When I was eight years old, I was confronted with death in the biggest way in my life so far. No close family members had died to that point, but someone who I saw every couple of weeks was about to die, live on television.
The earliest sport I can remember watching is Formula 1 motor racing, from the end of the 1991 season. I was supporting Nigel Mansell, Brit in contention for the championship, so I didn’t support Ayrton Senna, who beat him that year. Senna was amazing, though. In Monaco in 1992 he did remarkable things to keep his slower McLaren ahead of Mansell’s now dominant Williams. The 1993 European Grand Prix, the one with the Sonic the Hedgehog trophy, was another masterclass. Senna was always there, and undeniably the best, sometimes preposterously so. It was difficult to imagine Formula 1 without him, and Formula 1 was a big part of my life.
On 1 May 1994, Ayrton Senna’s car crashed into a wall from first place in the San Marino Grand Prix. I remember the BBC showing too many replays, and then no replays. I remember Murray Walker commentating and solemnly filling time forever until the race, despite everything, restarted. And I remember the confirmation later that day that Ayrton Senna had died, which I read printed on teletext, and how bizarre it seemed that the world continued on nonetheless. The clock ticking away in the corner of the teletext page carried on all the same. The total numbness and futility I felt took a long time to retreat.
In 2011, I went to see Asif Kapadia’s documentary Senna at the Odeon in Holloway, and something went wrong with the lights. As the film came towards its end, somewhere during the footage from inside Senna’s car prior to his fatal crash, yellow and pink lights started shining onto the screen, and remained throughout the rest of the film and credits. It was distracting, and we got a free ticket voucher to make up for it. It was also haunting as fuck, like the enormity of what was being shown couldn’t be contained by the screen.
Geoff Crammond’s Grand Prix 2 has some things in common with the regular upgrade school of sports games. It is very similar to the original Formula 1 Grand Prix. Two things set it apart. The first is that the technological gap from the PCs of 1992 to the PCs of 1996 is a big enough one to make quite a difference to what it can show. The details still aren’t all there but the cars and tracks look now remarkably real. You can read the names of the sponsors on the other cars and check out the drivers’ helmet designs as you go past them. Even the sound of the engine is monstrously real. When you run into another car’s wheels and get launched in the air, it feels stomach-churningly accurate.
The other thing that differentiates Grand Prix 2 is that it now has real teams and driver names. Specifically, it has the real teams and drivers of the 1994 season. I don’t know if this was because it took the best part of two years to replicate the sixteen venues of the season in remarkable detail, or because the licence for 1994 was cheaper, or just because the game sailed past some production deadlines. Whatever the reason, it doesn’t change the effect. Grand Prix 2 is a remarkably complete and accessible simulation, which lets you fiddle with the gear ratios and front wing balance for your car for each track but also doesn’t even make you do your own braking by default, and it is also haunted.
Ayrton Senna didn’t appear in Formula 1 Grand Prix by name, but he clearly appeared in it. With his distinctive yellow helmet design shown in the menus, it was pretty obvious who the “Carlos Sanchez” driving for “McPherson” was. Carlos Sanchez does not appear in Grand Prix 2. Ayrton Senna does not appear in Grand Prix 2.
Ayrton Senna was not the only casualty of Formula 1’s 1994 season. He wasn’t even the only casualty of the San Marino weekend. Roland Ratzenburger, driving for Simtek, suffered a fatal accident during qualifying. For the following day’s race, Ayrton Senna had an Austrian flag within his car, prepared for a tribute to Roland Ratzenburger. Senna’s death hit me as hard as it did because of his familiarity, but I was already trying to process the idea of sudden violent death even before it happened. Roland Ratzenburger does not appear in Grand Prix 2.
At the following race meeting in Monaco, with the Formula 1 world still reeling, Sauber’s Karl Wendlinger crashed heavily during a practice session. He survived, but was in a coma for three weeks, and though he returned to Formula 1 the following season he was unable to live up to his previous promise. Karl Wendlinger does not appear in Grand Prix 2.
Grand Prix 2 takes the car colours and sponsors and driver lineup from the German Grand Prix later in the 1994 season and casts it back across the season as a whole. During that very grand prix, Jos Verstappen was caught up in a terrifying fireball during a refueling pitstop. Jos Verstappen does appear in Grand Prix 2, though terrifying fireballs don’t.
Driving small cars at extreme high speeds in places bounded by solid walls is a dangerous pursuit and was both before and after 1994. And yet, there is something in Grand Prix 2’s approach that makes it that bit harder to reconcile a detailed simulation with its simulated reality in which those unfortunate people weren’t there to begin with. This is a game with a human presence, which again shows marshalls waving flags, and shows a mechanic in the pits lowering your car to the ground ready to set off. Just as much as the extra presence in the cinema, the absences at the edge of vision make themselves known and haunt the experience. Of course it’s not surprising for a game to present a happier world in which things are as we wish they would be, in which it is not possible to play out in a way where sport is reduced to a foolishness in the face of death. It’s just harder to make that feel right when the death feels so thinly plastered over.
You can race around San Marino’s Imola in Grand Prix 2, with the track in the layout it had before they changed it to slow down the corner that Senna died at. You can drive round Imola in a Williams, as Senna’s replacement David Coulthard, just as you can drive round it in a Simtek as Ratzenburger’s replacement Jean-Marc Gounon, or drive round Monaco in a Sauber as Wendlinger’s replacement Andrea de Cesaris. It will only make the haunting more obvious.