Five years earlier, Tamburello could already have been fatal. Gerhard Berger’s Ferrari ended up in flames in this fast left-hander, and it was at the last minute that we were able to extract the unconscious Austrian from the blaze. With his Brazilian friend, Berger returned the next day to the scene of his accident to try to modify the track. “With Ayrton, we realized that the river below was too strongly constraining the topologyhe told us two years ago. We said to ourselves that we couldn’t move it. We had capitulated. »
Nothing was done in 1989 and it was in this same curve that Senna died in May 1994. The day before, a bend further away, in Villeneuve, it was Berger’s Austrian compatriot, Ratzenberger, who was also fatally injured. . So, after this fatal weekend, the Emilian track finally decided to modify its layout, installing two chicanes on these two fast turns. The track, considered too outdated, will disappear from the calendar in 2007 after having offered two giant duels (Alonso-Schumacher) for its last two editions.
It was only during Covid and thanks to the help of Formula 1 boss Stefano Domenicali, a native of Imola, that the renovated autodrome regained its place on the calendar in 2020. A place that he has not left since even though floods in the region in 2023 had forced the organizers to cancel the previous edition. Imola’s F1 contract runs until the end of 2025.
