Doomed to Fail - Ep 76 - Nightmare on the Slopes: Formula 1's Michael Schumacher

Episode Date: January 10, 2024

You would think that as an F1 Racecar Driver, Michael Schumacher had seen it all. Farz tells us about Formula 1's tragedies, including the death of Ayrton Senna. There are a lot more (a total of 52 since 1952.That's not today's tragedy - Michael Schumacher was just back from retirement when he went skiing. A fall on his head has led to Schumacher being out of commission for the last ten years, so much so that his physical state is a complete mystery. It's very sad.  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

It's a matter of the people of the state of California versus Orenthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do with your country. Welcome back. Thank you. Welcome back, Farce. Thank you. Very, very nice cut from one to the next. Very official.

So I'm also going to talk. So last week, oh, wait, sorry. We're doomed to fail. That's what this podcast is. I'm Fars, joined by Taylor. And I'm going to cover, I don't even know what I'm covering today. It's not true crime. It's almost history, but not really.

Great. Bad things happen, but the start of it is great. So premise-wise, I have no idea where we're ahead at this point. I love it. We'll just roll with it. So I mentioned this in the episode released on Monday. that I have been so down this whole Uruguayan rugby team story alive and now Society of So on Netflix, again, if you haven't seen that on Netflix, it just came out.

They're already talking about this to me like an Oscar movie. And like, to be frank, I hate award shows and like the whole concept of them. And anything that they say is an Oscar movie, I never watched. So actually watch it before I heard there was going to be an Oscar movie. And I'm glad I did because it's actually really, really good. I'm like, if you saw Benjamin Button, they said that was supposed to be the best movie Benjamin Button was terrible. I was like, what in the fuck?

I think Benjamin Button was... I hated it. It was like probably the fourth movie or something I watched where it was just based on credit recommendations. It was like, stop listening to these people. Like, their movie suggestions are awful. I definitely like, yeah, it ebbs and flows, but I used to think the Oscars were fun. And then I was like, oh, wait, I don't care.

Like, I don't need to watch rich people giving themselves awards anymore. But Benjamin Button was terrible. Well, like, they didn't hurt Locker win. once and I watched that one off the recommendation was like so like it's literally just like every war movie ever like I didn't I didn't even see it guys PTSD and it wasn't even a true it wasn't even about like a real person it was just a movie about a bomb detonation team in Iraq during the war and it's like okay like it's literally just every movie that's ever been about wars so anyways so this movie is not like that this movie's actually really great and it's actually um filmed like unlike the

live version of this where... Wait, is it a documentary or is it a... That's a movie. Okay. Yeah, it's a film. But like, but like, it's actually, it's recorded. It's filmed with like, your lions and... Is it in Spanish?

It's in Spanish, but it's dubbed. Yeah, it's dubbed. So it actually took me, like, way too long to realize it was dubbed. I was like, oh, the, um, the audio track is off again or something. And I was like, oh, wait, no, this is all in Spanish. So they do a really good job With that Unlike in Alive

Where it's Ethan Hawk And it's like Blonde hair, blue-eyed Yeah, yeah, yeah You know what I mean? You could have tried a little bit To match reality a little closer Fantastic movie

I absolutely loved it I know We all love Ethan Hawk We still do We have no issues with them whatsoever So it sort of makes me Think of a lot about like Survival stuff

Let me down this road Of like survival situations Which is nothing about What my story has to do But just letting you know like that's what my frame of mind was and just like tragedies and survival situations and stuff like that so that's what mine was about yeah we have a themeish themeishishish but i also caught a commercial for the adam driver movie that's they came out it's called Ferrari it's about

the life of enzo Ferrari did you okay so all that kind of was like oh like survival situations mountain tops ferrari's cars and I was like oh okay I know I know what I want to come So, I'm going to cover a hugely popular sports figure throughout, like, the 90s and 2000s, who met a very, very tragic fate in 2013. Do you have any idea where I'm going with this? In 2013? Is it a race car driver? Is that what you were saying? Yes.

Is it Dill-Earnhard? It's only when I know. It's not Dill-Harner. That's a really good guess, though, actually. Did he die? Yeah, Dale Earnhard did die number eight. Is it Dale Earnhardt, Jr? It's not.

No, it's a different part of that sport. It's motorsports, but that's NASCAR, and what I'm going to be covering today is Formula One. And the person I'm covering is a guy named Michael Schumacher. Do you remember that name at all? I do not. Okay, that's fair because in America, really, F1 has taken off in the last, like, like, five years maybe. Like, it's only recent- Is it because of Netflix? Probably.

