities.

 

Oh, thanks Tony, I thought it was the other way round..

 

Williams destroyed them because they knew there would be a manslaughter investigation. They didn't want their engineers and mechanics going to prison. The Italians got a conviction but it was after the statute of limitations had expired. No jail time for anybody sadly.

 

Guys you cannot say it was the steering column. The car hit a WALL very hard it is just as probably that the steering column broke then, and not before.

Also a rear tyre deflating can cause a car to loose effective steering because the opposite front wheel will lift off the ground and if this is the outside and thus loaded wheel you have a big problem.

In the end I don't blame the car at all, it was simply Senna pushing too hard and he lost it. The car was all over the place and bottoming hard and he was trying extremely hard to break MS, and he was not able to. Senna and MS were playing mind games and Senna was out to prove that he still was competitive after 3 races with no results. MS was simply not going to go away and Senna pushed past the limits with a very difficult car to drive.

Let it go. He is dead, accidents happen on the race track and he would not have died if by very bad luck the wishbone had not gone into his head. When you have big accidents, you need luck. His ran out .
Pete

 

The data shows Senna in full force breaking as he is leaving the track? Why? When drivers "lose it" so to speak, on a corner, they don't go full on breaks b/c that is a sure fire way to find yourself going off track. They try to recover with the wheel and throttle.

Also, if he's "losing it" as in the back end stepped out, why is the wheel going to the left? During oversteer, you correct INTO the slide, not against it or you'll find yourself spinning off the track. Senna was still trying to steer LEFT as if trying to get the car around the corner, not RIGHT as if trying to recover from a slide. This always seems to be left out of the 'bottoming car' sliding off the track discussion.

And Williams even tried to explain that the several centimeter deflection of the steering wheel was "normal". BS. Even my little FF2000 car didn't deflect buy maybe a few mm under load, not over an inch!

http://www.ayrton-senna.com/s-files/start.html

http://www.ayrton-senna.com/s-files/picsf08.html
"David Coulthard, testifying for the defence, said that it was perfectly normal for the Williams steering column to move both up and down and left and right by several centimetres, and for the driver's hands to rub against the cockpit. He fully supported the Williams' theory that the amount of movement shown on the videotape was normal. Coulthard's statement was therefore in direct contradiction to that of Alboreto."

There is a video of Coultard sitting in a stationary cockpit/mock up 'showing' the steering wheel deflecting and that this was normal. All set up by Williams. No driver in the world would drive a car with a steering wheel that deflects centimeters off it's turning axis.

Lets see; Coultard was taking Senna's place in F1. He was young. He was a rookie, he'd just realized his dream of making it to F1. WTF do you think he's going to say about the Williams steering wheel? He's going to say exactly what his bosses tell him to say (and no knock on him, there is more too it than that, the trial was called a joke b/c it was a RACING accident, not a motor vehicle wreck on the street and just about anyone in F1 at the time would try to protect their boss/companions in the sport).