When I walked into the paddock at Imola on the last Thursday afternoon that April, the hand that grabbed my arm had a powerful grip. And the rumbling laugh that accompanied the gesture, and the curly hair and saturnine good looks of my assailant, belonged to Roland Ratzenberger.

We hadn’t seen one another since 1987, my last season covering the British F3 series. As we laughed and hugged I took genuine pleasure telling him how happy I was that he had finally made it to F1. We agreed to do something on Saturday night.

Our little group knew that this was going to be an odd one when an undeserving colleague won a 924 at a Porsche dinner that evening. But none of us could ever had predicted the horrors that lay ahead.

The weekend when God turned his back. That is how I will forever remember the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix.

Sixteen minutes into Friday afternoon’s qualifying session the bad things began. Rubens Barrichello’s Jordan launched over a kerb in the Variante Bassa and was thrown into the debris fence at undiminished speed, around 140 mph. It was a very scary shunt and there was palpable relief as he escaped with a vicious shaking and a broken nose. It was a miraculous deliverance, but there were to be no more that weekend.

When we saw Roland’s accident the following afternoon, 20 minutes into the second qualifying session, and the way he lay in the cockpit of his shattered Simtek as it slithered from the impact site at Villeneuve all the way down to the Tosa hairpin, our darkest thoughts were sadly realised.

I remain grateful that we at least were able to have that conversation on Thursday, that brief moment of good fellowship again. It was like nothing had changed in seven years, and it was good to know how happy he was in his final days with us.

The paddock was understandably a very sombre place on Sunday morning.

I remember many feeling unusually unsettled at the start of the race, and within seconds we watched with anguish as JJ Lehto, another mate, stalled his Benetton in fifth place on the left-hand side of the grid. We prayed that nobody would hit him, and just as it seemed those prayers had been answered, an unsighted Pedro Lamy smashed his Lotus into the back of the stricken B194. Poor old JJ had only just recovered from a neck injury sustained in pre-season testing, and had driven down to Imola from Monaco with Roland.

Then came Ayrton’s crash on the seventh lap, as the race restarted after the field had farcically been losing tyre temperatures and pressures, and thus ride heights, having to follow a ludicrously slow Opel Vectra road car which acted as the safety car while the mess on the grid was cleared up. As with Roland, we recognised straight away that the news with Ayrton was grim. It was unthinkable. Jim Clark and Gilles Villeneuve all over again.

Even as Ayrton was helicoptered away, the race dragged on. Nobody knew why they didn’t just flag the wretched thing after it reached 75 per cent distance. I watched it from the windows in the press room, above the pit lane, and had literally just said to colleague Nigel Roebuck that it reminded me of the gruesome Indianapolis 500 in 1973 and that all we needed was an accident in the pit lane, when on the 49th lap a wheel came loose on Michele Alboreto’s Minardi as he left after a tyre change. It bounced into the empty Pacific pit and then into Ferrari’s, injuring three mechanics there and one at Lotus before ending up on the opposite side of the track. And still the hallowed race dragged to its bitter, brutal conclusion.

In the immediate aftermath those media colleagues to whom motor racing was a job rather than a vocation seemed affronted that nobody had told them people could get killed. And perhaps the saddest sight was a female colleague who cared very much for Ayrton, who wandered the corridor outside the press room, utterly bereft. I had never seen greater misery etched on a human face.

I had written virtually nothing by the time it was finally over. I was working for Motoring News back then [now Motorsport News], as well as [UK newspaper] The Independent on Sunday. After Roland’s death I had been in no mood to write; I penned my qualifying story for the Sunday Indy and his obituary for The Independent daily, and one for Motoring News. I still had 20,000 words to write.

Then we learned around 1730 that evening that Ayrton had died.

My colleague Derrick Allsop handled The Independent daily back then, and asked me to write Ayrton’s obituary.

“How many words, and how long have I got?”

“They want 1,200, by eight o’clock.”

