Just four days after she was found dead in her hotel room in the Spanish city of Seville, the autobiography of the first Spanish Formula 1 driver, Maria de Villota has gone on sale in Spain.
The 33-year-old had been in Seville to attend an event with young people and also to help promote her book when she died of natural causes, which are thought to have their roots in the accident she suffered while testing for the Marussia Formula 1 team, reports Xinhua.
Her death was a major shock and was reflected in the media all around the world, while the drivers in last weekend's Japanese Grand Prix observed a minute of silence in her memory.
In July 2012, De Villota was involved in a collision with a lorry while testing the Marussia car at Duxford aerodrome in England and lost her right eye in the subsequent operation.
Her book "La Vida es un Regalo" (Life is a gift) was due to be officially presented to the press and public in Madrid Monday, by the driver and tells the story of how the daughter of a professional racing driver was able to progress from racing as a child into Spanish Formula 3 and also to driving the Daytona 24-hour race, before making the step onward to becoming a Formula 1 test driver.
The book also highlights the accident in which she lost her eye, her apparent recovery and recent work in helping children with neuro-muscular illnesses.
"I have not written this book to help vindicate my life, but to help vindicate yours," she writes in the text, adding that after the accident she had taken a different perspective on her life.
"Maybe I perceive more things than before, when everything was a battle against the clock. Now I see you have to stop and to see things in a different way. It is not tenths of a second in a race, but small moments in your life... I drove quickly, so fast that I hardly noted the small drops of sadness in life. Not because I didn't have them close by, but because I only wanted to go faster," wrote De Villota.