Yeah. Probably. Yeah. But in Europe, this guy, Michael Schumacher was, like, largely credited with, like, popularizing F-1, Formula One racing across the entire world outside of America. before then it was like mostly popular in places where they're really good at it so like think italy you know the brits were really good at it and so you know then it expanded into the rest of the world because of this guy and now it's becoming a thing most of you know somebody else would be mentioning here quite a bit louis hamilton is now like one of the top guys of racing

and he's with the mercedes team and he kind of he's made it way more interesting and cool to watch and so now it's expanded more and more to the U.S. is what you hear about all the time. But that's essentially what we're going to dive into is the life of this guy Michael Schumacher. And I was like a huge fan of this guy like when I was a kid. And so, and I haven't really gone back and revisited his life or his accomplishments until this, until researching for this episode.

I was like, oh my God, I forgot how much I love this guy. So when you get into how big deal this guy was, so when I started by mentioning that at the height of his fame and his success in the sport. I think of like the late 1990s, early 2000s, he beat out Tiger Woods, Mike Tyson, and Michael Jordan as the richest or most compensated celebrity for many, many years. So he was like one of those kind of guys, right? I mean, he was beating Tiger Woods.

Like, the only time he fell out of this running over a course of like four or five years was the one year in 2002 when he was second to Tiger Woods only and he like Tiger beat him by like $2,000 or something was something like that point. So anyways, like I said, F1 really wasn't that big of a deal here in the U.S. And even at this point, I think like most people would probably only recognize two or three names when it comes to F1 racing. Usually it's a guy named Eriton Senna, which I'll get into a little bit later. Usually it's Michael Schumacher and now it's going to be Lewis Hamilton. Although there's other ones. that are kind of like people who are more attuned to stuff

are going to pay attention to. The biggest name on that list of those three that I mentioned has to be Ayrton Senna. Mostly because there's so many documentaries about him, there's a documentary on Netflix called Senna, which is incredible. And he's also fascinating because the way he died was just like crazy.

Like there's so much footage of his death because he died on the track. And you watch what happened and you read the autopsy reports and they're like, there's probably like, three or four things that could have killed them instantly. So we actually have no idea what killed him because so many things could have killed him. And his wreckage was just absolutely horrific to look at. And I mean, at this point, McLaren, the team he raced on, actually has a car literally named Senna.

So, like, he is a ubiquitous figure within the car motorsport industry. So his death happened in 1994. And we're going to talk about it because it also touches on the life of Schumacher. So, again, another point real quick. I looked at the 10 most winning drivers in the history of motorsports ever, and Schumacher was number two. He's only behind the cart number one, which is Lewis Hamilton, who had more years racing.

So that's kind of where things stand. So to start things off, I'm going to go into a little bit of a brief discussion about, like, F1 is a concept, just to get a sense of what it actually is so you can understand what he actually accomplished within it. are you familiar with f1 race get all taylor you just know that this car is going around okay got it yeah um my my husband watched the thing when we were at jay's wedding him and and joe's girlfriend were like oh my god and they like knew everything about it but i don't i haven't watched it see i'm not really into it either like i like you know we're all drawn to like kind of cult's personality and i was

mostly drawn to like schumacher as like a race car driver for this brand for ferrari and that's mostly it. Like, I actually learned everything I know about what goes into F1 and what the expectations are researching for this episode. Before then, I really didn't know much about it. Wait, is this what Adam Driver movies about or no? No, the Adam Driver movie, that's actually going to come up a little bit later as well. That is about the life of Enzo Ferrari. And later on, we're going to discuss how Schumacher goes to work for Ferrari and what that actually meant as it relates to that movie in particular, the things that they highlighted in that movie,

but we'll get into that. So Formula One racing is essentially the highest level of racing in the entire world. As of 2023, there are 10 active F1 teams in the world. The most familiar ones that everybody's, well, the ones that people are most familiar with are going to be Ferrari, McLaren, and Mercedes. Cars, companies come in and out of being part of

Formula One, like, sporadically. So Honda will have a team one year, then drop out. Jaguar will have a team, then drop out. Ashton will have a team and then drop out, so on and so forth. So it's a revolving door, but these three are fairly dominant as of now. And Freud's been a part of it since its inception. It's the longest running team that's been a part of the Formula One circuit. Go ahead, sorry.

No, no. The craziest thing I've ever heard of my whole entire life was being on British Airways and hearing a commercial for Hyundai, the car, and the way they pronounced it was like Hiyande. And it was like just unbelievable. That is one team that is not an F1 racing. Got it. predictably. So there are 20 F1 racetracks or circuits in the world.

