Looking back: 20 years ago - the calm before the storm

1994. In F1 terms it even twenty years on is a campaign considered barely to have a redeeming feature; a rancid low point. It is viewed as a season of rancour, bitterness, tragedy.

It was a year of persistent and acidic controversy, both technical and sporting; race bans were frequent and the success of the champion Benetton team - the target of much of the contention - even today from many perspectives still festers rather like an uncleansed old wound. It was a year of sickening violence. Most traumatically two drivers, Ayrton Senna and Roland Ratzenberger, did not survive the campaign, others had their careers at the top in effect ended by injury, and there were plenty of near misses besides in which widespread injury and death was avoided only by chance. It was also a season lacking in competitiveness, featuring several soporific races in which the cars at the back, indeed in the midfield, barely belonged in the same formula as the cars at the front. And, almost appropriately in the perverse sense, in the final round the destination of the drivers' title was resolved in the most unsatisfactory manner, with Michael Schumacher's stricken Benetton via whatever explanation coming into contact with the Williams of title rival Damon Hill, thus ending both of their races and settling the championship in the German's favour. In many ways, in comparison with the 1994 season start by the climax of the harrowing campaign the sport appeared rather more than a year older.

But less well-remembered is that, fleetingly, the season promised rather different. Roughly twenty years ago at that very campaign start, the opening round in Interlagos in Brazil, it appeared that just maybe 1994 was instead to be the scene of the sport's renaissance, however laughable that concept seems to hindsight.

Ayrton Senna was expected to dominate the year
Credit: Instituto Ayrton Senna / CC

It appeared so unexpectedly too, as in advance not many looked forward to the season with a great deal of relish. For one thing the world championship looked bought and paid for before anyone had turned a wheel. The Williams cars had been insultingly dominant for the previous two years and now for 1994 it had triangulated much of the opposition that remained by seizing as its own its main, perhaps its only, irritant in this time. Ayrton Senna despite battling against much superior Williams machinery throughout 1992 and 1993 had won eight races (one in four) in that time somehow, and a few of these drives were of sufficient quality so to go into folklore. Now for 1994 Williams had Senna signed up all for itself and the logic seemed irrefutable: best driver, best car, best engine should equal sweeping all before them. Most foresaw a year of demonstration runs.