“Okay.”

I went down to Lotus’ hospitality to write it. It would be quiet there and I worked for the team doing press releases at races. But when I got to the motorhome at six o’clock [Lotus boss] Peter Collins’ wife Jane was very emotional so I spent 10 minutes calming her down. Then I went to work.

I’d never done it before, nor since, but I wrote Ayrton’s obituary in 20 minutes, working three or four coherent sentences ahead. I opened a vein and those 1,200 words flowed as I drowned in all the memories since I’d met him in F3 late in 1982. I felt that I had done the right thing by a man whom I had admired greatly, despite our differences.

My relationship with Ayrton remains my biggest regret. If I’d been prepared to be wholly uncritical, I might have enjoyed my greatest driver/hack relationship.

But I couldn’t condone some of the things he did. He broke rules of driving etiquette and set examples that legitimised such dangerous and aggressive tactics all the way down to the grass roots of karting. I found that unacceptable, and said so. The relationship fluctuated.

We stayed at a small hotel that weekend, La Pergola, in Fontanelice, run by a sweet woman called Rosa, and her surly husband Leo, who stayed muttering in the kitchen chopping things on a block like he wished it was parts of us.

When Nigel and I left early on Monday morning, Rosa tearfully and touchingly handed each of us a bottle of red wine. It was as if she wanted to apologise for what Imola had done. I drank mine two days later watching a television tribute to Ayrton, and cried all the way through. Ayrton and I had spoken for the last time at Suzuka the previous year, when I asked him to sign my Honda book ‘A Decade of Continuous Challenges’. He smiled graciously when I smirked and said he didn’t have to sign it if he didn’t want to, and as he obliged, he said, “Time, Dave, is the big thing.”

I took that to mean that time is the big healer. But that sociable evening, none of us could have known how little he had left.

And here we are, somehow 25 years after those cataclysmic events, the wounds as raw as ever when you let yourself think about them too deeply.

BMW doesn’t have a super long history in Formula racing. Yes, BMW did participate in Formula 1 and 2 but it didn’t always and it doesn’t now. It doesn’t have the Formula 1 history of Ferrari or McLaren, for example. However, during its time in Formula racing, it had some pretty awesome cars. Two of which are now for sale on Race Cars Direct.

One of the cars for sale is a 2007 Sauber-BMW F1.07 and it was driven by Sebastian Vettel at one point. In the ad, it specifically says “driven by” and not “raced by”, so it could have been a developmental car and not an actual race car but, still, who cares? It’s awesome.

It’s obviously an open-wheel F1 car with a carbon fiber monocoque chassis so it should be a riot to drive. Powering the Vettel-driven F1 car is a 2.4 liter BMW-sourced V8 and it makes a very good noise. It’s also incredibly fast, obviously, as it’s a flipping F1 car. As a track toy, it’s hard to find something more fun.

Until you see the other old Formula Bimmer for sale. It’s a 1946 BMW Formula 2 car and it’s glorious. The post-war racer used a 2.0 liter naturally-aspirated inline-six engine, whose block was sourced from a BMW 326/327 at the time. It also had three 32mm Weber carburetors and it must make the most wonderful noise. Pre-war and early post-war BMW inline-six engines made unbelievable noises and we can only imagine what sort of sounds this Formula 2 racer makes. It makes 90 hp, or at least it did back in 1946, and that’s more than enough for this little thing to be fun.

The F2 car uses a tubular frame chassis with a BMW 326 front axle, rack and pinion steering, a four-speed manual gearbox with leaf springs at the rear, a rear axle form a BMW 327 and the rear diff from a 326.

The best part about the old F2 car is that it holds FIA papers and is eligible for all sorts of classic and vintage car racing. What a thing to own.

SILVERSTONE, England (Reuters) - Jenson Button fears he may have driven for the last time the Brawn GP car that took him to a stunning 2009 Formula One world championship.

