Senna's Death Trial - 22 November 1997

22 November 1997 Penultimate session of the Strial for Senna's death with the prosecution's answers to the defense arguments. Passarini said that he agrees with the defense of the track that it is possible to have a off-track area combined with a escape route, but that the Tamburello is a very dangerous place where cars are put under considerable mechanical stress and there should have been an escape route, as well as a off-track area. He then disagreed with the track's management interpretation of the regulations which implies that an escape route would not be required in that position. The works carried out at Tamburello in 1989 were OK, but they could have been expanded by raising the off-track area by 30-40 cm to bring it within the regulation requirements to allow a level passage from the track to the off-track zone. The prosecution's calculations, which have been called approximative, are actually based on scale measurements.

Passarini went on to refute Williams' defense arguments. He said that it is not true that his consultants did not consider the hypothesis of instability, which can be responsible for one out of 50 times a car leaves the track. The track has been examined in detail and everybody is aware that there were violent collisions with the ground. Williams reconstruction is biased because it assumes that certain data, proved wrong by the telemetry, is real. One of these assumptions is that Senna tried to counter-steer to correct the over-steering, which is impossible to see in the telemetry and is therefore not proved at all. On the contrary, one of the most significant things about Senna's car is that with the decrease in lateral acceleration, the torsion exercised on the steering column gets to 0, which means that Senna stopped using the steering wheel. This was not because he wanted to try the best possible brake action, but because the column had broken at this point. If the steering column was still working, the torsion should be evident in the telemetry. It is legitimate to have doubts on when and where the steering column was modified, therefore there is no point in pointing out that Hill had an identical steering column. It is not possible to claim that the breaking of the steering column was an unpredictable fact and that there is no causal relationship between the accident and Senna's death because the failure of the steering column is the primary cause why the car left the track. Head and Newey, because of their roles inside Williams, cannot claim that quality control was not one of their responsabilities according the principle of assigning tasks to specialised personnel.

The session was concluded by the reply of Lanzi, Newey's defense lawyer. He said that the central point of their argument is that the prosecution cannot say what Newey should and should not have done. From none of the prosecution's arguments it appears that Newey was Senna's confident in terms of technical choices or security issues.

The other replies from the defense will be heard in the last hearing on 26th of November.

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