7. He was arguably the deepest thinker in the history of sport

Senna's philosophical outlook is worthy of an entire book of study. He described driving in metaphysical terms, and its pursuit as a spiritual endeavor: "On a given day, a given circumstance, you think you have a limit. And you then go for this limit and you touch this limit, and you think, 'OK, this is the limit.' And so you touch this limit, something happens, and you suddenly can go a little bit further. With your mind power, your determination, your instinct, and the experience as well, you can fly very high. [...] 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."



8. Senna predicted someone would die in the exact place where he did

Ayrton went with his fellow driver and eventual teammate, Gerhard Berger, to see what could be done in the name of safety at Imola's Tamburello corner, after Berger and several others had been involved in serious crashes there. Together, they climbed through a partition in the retaining wall to investigate the surroundings. Senna wanted to move the retaining wall back, but the Santerno River prevented doing so. Senna told Berger that he feared someone would die in that spot. Five years later, his words proved eerily prescient.