A decade on from one of the most extraordinary seasons in the sport's history, the Briton enjoyed putting the car through its paces again at Silverstone in the build-up to the British Grand Prix.

"It was a real pleasure," said the 39-year-old, now a pundit for Sky Sports television, whose lap on Thursday was for the cameras rather than the crowd.

"It might be the last time I ever drive it because it’s the only gearbox left. And the only wishbones left. And obviously they are carbon fiber so they are lifed (with a defined lifetime).

"They can become lifed after a very short period of time, the glue goes off. They (the engineers) were doing an ultrasound on the wishbones, making sure there weren’t any hairline cracks or anything," he continued.

"And I'm just about to jump in the car and do 300kph. And I came past the old pits flat through the corner, which is an easy flat corner, but Ross (Brawn) said he felt quite nervous seeing the car go at full speed."

Ross Brawn, the former Honda team boss who put his name to the team after keeping them afloat following the Japanese manufacturer's withdrawal at the end of 2008, owns the car Button won the title in.

There are two others -- one without the full internals that Button owns and keeps in a warehouse, and another belonging to Mercedes, who provided the engines and bought Brawn at the end of 2009.

The gearbox in Brawn's car, Button said, is the only working one and there are no spares.

"When Mercedes bought the team, the car became the show car," he added. "So it basically did two years of doing 'donuts' (spins) and burnouts. So they destroyed all the gear-boxes.

"And you can’t build more wishbones because the tools were thrown away. And they were crushed. Why would you do that?

"I do have one (car) at home but I’ve just been told mine doesn’t have internals and the gearbox. No-one told me that when they gave me the ‘complete’ car," smiled the Briton, who is hoping to put his on display in a museum in Los Angeles.

SMALLER

Button won six of the first seven races in his title season with a car that was in a class of its own from the moment it first broke cover. He won the title in Brazil that October.

"It’s such a small car compared to what we have now," he said of his impressions now.

"It’s a lot narrower, that’s the regulations, but it’s also really short because you don’t have the battery packs and the fuel cell. It doesn’t need to be so big because we had refueling. The thing’s tiny and it’s just beautiful.

"It doesn’t look out of date at all. The front wing’s a bit big, and not the prettiest thing, but apart from that the car is stunning.

"I jumped in, used the same seat, same seat belt, position, drove out of the garage and everything just worked like I remembered... everything just felt very natural."

(Reporting by Alan Baldwin, editing by Christian Radnedge)

Want to own a significant slice of Formula 1 history? You might soon have your chance. This Ferrari 312T, driven by Niki Lauda during his championship-winning 1975 season, is coming up for auction via Gooding & Company as a part of its Pebble Beach event this August. You should buy it.

After the car was retired from competition in 1976, it was acquired by a French collector, who kept it for nearly 20 years. The 312T was then sold to another collector in the Netherlands, before being purchased by its current American owner in 2008. Following a full restoration, the Ferrari was entered into the 2017 Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, finishing third in class. Now, it's coming up for sale at Gooding & Co.'s Pebble Beach auction August 16-17, 2019, where it's expected to sell for somewhere between $6-8 million.

Today's drivers "will never know" what racing a "proper F1 car" is like.

That is the claim of 1992 world champion Nigel Mansell, who says the sport's best era was actually before his title with the super-powerful turbo engines of the 80s.

"Formula 1 will never get back to that," Mansell, now 65, told the FIA's Auto magazine.

"Driving those turbo cars was the most exhilarating, frightening thing that you could do in your life.

"The (1987) Williams FW11B -- nothing comes close to that car, nothing in the world. Really, today's drivers will never know what a proper F1 car feels like.

"In qualifying you literally had up to 1,500 horsepower -- it's reputed that BMW had more. And to have wheel spin in sixth gear down the straight, at 175 or 180mph -- you cannot put that into words as a driver.

"At every single corner you came to, the car was literally trying to kill you," Mansell added.