“Team” journalist Anne Giuntini remembers with emotion on franceinfo May 1, 1994 when she experienced the fatal accident involving the Brazilian Formula 1 legend.
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An intact legend: Ayrton Senna died 30 years ago on the Italian circuit of Imola. A tragic race that remains in the memories: viewers around the world experienced the drama live on television, while the Brazilian driver was at the peak of his career.
An extraordinary race too, this weekend in 1994 in Bologna: the day before the Brazilian’s fatal accident during the Grand Prix, another F1 driver, the Austrian Roland Ratzenberger, had already been killed in an accident during qualifying tests. Rubens Barichello, Senna’s compatriot, also had an accident that same weekend, from which he emerged miraculously unscathed.
The journalist of the Team Anne Giuntini was there at the time. For franceinfo, she remembers this weekend and the death of the Brazilian legend: “When the car came to a stop, Senna’s head moved and returned to an upright position, she says, with emotion. I clung to this image, to this hope, to this conviction that he could not be dead. Because actually Senna couldn’t die.”
“The planet stopped spinning”
“We had the impression that the planet stopped spinning. There was a great silence in the press room. We were crushed by this news which came quite late,” remembers the journalist. “In the meantime, we had time to inquire but we could not find any information. Her press officer was running towards the helicopter and she told me: ‘We don’t know the arm, the shoulder…’ In fact, I think she knew but couldn’t tell. say. I saw his personal photographer leave the McLaren stand crying. At Williams-Renault, we were very serious but we didn’t show anything.” continues Anne Giuntini.
“At the moment we were told of his brain death, his clinical death, something stopped. I think we had difficulty realizing it, understanding it.”
Anne Giuntiniat franceinfo
The journalist then confides:“I personally felt the need to go to his funeral in Brazil. If the newspaper [L’Equipe] had not sent me there, I would have gone there personally because I had to accompany him.”
And Anne Giuntini concludes: “We couldn’t believe he was dead. The next day, when we took the plane back from Bologna and his plane was there on the tarmac… Yes, it was there, without him: he hadn’t left. And little by little, we realized. But it was at intervals. We couldn’t take it all in at once, it was too big.”