Revealed: the harrowing real-life crash that inspired Brad Pitt F1 movie

Last week’s release of the official trailer for the F1 movie has given us a little more insight into the plot ahead of its release in June.

The basic storyline has been known for a while — a driver long absent from the top level of the sport returns to the worst team on the grid to mentor a young rookie.

The trailer has filled us on a few more details, such as the initial tension between the two team-mates and there was also a brief glimpse of a scene that provides confirmation of how another important plot point is rooted in a real life event.

From the early stages of filming it’s been common knowledge that Brad Pitt’s character Sonny Hayes had raced in F1 in the 1990s before a major accident derailed his career.

It was also rumoured that the crash was based on that suffered by Martin Donnelly in practice for the Spanish GP at Jerez on September 28, 1990, and which saw the Ulsterman suffer severe injuries.

The fact that the Donnelly was spotted in the fictional Apex GP team’s garage at last year’s British GP appeared to confirm that he was in the loop.

The trailer has indicated not only that Donnelly’s accident forms part of the story, but also how accurately the production has attempted to recreate it.

A brief snippet shows Hayes in a pit garage with a Camel-liveried Lotus 102 similar to the car driven by Donnelly. On his yellow overalls Hayes even carries the logo of Martin’s personal sponsor Cellnet, which stuck with him after his F3 days.

Director Joe Kosinski didn’t have to use a 1990 Lotus – Hayes could have been driving any generic nineties F1 car – but the fact he did so reflects the overall quest for realism and detail.

Should anyone watching the film suggest that the sight of a driver thrown from a broken chassis is far-fetched, Kosinski can cite Jerez, and say that it really happened.

The precise context of the crash in the storyline and what unfolds afterwards remains to be seen. What is clear is that thanks to a little Hollywood magic Hayes makes a full recovery and is able to resume his career in other categories, before eventually getting the call for a surprise F1 comeback. The real Donnelly was not so fortunate, and never had that second chance.

A star in the junior categories in the way up, Donnelly made a one-off appearance for Arrows in the 1989 French GP before landing a full-time ride with Lotus the following year as team-mate to Derek Warwick.

Sadly the Lamborghini-powered 102 was unreliable and uncompetitive, and Donnelly had little chance to shine, although he did pick up a seventh place and a couple of eighths over the first two-thirds of the season.

Then at Jerez a suspension failure sent him off the road and into the barrier at high-speed. The chassis disintegrated in unprecedented fashion, leaving the driver lying prone on the track, still strapped to his seat. It was only the fast intervention of Prof Sid Watkins that kept Donnelly alive at the scene.

Ayrton Senna viewed the accident site up close before resuming qualifying, ensuring that the crash also became part of the Brazilian’s story.

“The Lotus boys said when they went to get the car, most of it went in bin bags, shards of carbon fibre mixed in with syringes,” Donnelly told Motor Sport’s Simon Taylor 20 years after the crash.

“As for Ayrton, he’d been watching a man he knew near death, bone sticking out of his legs. He told a journalist that seeing me like that made him realise how fragile we all are.

“Then he went back to the McLaren garage, got in the car, put his visor down, and when they ran the last eight minutes of the session he set the fastest lap anybody had ever done round Jerez.”

That Martin survived was a little short of a miracle, and after he was returned to hospital in London he had to be resuscitated three times. At one point he was given the last rites.

“I was in a coma for seven weeks, and when I started to regain consciousness my voicebox wasn’t working, because I’d had tubes down my throat for so long,” he told Taylor.

“So I never said anything. They were worried that I might have some brain damage. Then one day my fiancée Diane was sitting beside the bed, and a nurse came round to take some blood. When he put the needle in he hurt me. Apparently I grabbed him and said, ‘That f***ing hurts!’ and Diane said delightedly, ‘He spoke! He spoke!’”

It was just the start of a long road to rebuilding some kind of a normal life.

“As my consciousness came back I worked on getting better. I was really determined, because in my naïveté I thought I could go to Willi Dungl’s clinic in Austria and he’d do for me what he had done for Niki Lauda, get his magic wand out, wave it, and I’d be racing again in March.

“But I didn’t leave hospital until February 14, four and a half months after the accident. I wasn’t in a fit state to leave, but I went, in a wheelchair. Niki flew me to Dungl’s, and on the second day one of the physios came to my room and chained up my wheelchair. ‘Willi says you use crutches only now.’ I couldn’t stand up, but I went down to breakfast on my crutches.

“We did seven hours a day of different therapies and exercises. It was very hard work, but I stuck to it.”