In the aftermath of Ayrton Senna’s shocking 1994 death at Imola's infamous Tamburello corner while leading the San Marino GP, the F1 fraternity was shaken to its core. Once again new technical regulations were imposed to slow the cars and improve driver safety, but even with the first driver fatalities in a dozen years, the show went on, as it always has.

The beginning of the current era in Formula One is marked by a single day: 1 May 1994.
But once again, the roots of the transition reach back further, to the 1991 Belgian GP at Spa, where young German Michael Schumacher burst onto the F1 scene by qualifying 7th in his first Formula One start for Team Jordan, moving on just one race later to Benetton. With the absence of Mansell and the now-retired Prost from F1 for the 1994 season, there was only Schumacher to take on Ayrton Senna and make the new F1 cars — running under revised FIA specifications once again, designed to encourage more competition between drivers rather then between money and computers — a true test of driver mettle.



And new the cars were. After focusing on their active components for years, F1 designers were hard pressed to meet the new specifications, and most of the paddock was not delivered in time for much winter testing before the season's first race at Interlagos in Brazil. As Senna prophetically told a pre-season interviewer,

"It's going to be a season with lots of accidents, and I'll risk saying that we'll be lucky if something really serious doesn't happen."

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