Why F1 still misses Imola

The Tannoys are silent today. Perched on top of tall white poles, like seagulls on street lights, they wait to shout to a crowd that will never arrive - not to watch Formula 1 cars anyway. Deserted grandstands, a dormant track, row upon row of empty wooden benches mounted on the parkland banking that surrounds the circuit: this is Imola in winter, 10 years after it last hosted a grand prix.

Routine maintenance goes on around the fringes: there is paintwork to be touched in, verges and run-off areas to tend and, more substantially, a media centre under construction to complement the swish new circuit offices and museum that were erected in 2008. But it sure is quiet at the Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari: even a leaf blowing across the Tarmac is loud enough to be heard.

It's one of those ultra-high-def days that combine sharp winter chills with razzle-dazzle sunlight. Everything is turned up to 11: the sky a deeper blue, the track surface that bit more granular, the rushing of water through a weir on the Santerno River a touch louder in the background.

There is precious little else to disturb: for half an hour around midday, the sound of children playing in a schoolyard is carried on the air and then, once again, all is calm. This feels like an empty colosseum; stripped of purpose, it waits for the racing season to begin because there's nothing else to be done.

Yet everywhere is the echo of noise: the imagined sound of mighty Imola, reverberating around the hillsides. This was where the wild things were: a power circuit for '80s turbo-cars and 3.5-litre V10s to be given their head - all the way from the old Variante Bassa (lower chicane) through scary-flat Tamburello, round through Villeneuve, before brake-with-all-you've-got Tosa.

Uphill, then foot-to-the-floor into the blind right-hand crest before Piratella. Second through to sixth and rising, this section would have required every bit of The Right Stuff any F1 driver could call on: maximum acceleration; total commitment on entry and through at around 175mph before braking and two flicks down on the paddles to take the wide, 100° left at around 125mph. Michael Schumacher had a big one here, dropping the rear of his Benetton in 1995, as the track curves right before the braking area. He wiped the left-hand side off the car and almost flipped it in the gravel. At Imola, there's no such thing as a small shunt.

Downhill towards Acque Minerali, named after the park within the circuit outline, past the fine brick-and-terracotta houses, whose upper floors afford a panorama of this most thrilling section of race track. It's wasted on the garden pigs who hunt for truffles in the grounds, oblivious to their surroundings. Speeds would rise to 165mph here, sixth gear, narrow track through the tall cedars and cherry blossoms before the slight left-hand flick, then a touch on the brakes for the first, open right of Acque Minerali, taken at 150mph. Brake again, harder, down to second - "burying the car at the foot of the hill" as Martin Brundle once described this stretch - before sweeping up the momentum and catapulting towards Variante Alta ('top chicane').

To stand here on a virgin track, not another soul to be seen, is to experience the majesty of Imola. This is a breathtaking section of track, sinuous, fast, challenging. And did I mention scenic? It just so happens to be achingly beautiful here, too: a stretch of circuit that appears to have grown from the very land on which it rests. It's where Valkyries would come to ride on their days off.

Not that any F1 driver would ever have had time to admire the view round these parts - they'd have been too busy gathering it all together for the charge uphill. Variante Alta comes suddenly, all hard right angles, to disrupt the rhythmic flow, before another sharp drag left. It feels awkward and clumsy in the context of Imola's contours and speed elsewhere. It's just 75mph here, so the most crude-but-effective approach was to smash over the kerbs, straighten the line, and pretend they weren't there. Think Ralf Schumacher, all bludgeon, right boot and to hell with the suspension en route to his first victory, for Williams, in 2001.

There's a call for power again on the charge to the Rivazza double-lefts. The temptation would be to brake too late, down to just 60mph and plough forward into the vast gravel basin that separates circuit from surrounding apartment blocks. Not so long ago, their balconies were draped with 'Forza Schumi' banners every April as F1 returned to Europe following its early-season fly-aways.

Rivazza (2), and on to the bottom straight and the entry to the Variante Bassa. Rubens Barrichello had his monstrous 1994 qualifying accident in a Jordan here - shocking to watch and you wonder how he emerged almost unhurt - and one forever wrapped up in the events of that Imola weekend.

These days, after numerous safety-driven layout changes introduced in 1995, there's an uninterrupted blast past the paddock, pits and main grandstands, all the way to the braking zone for the Tamburello chicane. The sprint is very much in keeping with the foot-to-the-boards spirit of the original 1950 circuit, which ran without chicanes - just Tosa and Rivazza to slow things down. Were Formula 1 ever to make a comeback here, as has been rumoured since Imola was granted a 'Grade 1' FIA licence in 2011, it would be easy to imagine a current-spec grand prix car topping 220mph along this section.

This is where the tifosi used to throng, from bottom to top on the hillside, cheering their heroes. In a good year, when ticket prices were low and Ferrari were doing well, it seemed an entire edifice of humanity had been planted here for the race weekend: Italians piled one on top of the other in some kind of outsize circus pyramid. The atmosphere, always sharp at Imola, crackled when this many race fans were in the house.

The great sportswriter and sometime contributor to F1 Racing Richard Williams once commented as he looked across from the paddock to the banking: "This is the people's grand prix, isn't it?"

How right he was, for where Monza has always felt, somehow, 'proper' - Italian racing nobility, if you will, to be respected and revered as much as it was to be enjoyed - Imola was always more accessible, more populist.

F1 came here with a sense of relish: it was always a race weekend filled with promise - a circuit the F1 fraternity loved to visit, having schlepped through Australia-Malaysia-Bahrain. "It felt like going down to close the garden gate," the late F1 Racing scribe Alan Henry used to say of the easy flight (for a European) to Bologna airport, followed by a few days rolling around the Apennine foothills in a Fiat Panda rental.

