Formula 1 was still reeling from the deaths of Roland Ratzenburger and Ayrton Senna when the Grand Prix circus arrived in Spain for round 4 for the 1994 World Championship at the 1994 Spanish Grand Prix, and the accidents didn’t stop. In practice at Silverstone in preparation for the race, Lotus’s Pedro Lamy suffered serious injuries when his car vaulted the barriers. He was replaced for the rest of the season, starting in Spain, by Alessandro Zanardi. Andrea Montermini, taking the drive at Simtek left by Ratzenburger, broke his left heel and right foot in the Friday qualifying session. Williams, having only ran one car in Monaco, promoted test driver David Coulthard, who was given the task of filling the monumental void left by Senna. The newly-formed Grand Prix Driver’s Association took the decision to install a temporary chicane before the very fast Nissan corner, in a bid to prevent further accidents. In qualifying, Michael Schumacher placed his Benetton on pole position by over half a second over Damon Hill, now the outright number one driver at Williams. McLaren’s Mika Hakkinen was an impressive third, with Coulthard a respectable ninth.
At the start, Schumacher led away from Hill, with Coulthard was soon up to fifth place, with the Jordan of Rubens Barrichello and Gerhard Berger’s Ferrari colliding, sending the Austrian down to twelfth. Schumacher was soon pulling away into a distant lead, leaving Hill and Hakkinen to fight for second place. Coulthard stalled his car in the pits on lap twelve and retired on lap 32 with an electrical failure. In the midst of the first round of pit stops, Schumacher’s Benetton became stuck in fifth gear, leaving Hill in the lead. Despite the near-impossibility of driving the remainder of the race in fifth gear, Schumacher was still setting more-than-respectable lap times, but was beginning to fall into the clutches of Hakkinen, but with less than 20 laps to go, the Finn’s Peugeot engine expired, sending him into retirement. Schumacher’s team-mate JJ Lehto inherited third place, but his engine also gave out six laps later. Hakkinen’s team-mate Martin Brundle was now set for the final podium place but was thwarted by a transmission problem with six laps left. Hill took an emotional win for the Williams team, with Schumacher an incredible second, and Mark Blundell completing the top three in what would be his and Tyrrell’s final podium finish in Formula 1. Schumacher led the championship by nineteen points from Hill, with Benetton leading Ferrari in the constructor’s championship by 21 points.
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