A short note on Ayrton Senna, 20 years later

F1 driver Ayrton Senna died at Imola 20 years ago today. He remains the high priest of speed for a reason.

I've had one religious experience and/or hallucination in my life: a dream where I was laying on my back looking at the sky, watching a silvery banjo floating and rotating slowly thousands of feet above me, all the while experiencing the distinct sensation of being hooked through the chest by a giant wire that pulls me painlessly upward.

In dreamtime, it felt like it took years to unwind, with me rising slowly upward while never getting any closer. When people talk about a religious ecstasy, this was probably the thing they're talking about: a feeling of total joy transcending the physical or intellectual, and a sense that somewhere you plugged yourself into the great humming mainframe of the universe.

I was 22 when I had it, and woke up grief-stricken for reasons that, 15 years later, I don't totally understand. There is only one thing since that has come close to replicating that time-warping sense of total removal from this plane of existence: getting in a car, flooring it, and going as fast as possible until fear and an overwhelmed nervous system obliterates everything else. Sometimes I've done this under the guise of work. Sometimes I just did it and hoped no one objected too much.

This is Ayrton Senna, who died twenty years ago today during a race at Imola, driving a lap at Monaco.

Senna described some of the best laps in the history of the sport like this:

Suddenly I was nearly two seconds faster than anyone else, including my teammate with the same car. And suddenly I realized that I was no longer driving the car consciously. I was driving it by a kind of instinct, only I was in a different dimension. It was like I was in a tunnel. Not only the tunnel under the hotel, but the whole circuit was a tunnel. I was just going and going, more and more and more and more. I was way over the limit, but still able to find even more.

Senna has already been the subject of an intense and ongoing canonization process. Yet even now, after the documentaries, the feature film, the statues, the memorials, and his transformation into international racing's most revered ghost, Senna still sticks out, and not just for his brilliance on the track. Senna remains the most luminous of ghosts for his ability to describe the experience racing not as a dry, technical exercise, but instead as a kind of death-defying religious experience.

At his peak, his driving was unconscious; at the limit, he was not sure where he was, or whose hands were on the wheel. If speed is as close as you've ever come to God, and you've had that unconscious and blissful moment of disappearance at the edge of control and total chaos, then even two decades after his death Ayrton Senna is your Paul, and his races at Monaco are his Letters to the Corinthians.