Argumentadjourns Senna hearing
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Your support makes all the difference.The trial of Frank Williams and five other defendants under fire for the death of Ayrton Senna at Imola in 1994 got off to the slowest possible start yesterday, as the hearing in an Italian court was adjourned for eight days to consider an application by the defence to have charges against two of the accused dropped on technical grounds.
The makeshift court in Imola may have been besieged by journalists and expectations of shock revelations high, but the proceedings were remarkably mundane. As expected, only one of the defendants, the managing director of the company that runs the Imola race track, Federico Bendinelli, was in court for the trial opening.
Defence lawyers immediately took up the argument that the case against two of the defendants, the race director Roland Bruynseraede and the Williams team technician, Adrian Newey, should be dropped immediately on the grounds that they were not properly informed, according to Italian law, of the investigation in progress against them.
As often happens in Italian trials, the court quickly adjourned for several days - in this case, until 28 February - to consider the defence's objections. There was no glimpse of the special CD-ROM prepared for the trial which shows a simulated 3-D version of the Senna crash based on all available television footage.
Nor was there any hint of how the Williams team will set about their defence. The whole trial was meanwhile decried as a "cynical and stupid exercise" by Niki Lauda, who noted that the criminal proceedings went against the wishes of Senna's own family.
"I hope the court takes into account the risks that we drivers undertake of our own free will," Lauda told the Austrian newspaper, Neue Kronen Zeitung.
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