And my mom went to the opening day in Las Vegas one. Did she actually attend it? Yeah, she went to like the big party because she, my mom works at a hotel in Vegas and she gets a bunch of perks and she went and and she got to be in like a nice box and watched John Legend. all that? Isn't that cool? Yeah.

So that's really, so I actually look this up. Like, those tickets are so expensive. F-1 tickets are crazy expensive. So, I mean, if you're able to get in to see one of these,

like you should definitely do it. And I think the first year they did the Las Vegas circuit was actually last year, wasn't it? Oh, it just started. It was like a couple months ago. Yeah.

Yeah. So now, because of that track, now there's two, um, races that happen in the U.S. So it's Austin, and now it's going to be Austin, Las Vegas, which is cool.

So one thing I didn't know, and if somebody knows more about this, please write to us and tell me more, but apparently there's no fixed number of races in a year. So it always ranges somewhere between 11 to 23, depending, I don't actually know what it depends on. I couldn't

figure out what it depends on, but it's kind of a variable thing. So you don't know if you're a driver, if you're going to be working for I guess it's, if it's 23, then that means that you'll be working for, I guess, 69, you'll be racing on roughly 69 days out of the year. We'll go into the details of that here in a minute, but it's weird. It's like the workload seems pretty, pretty highly variable.

The way that a typical race is conducted is that Friday is when teams show up and they run practice rounds. So basically these are rounds they run to familiarize themselves with the track. They use that time to kind of dial in the car and do all that stuff. if they anticipate it rain, they can do stuff to the car to kind of make it better in the rain. They'll also do a practice session early on Saturday mornings, and then they start performing what's called the qualifying rounds. So this is a really big deal.

So when you look at the stats of the top race car drivers in the entire world, in addition to how many wins they've had, how many championships and all that stuff, they also list how many qualifying rounds they've had or how many what's called pole positions they've had. And you get a pole position through qualifying. So essentially what that means is that you get a one or two time shot and running as fast as you can around the lap, like on your own. And whoever is at the top of that, whoever's the fastest is closest to the front. It's just a way for them in a seed, basically. So when you start out, you really want to be at the front, obviously. Right. And then because you're there to race. Exactly. And then if, and if you get a, and if you get

If you get to the very front, it's called taking pole position. And that's the ranking that used to determine how good a race bar driver somebody is. So Sunday is when races actually begin. And the rules are that however many laps it takes to go about 305 kilometers or 189 miles, that's the minimum number, maximum number of laps you need to do to win the race. So for example, I'll explain it. So let's say that doing 80 laps around. a track totals 306 kilometers, then whoever is the first to 80 laps wins.

Makes sense? No, wait. But it's a race. Isn't that just how races work? Well, yeah, but the idea is like, how do you know when to stop racing? Oh, there's no like. Yeah, yeah, there's no like, no, because you're just doing circles, right? and so you don't it is all deterministic of the track that you're on because all the tracks are

different oh okay okay okay so you can't be like every why are they all different well i actually don't know why they're all different well they all look different for sure right like there's so i mean think about it this way so like monaco's track is in the streets of monaco right i think las vegas track is the streets of las vegas like it's not going to look the same as coda that makes sense So there's a point system associated with this. So basically, depending on how high you are or how close to the front you are in finishing, you had a word of points. So 25 points goes to the driver and to the team who is first, then it drops like dramatically.

Like it goes from 25. I think the next one is 15 and then it keeps going further, further down. Then you have like additional points you get for lap times and all that stuff. the idea is you're just trying to get as many points totaled out per race so at the very end when the season ends they look at who had the highest number of points across all these different races 11 to 23 and they award you an prize essentially you're awarded the championship but so you also want to be in a bunch of all the races you got to be in all the races do you have to be in all of them you need to be in I mean you want to be in all of them because if you're because imagine this imagine you are the best racer and you're winning and you're number one for eight of 11 races you don't know if in the next like race or two somebody's going to drive into you and send your car flying you know like you don't know like a thousand things can go wrong and so you want to be in every race you can be there are teams that have joined mid-season but that's just like a let's just warm the team up you know

let's warm up everybody let's make sure we get our car doll in for the next season so on and so board right because you couldn't like if you miss one you're fucked right um you're actually not fucked so there's a story um with schumacher in particular where he didn't actually have to win a race he didn't have to finish a race it was one of the last races of the season all he had to do was prevent a specific other driver who was very close to him to not finish also and so there's some there's some conjecture that this other driver was coming up behind Schumacher and then Schumacher drove into him like side swiped him basically totally both their cars and everybody was pissed on that other team because he did that intentionally because he knew he just has to prevent him from even crossing the finish line so so you don't actually have to win every race like you can actually get so far ahead that you just have to prevent the other guys from getting points so that's kind of fun yeah So all these drivers, so there's the scoring system is like you, there's a driver and then there's a team, the points from the driver go to the team, but the points to the team don't always go to the driver because there's multiple cars on the same track usually for the same team. And so all these drivers want to be number one because like fuck their team.

