On 23rd April 1989, Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost lined up on the front row at Imola with a gentleman's agreement in place. Whoever led into the first braking zone would not be challenged. It was a simple pact — one they had honoured before. Then Gerhard Berger's Ferrari exploded into the wall at Tamburello, the race was red-flagged, and everything was reset. Everything except the agreement.

What happened on the restart — a slipstream, a late braking move, two seconds of racing — lit a fuse that burned for the rest of the 1989 season and beyond. Tears in a team van in Wales. A bombshell interview in a French newspaper. Two world champions who stopped speaking in the same paddock. Alain Prost, asked decades later when it all went wrong, never hesitated: it started at Imola. It started from this point.

That's the centrepiece of this episode, but April the 23rd has more to say. In 2000 it gave us the British Grand Prix at Easter — and three days of rain that turned Silverstone into a swamp, sent fans home at the gate, and somehow produced one of the cleanest overtakes the circuit has ever seen. And in 2006 it brought us back to Imola one final time, where Michael Schumacher claimed his 66th career pole position — one more than Senna ever took — at the very circuit where Senna's record had been set twelve years before. Three races. Seventeen years. One date that keeps pulling motorsport history back to the same piece of tarmac.

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