Seeing is believing, they say.

If you didn’t see it, or it wasn’t caught on camera, then it didn’t exist, right?

That’s especially true of Formula 1, where the ever-present television cameras capture action and incident from multiple angles, replaying them in slow-motion to allow us to critique them, more fully understand them… and then endlessly post them as GIFs on social media.

But, as used to be the case, if the TV cameras missed the moment, then it escaped – recorded for posterity in the record books, but dangling frustratingly, tantalisingly beyond the grasp of our greater understanding.

Take, for instance, Ayrton Senna’s blisteringly quick pole position lap for the 1988 Monaco Grand Prix. You know all about it, yet you’ve never seen it. The TV cameras that May afternoon were switched on, but wholly failed to capture a single one of the incendiary 84 seconds it took for Ayrton to scorch to pole.

It’s incredible to think that one of the sport’s all-time great laps was missed by the director. But it was, so it lives on only in our fading imagination.

Modern Formula 1 has become fully realised by the broadcast media: it defines how we consume the sport.

Before proper TV coverage, F1’s superstars existed only in gritty black and white newsreel footage – the great heroics of Fangio, Moss and Clark were never shown in their full glory.

Television, by contrast, has made the sport’s greatest achievements indelible. We all remember the Senna vs Prost feud because every race was televised. We can all re-live the tension of that final lap around Interlagos for Lewis Hamilton back in 2008. Most of us probably even know where we were when we first saw it.

And that’s why we celebrate the antics of the modern-day fighters like Michael Schumacher, Juan Pablo Montoya, Lewis Hamilton, Fernando Alonso and Max Verstappen – their combative style sets our screens alight every fortnight. And we love them for it.

And that’s perhaps also why our old-school heroes are remembered more now for their finesse and skill (we celebrate the likes of Fangio, Moss and Clark for their inherent ability rather than their fighting attitude), because the archaic broadcast equipment of the time simply wasn’t up to the job of capturing anything other than fleeting glances of the cars at speed.

And perhaps too that’s why Senna is so pivotal.

More than any other driver, he straddled the link between the un-televised and the televised eras. Indeed, it was largely his skill and commitment that helped to popularise the sport enough to bring it to TV screens across the world.

And it was his blend of charisma, aggression and sheer speed that meant he appealed both to the old-school cognoscenti and the new breed of fan attracted to the drama, glamour and danger of Formula 1.

And that, too, is why the strange omission of that 1988 pole lap is so frustrating. Here was Formula 1’s greatest star taking his first steps onto the world’s stage, and his defining moment was taken from him; from us.

Without pictures, we are left with words:

“That day, I suddenly realised that I was no longer driving conscious. And I was in a different dimension, for me. The circuit for me was a tunnel, which I was just going, going, going. And I realised I was well beyond my conscious understanding…”

You’d love to hope that there’s some dusty old VHS cassette, lying undisturbed beneath a pile of old paperwork, that contains the footage from that mighty lap, but it is something of a forlorn hope.

Well, here’s to hoping…