They want to be number one because when you're number one, you get a shitload of money. Yeah. He's number one. So right now, the number one, as of 2023, the number one highest paid driver is this guy named Max Burr-Stampen. He is paid $55 million per year. The lowest guy who is a professional race, like a guy who's driving a car that's probably worth more than a billion dollars, his name is Logan Sargent, and he is paid $1 million. So that is kind of the differential there. that guy by the way he's 23 years old so you can't really knock him but still 55 to 1 million

that's a huge difference so the cost of doing this so each team usually spends more between 200 million to 500 million dollars a year in doing this Ferrari and Mercedes are obvious the ones that are in the higher bracket in the half a billion dollar range and really the reasoning for it is twofold one is it's good marketing because your name is plastered everywhere all the time um and if your driver's good, you get even more famous because then they're promoted elsewhere as well. So you want that, it all kind of works together. And the other big thing is engineering. So the way I always kind of equated it is like the way NASA used to be with like innovation

that then goes into like commercial planes and stuff like that. That's kind of what this is. It's like a proving ground for all these huge brands to like figure out like what is the absolute limit we can push engineering to for formula one they can then translate into it so several things i pulled out here was things like carbon fiber being used in cars that all started an f1 same with active suspension paddle shifting buttons on the steering wheel like all this stuff what a job to be like you know what we're just going to test this like it might kill you i know i know i mean i don't know taylor for the money for 55 million it's i i was going to

through um who what was i on i i was just looking at uh ferrari's it's called scuderia Ferrari is like the name of their stable their racing team and it's a several website from their commercial website their consumer website but i was on there and on the front page was like um rest in peace it was like a picture of this like kid and i was like and he was just like some kid like an 18 year old who was like in one of their driver programs like basically they put these kids in these programs, like level them up step by step to eventually become F1 racers. And you had a crash and just flip the car and just fucking, like, crazy. Unbelievable.

So I'm going to talk a little bit about, like, again, all this is kind of shaped, like, understanding who this guy actually was. So, like, understanding, like, what you're capable of. So I look at golfers, for example, and in my mind, I'm like, that's not an athlete. If John Daly can do it, it's not athletic, right? Like, if you can do it while smoking cigarettes, it's probably not athletic. And, like, I stupidly also, I mean, look, I'm probably stupid about that anyways, about golfers. I'm sure it is incredibly athletic.

I think they work really hard, yeah. Yeah, exactly. So don't come at me. I'm acknowledging that I'm ignorant. But I was also very ignorant about this, too. So I just assumed, like, you're driving a car. Big deal, right? Like, how big a deal could be?

And that's really going deeper What kind of cars these were? It's like kind of insane what happened. So, for example, as a regulation, an F1 car At the absolute maximum Has to be able to go from zero to 99 miles per hour Back to zero in less than five seconds. It can't be five.

It has to be less than five seconds. Oh my God. So with that essentially means These guys are usually subject between two and seven Gs on their bodies between acceleration and braking. And then you layer on lateral turns. You're basically doing crazy hairpin turns at around 180 miles per hour.

And you can see why it takes a little bit of a unique individual. Like, there's athleticism and then there's like, you're built, build different. I'm just thinking about like, yeah. I'm thinking about how like I can't like play around the Rosie with my children because I get really nauseous. Yeah, yeah. Like reading, reading, I read some of this stuff around like what the expectations.

on your body are. And some things are that, for example, it has been documented and recorded that their reaction times are two and a half times out of a normal person, the speed of their reactions. Yeah. Also, it has to be. It is noted that the average F1 driver's neck is 20% thicker than a normal person because the G forces on your on your body are so high that if your neck wasn't thicker and stronger, you'd just be like Gumbie. Like your head would just be bobbling around. Like you wouldn't be able to actually hold it up, right? I'm sorry. Sorry, that is so gross. Wait, did it start out that way or do the next get thicker from, like, the more they do it?

So there's a training methodology. So one thing that we're going to get to here a little bit while it's bringing up now is that Schumacher is the first F1 driver to incorporate actual strength training as a core part of his workout regimen or his, like, his driving regimen. So he'd work out, he'd lift weights four hours a day. They have a special helmet that he had to wear on his head. so you could actually just move his neck over side to side to strengthen the side muscles of it. I don't know why that's one of the grossest things ever hurt. Yeah.

