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Comment by cl8ton | Hacker News Reader

A Bit Off Topic: If anyone has interest in how it was before smart steering wheels, here is a vid clip of the master Ayrton Senna at Monaco in real-time as it happened.

http://youtu.be/rh6bwZ4ooTI

It is deemed the best in car F1 vid of all times by fans. It is raw and not sped up.

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That's unreal. I remember watching the Senna documentary and at the end of one of the races they had to pry him out of his car, starting with his fingers. His teammates were giving him pats on the back and he just screamed out not to touch him.

Insane.

Forearm and leg pump battling lateral G forces, current day Fernando Alonso/Ferrari describes this during his race season if you following him.

During the Senna video above, he takes his hand off the steering wheel with 2+ lateral G’s to shift which is insane also. Today’s drivers paddle shift with both hands on the wheel.

And back in Senna's day relatively little attention was paid to the physical performance of the driver — nowadays all the drivers spend far, far more time on their fitness.

That was most probably in Brazil where in treacherous wet conditions his gear-box got jammed at 6th gear. And he drove his car in 6th gear for several laps towards the end.

Yes those were the details I was missing, thank you.

BTW, even if you're not an F1 fan (I wasn't), check out the Senna documentary, a great movie: http://www.sennamovie.com/

That video never gets old. Taking your hand off the wheel to manual shift one of the most powerful f1 cars ever made around Monaco... That f1 era was quite insane.

Monaco is scary.

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