On a particularly difficult section of the Monaco circuit, Jenson Button, a driver at the McLaren Mercedes team, said at the race in the Mediterranean principality a few weeks ago, drivers must be brave to get it right.

“You just have to be brave enough to try and get as close as you can to that edge of the barrier,” he said of the corner called Bureau de Tabac, “because you carry the speed through the corner, knowing that it drops away after that.”

As Formula One stages the Canadian Grand Prix at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve — another track with close walls — on Île Notre-Dame in Montreal this weekend, it has been 30 years since the circuit’s namesake, one of the bravest drivers ever, was killed in an accident at the Belgian Grand Prix in Zolder on May 8, 1982. A month later, another driver, Riccardo Paletti, was killed in a race accident on the Canadian circuit that had been renamed for Villeneuve.

After a safety overhaul that year, it would be 12 years before another death on a race weekend. But on May 1, 1994, one of the bravest and best, Ayrton Senna, died at the San Marino Grand Prix at Imola, Italy. The day before, Roland Ratzenberger, a rookie, had been killed during a practice track session.