Damon Hill, who won here in 1995 after enduring the shocks of '94, when both Roland Ratzenberger and Ayrton Senna were killed on the same weekend, remembers days spent racing and testing at Imola with huge affection.

"The atmosphere was like nowhere else," he recalls. "There was a much more mellow crowd than you had at Monza - less aggressive. And spring was always a beautiful time of year to go there.

"One of the very first times I went, I was testing for Williams and they really were the good old days. You sat in the garage and watched the Ferrari fans eating cheese and drinking wine in the grandstands. They would wait all day for a Ferrari to go out, and when it happened, they would all cheer."

That vibe is still very much alive - how could it not be when the town's residents live so close to the track that they're at risk of losing the laundry drying on their balconies in a passing swirl of rear-wing vortex? And it's reinforced by modern re-interpretations of what Imola must offer to remain a viable business and not slide into obscurity as a deceased race track.

Only last July, more than 90,000 fans flooded the circuit to see AC/DC play the Italian leg of their 'Rock or Bust' tour. Even F1 in 2005, the final year of 3.0-litre V10s, would have been noise-challenged by 'the thunder from down under' that night. A few weeks earlier, the masses had been drawn to watch the Giro d'Italia running its 11th stage through Italy's Emilia-Romanga region, concluding with three laps of Imola.

And there's still motor racing, of course: the 2016 calendar features World Superbikes and the European Le Mans Series, among a cluster of events for domestic championships.

But the memories of Formula 1 here are the ones that make the heart beat faster and the blood run cold. For a driver, reckons Hill, there were few experiences to match driving around pre-chicane Imola: it would challenge and reward in equal measure.

"The old Imola track was one of the world's great racing circuits, no question," he says. "It was brilliant, honestly, and very scary in places. I remember dandelion tumbleweed going down the straights. You would hit these things going through Tamburello and there would be a massive explosion of dandelions.

"Then at Piratella the kerbs were three feet tall. You'd just get that right and then you were braking downhill into the chicane for Acque Minerali and the kerbs were like brick walls. If you got them wrong, you knew it would hurt. You carried so much speed - it was absolutely brilliant."

He describes the approach to Tosa and the corner itself as "beautiful". "The car was loaded with downforce, probably because you were approaching at 200mph, so you could brake incredibly late. There was just a lot of grip then an uphill exit. It was a beautiful corner."

As for the original Tamburello: "It was a curve, like the Curva Grande at Monza. It shouldn't have been a problem, but if you weren't careful it would catch you out. The first time you went around it, you'd come out and think 'Yee-hah! This is amazing!' Stupidly, you don't think of the danger. Call me irresponsible, but it's a real shame we don't go there any more."

Imola's Formula 1 story began properly when teams arrived in 1980 to contest the first world championship grand prix held there. There was already a whiff of controversy in the air as Imola had snatched the Italian Grand Prix from hallowed Monza, which had been staging the race in an uninterrupted sequence since the start of the world championship in 1950.

Lingering ill-will among the F1 teams in the wake of Ronnie Peterson's death at Monza in 1978 had given Imola the chance to ease onto the F1 calendar, first with a non-championship race in 1979, then with the real thing. Monza was having none of that and wrested the Italian GP back for 1981.

But Imola's backers, undaunted and blessed with covert patronage from Ferrari (this was, after all, the Autodromo Dino Ferrari - later the Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari), hit upon a cunning ruse: they would name their grand prix after the tiny principality of San Marino (never mind that it was 50 miles away) and, lo, Italy would host two races a year. Think Monaco and the French Grands Prix and you've got it.

This happy arrangement continued until 2006, when demands for ever-greater race hosting fees and increasing disgruntlement as to the standard of Imola's facilities ("Squat toilets? Not very F1, dahling...") led to its demise as a Formula 1 venue - for the time being, at least.

Over 27 grands prix it had provided a generation of F1 fans and participants with a series of indelible memories. From the purely personal, such as the hayfever brought on by spring tree blossom that afflicted half the paddock, to those that shocked us in our Sunday afternoon armchairs.

Gilles Villeneuve, approaching Tosa in 1980: a huge accident from which he escaped injury most likely only because of a shallow angle of impact. It was his perverse honour to have the corner named after him, post-shunt.

Two years later, same place, same Villeneuve, but this time with the added duplicity (alleged) of team-mate Didier Pironi. His last-lap pass into Tosa for the lead; Villeneuve with no chance to respond; both men taking the ensuing feud to their graves.

Nelson Piquet, 1987: a 170mph crash at Tamburello that rattled him so hard some maintain he was never the same driver again. Gerhard Berger at the same corner in '89, his Ferrari 640 a fireball after slamming into the retaining wall. He lived to race again, singed but not slowed.

Roland Ratzenberger, April 30 1994, at Villeneuve. A head-on-impact with no chance of survival.

And the singular moment that made the world stand still.

It is impossible to visit Imola and not reflect on the May 1 1994 race in which Ayrton Senna died. Tamburello has been a swooping chicane since '95, slowed in the wake of Senna's death, as was the approach to Tosa. T-shirts and flowers, hand-scribbled messages, hang from the fencing at the spot where his Williams FW16 hit the circuit wall and scragged back, shattered, across the run-off to the circuit edge. Similar tributes - Brazilian flags, photos - are dotted around the small bronze Senna statue erected just opposite, inside the circuit.

You can stand now and stare down the Tamburello approach, follow the natural arc of the corner, away from the chicane, and imagine how daunting it must have been to take at race-leading speed in a car whose handling was not to your taste, how tight it must have felt at around 190mph. A clear track ahead, but Michael Schumacher at your shoulders; a race to be won, a championship still to be fought for...