Dominioni tactic was to try and destroy the prosecution's arguments one by one. He accused Passarini of never having investigated whether phenomena of instability were present in Senna's William in relation to the characteristics of the Imola race track and to the settings of the car itself. Forghieri, Carletti and Lorenzini never took this possibility into consideration and never presented objective evidence.
Then Dominioni tackled specific issues. Senna's steering column was the same as Hill's and they had been designed before the start of the '94 F1 season. According to Allgass, consultant for the prosecution, it is not possible to say that a piece built with a security coefficient of 1 is badly made. The stress on the piece denounced by the prosecution should have become apparent at 350,000 cycles (a cycle is anything that causes wear on the piece), while the steering column, which has been checked after the first two GPs of the season, was only ever subject to up to 27,000 cycles. The question is why in the occasion of the accident there had been so much stress which had never been observed before?
The prosecution's exam is arbitrary becasue it is not based on objective facts but on presuppositions. There are internal contraddictions, especially Forghieri's statements on the tyre pressure, which have been proved to be wrong. The consultants first spoke of two bumps on the track, then one, then three, but they never mention the one which caused the loss of control of Senna's car at 11"24, as shown by the telemetry. As for Nosetto, he has been called as expert on himslef, which is clearly wrong. On the subject of the tyre pressure the prosecution's consultants relied on evaluations and not real data and they have been proved wrong by Goodyear. The whole reconstructions done by the prosecution's experts is wrong and must be redone. There are mistakes in the temporal and dynamic logic of the reconstruction of the accident, which starts at 11"24: following a heavy collision with another car Senna'scar shifted sharply and the Brazilian oversteered trying to correct the trajectory. According to the prosecution the steering column broke at this point because the car carried on straight and the driver did not try to steer in the 60 metres outside the track. In reality this did not happened because the wheels were not responding any more to the steering wheel, but because Senna was trying to obtain the best possible braking which can only be achieved with straight wheels. But the car had a variation of trajectory of 2-4 hundredths of a second which Senna could not manage.
It is pointless to compare the lap in the Friday practice session with that in which the accident occurred because the car settings were different. The films cannot be used either because the on-board camera was not rigidly fixed and there are phenomena of optical illusion. The steering column and wheel are flexible and the film images do not reflect reality. Alboreto's testimony cannot be trusted since he accuses Coulthard of not telling the truth. Williams, Head and Newey are not and were not general directors, they have areas of technical autonomy typical of F1, which is specialised to the extreme. Dominioni asked for Williams and Head to be found not guilty for not having committed the fact as the accident did not happened because the steering column broke.
Next session will be on Wednesday 21st November.
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