Adelaide at last: F1 survivor Martin Donnelly to finally complete the 1990 season

Some stories in sport refuse to end neatly. Some careers are cut short before their final chapter can be written, and the unfinished business lingers — sometimes for decades. Martin Donnelly knows that feeling better than most.

This weekend in Adelaide, Australia, the Belfast-born driver will climb into a Formula 1 car and take to the track at the Adelaide Motorsport Festival (February 28-March 1).

He will be driving the Hesketh 308 – one of the most celebrated cars of F1’s classic era – in the very city where, in 1990, he was supposed to be racing before his career was violently and suddenly taken from him.

“I was supposed to be in Adelaide in 1990, and I never made it,” Donnelly said ahead of the event. “My career stopped before I ever got the chance. That’s something that stays with you.”

It is a quiet, understated way to describe one of the most harrowing stories in F1 history.

The accident that changed everything

The date was September 28, 1990. Donnelly was at the wheel of his Lotus during official qualifying for the Spanish Grand Prix at Jerez.

He was 26 years old, at the wheel of a Formula 1 car, coming to the end of his first full grand prix season. The final round of the year in Adelaide was just two races away — tantalisingly within reach.

A suspension failure ended it all in an instant.

His car struck the barriers at an estimated 176mph (283km/h). The impact, measured at 42g, split the car in two and ejected Martin onto the track, leaving him with multiple fractures, brain and lung contusions. His body went into shock, causing his internal organs to begin failing.

He spent seven weeks on life support, as the F1 circus completed the final races of the season in Japan and Australia. Doctors told him he would never drive a Formula 1 car again.

Photographs taken at the scene showed Donnelly lying on the track beside the shattered remains of the car, still in his race suit and helmet.

They became among the most haunting images in Formula 1’s history – and, as it would later turn out, among the most globally recognisable.

While 1990 would be remembered for the title battle between Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost and for their collision at the first corner of the Japanese Grand Prix, for those who witnessed the events at Jerez, the image of Donnelly prone on the asphalt was the season’s most indelible moment of all.

The F1 movie connection

Donnelly’s story might have remained one known primarily to hardcore motor sport fans — a chapter in Formula 1’s history that older followers remembered with a shudder and newer ones had perhaps never encountered. But in 2025, that changed.

When the blockbuster film F1: The Movie — starring Brad Pitt as a veteran driver making a comeback — was released, it brought Donnelly’s story to a new global audience.

Footage of his crash at Jerez had inspired the backstory of Pitt’s character.

Donnelly was invited to the film’s premiere as a personal guest of Pitt and had advised the actor during the production.

It was, by any measure, a surreal turn of events for a man who had spent years quietly rebuilding his life after one of the series’ most violent accidents.

“Watching the crash recreated for the film was surreal,” Donnelly reflected. “But driving an F1 car again, in the place I never got to race, is something else entirely. This is real.”

There is something fitting about the parallel. The movie tells the story of a driver given a second chance, of unfinished business confronted and, perhaps, resolved.

The man who inspired that story is now living out his own version of it, not on a studio backlot, but on a real circuit, in a real Formula 1 car, in the real Adelaide.

The car Donnelly will drive is itself steeped in history.

The Hesketh 308, owned by Northern Ireland housebuilder James Hagan, launched the career of 1976 world champion James Hunt and later featured in the acclaimed film Rush.

Closing the circle

Donnelly has never truly left motor sport. Since his recovery from injuries that doctors feared would leave him unable to walk properly, he has built a second career in the sport he loves as a driver coach, an FIA steward, and as founder of the Donnelly Track Academy.

A publishing deal for a new book has recently been signed, and he remains in demand for speaking and ambassadorial roles.

He has also raced in other categories since his recovery and carried out various demonstration appearances in Formula 1 cars at events across the United Kingdom.

But Adelaide will be different. Adelaide, in his own words, is where a circle gets closed.

“This isn’t about speed, competition or proving anything,” Donnelly said. “It’s about finishing something that was taken away from me. The Hesketh is a historic Formula 1 car, driven with respect and within limits, and that makes this moment possible.

“For me, Adelaide feels like closing a circle.”