Bernie Ecclestone: “I thought Ayrton Senna’s death would mean the end of F1” – F1journaal.be

On May 1 it will be 30 years since Ayrton Senna died. In response, former F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone looks back on that tragic event during an interview.

The story of Ayrton Senna’s dramatic crash is well known, but what is less known is what happened shortly after the crash. Then F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone went to the control tower and was told by F1 doctor Sid Watkins: “It’s his head”.

” I thought he said, ‘He’s dead.’ I came out of the control tower and was of course very upset. When I walked away I saw Senna’s brother. He asked what happened and I said, ‘Apparently he’s dead’, and that was it,” Ecclestone told Racingnews365. “I left fairly quickly. I just wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. There was nothing anyone could do and I didn’t want to get involved in the conversations about canceling the race and not saying anything about him having died, him going to hospital.”

“It was the story they put out because if he had died on the track then of course you had to cancel the race, so that’s why I didn’t want to get involved in the fact that he was dead.”

It was a strange situation in which the race eventually went ahead again and Senna was clinically kept alive, after which Bernie Ecclestone only learned that Ayrton Senna had died in the evening. According to Ecclestone, Formula 1 suddenly returned to a period in which F1 pilots again died. Earlier during the weekend, Ronald Ratzenberger had also died.

“We used to lose a lot of drivers, one or two a year, then it went away and it wasn’t like that anymore,” said Ecclestone. “The problem was that when someone died, we moved on and no one made an effort to do anything about it. It was so normal. It was stupid. Then we were suddenly confronted with it again.”

As then F1 boss, Bernie Ecclestone had to think back to the words of then FIA chairman Max Mosley after the death of Ayrton Senna.

“Max said to me: ‘Now Formula 1 is over’, and that, I think, is the way to think,” Ecclestone reflected on the tragic weekend in Imola. “Eventually Formula 1 became more popular.”