@Leawood911: that's a very interesting explanation of the mental battle of wills between rivals. Yes, I certainly agree that this does form part of the equation. It is definitely a game of who will flinch first and also there's a bit of ego involved in the sense of 'don't mess with me, know your place'.

About the crash, I also interpreted the way Senna just kept on going forward off the track to mean the same thing: steering failure. How it hurt him is, I agree, some kind of freak accident. Maybe it takes a freak accident to overwhelm a driver like Senna who was himself a kind of irresistible 'force of nature'.

Who knows what Senna might have achieved had he continued racing? He was only 34 years old. By any standards, that's a tragically young age to die. If he had continued till age 40, he could have won several more titles. We will just never know.


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