In motor racing, some lessons are never learned. After Roger Williamson's death in 1973, for example, marshalling still continued to be slack in some countries. After Tom Pryce's death four years later, foolish people still ran across tracks.
The 1989 Australian GP should have been sufficient to chill even the least caring into an awareness of the risks presented by racing in the rain on a track with very poor drainage. After all, only sheer good fortune prevented that one being remembered as the race in which two World Champions, Ayrton Senna and Nelson Piquet, had lost their lives in freak accidents.
You would think such lessons could be learned in this enlightened day and age, but the 1991 Australian event simply served to underline how little progress has been made in 24 months. It was a carbon copy, another game of Russian Roulette in which motorsport could count itself lucky nobody was hurt.
