The abyss that sometimes appears before sleep and expands from the stomach was especially deep that last night. It was April 30, 1994. As if it were a private movie session, the ceiling of suite 200 of the Hotel Castello in Castel San Pietro Terme seemed to project one image after another from the mind of its only guest. The Brazilian driver Ayrton Senna, scarred by the tragic training sessions of the previous days on the Imola circuit – the Austrian driver Roland Ratzenberger had died and Rubens Barrichello suffered a serious accident – began to sort out the strange sensations that had been accompanying him for some time. His memory takes him back to 1982, to the day Gilles Villeneuve crashed on the Zolder circuit and lost his life. He admired the Canadian, although at that moment he was more hurt by the contempt shown him by his compatriot Nelson Piquet. On that last night, however, he goes over what he did when Villeneuve’s accident occurred. It was not very different from his reaction after the accidents of Ratzenberger and Barrichello. In addition to the shadow of death, there are those that hang over his relationship with Adriane Galisteu, with whom he had been dating for just over a year: they reached him that same day through a recording of a telephone conversation. To get out of that abyss, Senna turns to his childhood, to the first time he held a steering wheel in his hands.
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