APRIL 24, 1995

Senna - one year on and still no verdict

The Italian investigation into the accident which claimed the life of Ayrton Senna at Imola on May 1, 1994, has still not yet reached any conclusions, and last week Italian magistrate Maurizio Passarini applied for a six-month extension to the deadline by which he must publish his findings.

The Italian investigation into the accident which claimed the life of Ayrton Senna at Imola on May 1, 1994, has still not yet reached any conclusions, and last week Italian magistrate Maurizio Passarini applied for a six-month extension to the deadline by which he must publish his findings. This means that we may not discover the official version of the accident before November.

Passarini has received a copy of the technical report which suggests that the accident was caused by a steering failure on Senna's Williams-Renault FW16. Although no-one will say anything on the record, the Williams team will not accept these findings and has its own ideas on what may have caused the crash.

We understand that, having read the report, Passarini felt he needed to talk more with Williams technical director Patrick Head and the two are expected to meet in the course of this weekend's San Marino GP. Head is expected to argue that there was no steering breakage but that the crash was caused by a complex series of circumstances which caused the car's hydraulic system to malfunction, thus affecting the power-steering the team was using at the time.