The corner was named after the Tamburello stream that runs in a culvert beneath it — the same naming convention as Eau Rouge. The lap geometry placed Tamburello immediately after the start–finish straight, taken under sustained left-hand load at 300+ km/h for almost six seconds. The outside of the corner was protected only by a concrete wall and a narrow strip of grass — no run-off area existed because the circuit was hemmed in by the Santerno river on the outside. Drivers who lost the car at Tamburello had nowhere to go.
The corner had been the proximate site of multiple major incidents over the preceding decade:
1987 — Nelson Piquet crashed heavily in Friday practice at Tamburello when his Williams's left-rear tyre failed. Piquet was concussed and withdrawn from the rest of the meeting.
1989 — Gerhard Berger's Ferrari front wing failed at Tamburello; the car struck the wall and was engulfed in fire. Berger was extracted in approximately 14 seconds by trackside marshals and survived with second-degree burns. The fire was significant enough that it would later define what acceptable F1 marshalling response times needed to look like.
1991 — Riccardo Patrese crashed at Tamburello after a mechanical failure on his Williams; he was unhurt.
1992 — Michele Alboreto crashed at Tamburello after losing rear downforce on his Footwork; he was unhurt.
Each of these incidents prompted discussion of whether Tamburello needed to be modified — but each ended with a survival, and the corner's iconic status (flat-out, mythical, on the outside of a great river bend) was prioritised over safety modification.
On lap 7 of the San Marino Grand Prix, Senna was leading Michael Schumacher's Benetton by ~0.6 seconds. The cars passed the start–finish line with the Williams subject to a problem that has remained partially in dispute — the post-mortem investigation found that Senna's steering column had been modified during the off-season at his request, and that the modified column was found broken in the wreckage. The car appeared to go straight on rather than turning into Tamburello, indicating loss of steering control.
The Williams struck the concrete wall on the outside of Tamburello at an estimated 211 km/h. The angle of impact was approximately 22 degrees. A piece of suspension was thrown back at high velocity and struck Senna's helmet; the impact penetrated the visor and caused a fatal head injury. The car came to rest on the grass strip between wall and racing surface; medical intervention was immediate but Senna was clinically dead at the scene. He was airlifted to Maggiore Hospital in Bologna and pronounced dead at 18:40 CET.
The post-event investigation by the Italian state prosecutor charged Williams personnel with manslaughter; the prosecution failed at appeal but produced an enduring contention about steering-column responsibility that has never been fully settled.
In the off-season, Tamburello was demolished. In its place, a chicane combination — a left, then a right, then a brief straight — was constructed across the original corner's footprint. The redesign reduced the corner speed dramatically: the chicane is now taken at approximately 70 km/h, less than a quarter of the original Tamburello's apex speed. The unprotected concrete wall on the outside of the old corner was buried within the chicane footprint and gains a substantial gravel-and-tarmac run-off behind it.
The redesign was unloved by drivers who had raced the old Tamburello — Damon Hill and Mika Häkkinen among them — for breaking the rhythm of what had been one of F1's defining sequences. But it has not killed a driver since.
The modern Tamburello is the first chicane after the start–finish straight: a hard left followed by a hard right, with a short straight in between. The chicane is the principal overtaking opportunity on the modern Imola lap, particularly with the assistance of DRS. The corner sequence is more technically interesting than its post-1994 detractors suggested — it rewards a late braking line and a careful exit kerb — but it has never matched the mythological weight of the original.
A bronze statue of Senna was erected by the Bologna provincial authorities at the inside of the modern chicane in 2014, on the twentieth anniversary of his death. A simpler tribute — a plaque on the wall where the original Williams came to rest — has been there since 1995. Both are visited regularly by drivers, fans and journalists who travel to Imola.
Tamburello in the popular memory of Formula 1 is not the modern chicane but the original flat-out left. Senna's death there is the most-cited single event in F1 safety history, and the corner sits in the imagination of the sport as a synonym for the watershed moment when F1 stopped accepting fatalities as part of the cost of doing business. The fact that no F1 driver died at a Grand Prix weekend in the next 20 years — until Jules Bianchi's 2014 accident at Suzuka, in conditions and circumstances utterly different — is the legacy Tamburello bought.
Tamburello exists in our database as:
Original pre-1995 Tamburello in the historic Imola variant slugs (1953–1994 layouts).
Post-1995 chicane Tamburello in the modern Imola variant slugs (1995–present).
The two are catalogued under distinct corner records because they share only a name and a location, not a geometry.