Friday November 19th, 1999

The appeal trial into Ayrton Senna's death began today, with the prosecution asking again for a suspended one-year sentence for Williams' Patrick Head and former designer, Adrian Newey.

The prosecutor in the Senna trial was Maurizio Passarini, whose case was that Senna had died due to a steering column failure that was, he claimed, poorly designed and built. However, the court acquitted the defendants from the manslaughter charges, although did not rule out the possibility that the steering wheel was indeed the cause for the fatal accident. The prosecution appealed against the decision.

Today, prosecutor Rinaldo Rosini called on the appeals court to confirm Passarini's requested guilty sentences. Williams lawyers, on the other side, asked the court to once and for all rule that the steering column was not to blame for the accident, therefore acquitting the Williams team entirely.

Head and Newey did not attend the appeals court meeting.