In case you had not noticed, there was no Formula One race last weekend. In those days, it felt as though F1 drivers climbed into their cockpits straight from the pages of an Ernest Hemingway novel. ‘Twenty-five drivers start every season in Formula One and each year two of us die,’ he says. The success of Drive to Survive, the mystique that still surrounds racing drivers, is built on racers like Senna and Mansell. It is hard to think that, in a few weeks, Formula One will mark the 30th anniversary of the day Senna was killed at Imola. It was the first death in Formula One since Villeneuve was killed at Zolder in 1982. It was the height of naivety but until that weekend in Imola, I had never thought any of the drivers would die. In those days, when we still mixed with the drivers, I went to stay with him in Dalkey, outside Dublin.

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