Yeah. There's some pictures of him. And actually, it's funny, because I was looking at pictures of his son. His son, Nick, is now, his son Mick is now a Formula One driver as well. And it's more pronounced in Mick than it was in Michael. But his neck is like, it's thicker than his head. It looks weird. It looks a little unusual.

And I started looking at a person of Lewis Hamilton, and I was like, his neck looks kind of normal. Oh, my God. Okay. I haven't looked up yet. I haven't looked at it now. And I'm going to be like, you know, keep going. So there's other things, too. So, for example, one thing that was noted was the heat on these things is absolutely

incredible. So apparently, the cockpit is usually running at at least 140 degrees. And you're wearing a thick fire retardant suit. So if you're doing it. doing this for over two hours at a time. So the endurance, and you have to not die because cars are coming at you at 200 miles per hour. It is, it is an insane workload for an average person to be able to actually consume and digest all this stuff. And that's why, like I said, you don't hear about the greats ever, right?

Well, no, you hear about the greats. You don't hear about casually okay drivers ever. You know, again, Ayrton, Schumacher, Hamilton. Like, that's it. Like, there's really not any outside of that because it's so unique to be incredible. incredibly good at this at the highest level for a very long period of time. So going to Michael's life early on, so he was born in 1969 in West Germany. He's German.

And it's interesting because I dug forever on information about the whereabouts of his parents in the 1940s. And I can't seem to find anything. Of course he can't. So something probably was going on there. His neck doesn't look weird. Look up Mick. Look at Nick's neck. Mick's neck stands out with me.

Okay. Mick Schumacher. And I'm going to look at it too. Yeah. He has like a necklace the same width as his face. There's one. Yeah. They're very what?

Cute. Isn't it like good looking you mean? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah. They're, his mom is a very, attractive woman as well so it all kind of came together um so he his parents owned um his dad

owned a uh go-car track that his mom also worked at serving refreshments um and that's kind of how michael came up in this like quaint little village in bavaria um was he was race go-carts and he developed like a really good taste for it but he was also one of those rare drivers who was like super mechanical so he wasn't just like a yeah give me a car i want to go with it he actually was digesting and understanding what the mechanical components of making the car go faster actually meant um from that he graduated to what's known as formula three and from there he graduated to formula one so normal sorry i misspoke there he went from formula three to formula three thousand then to formula one and the only real difference there is between formula three and formula between

formula three and one is the car itself so in formula three and formula three thousand The cars get more powerful, but they're all uniform because the idea is that F1 is trying to look at a controlled field of drivers to figure out who's actually doing the best. So if you give them better cars, of course you're going to do better. So they make them all drive the exact same cars. And that was his kind of graduation process. So in 1991, that was the first year he debuted in F1 and he was pretty much okay. So what I mentioned earlier on qualifying, the only good thing he really did that was like

shocking to everyone was he placed seventh in qualifying, which was like unheard of at the time. He was like, I mean, he didn't even finish that race on, on that Sunday because his car's clutch blew out. But nobody cared because they're like, wow, this guy actually is his first race and he's already in seventh pole position. That's impressive. And so that was kind of the point when people started realizing that this guy might be someone special.

And at that time, it looks like a lot of these companies were trying to buy for him to race for them instead. everybody was basically like this is the guy that we want to approach and so they kept trying to throw money to him to try and attract him over to their side and it really wasn't until 1994 when it became clear that he was kind of like a somebody and like I said that's also the year eritin senna died he died at the san marino grand prix and my take on it was it wasn't really that it wasn't coincidental so erison senna and him had a rivalry because ererton was already like this established, you know, world famous driver.

And this was kind of like the guy who was coming up. And they were right on each other's heels to the point where they actually had accidents and mishapsed with each other. It was a pretty contentious point. The race that Ayrton died at, the San Marino Grand Prix, Schumacher was behind him. He was always behind him. And so this guy who's fighting to stay the best in the world has this young kid behind him constantly. And it was at that

race where he basically left the track at 180 miles per hour and slammed into a wall at 130. And the camera... He's also very cute. All the F-Banavre's very cute. They don't hire ugly ones. It doesn't look like it.

I mean, I have no, I don't see any other one so far in the story. There you go. See, all the more reason you got to attend one of these races. I know. So part of what they use, there's obvious footage. of Ayrton's crash, but one of the footage that they use is from Schumacher's car, because

again, he was just always behind him. And, like, there's some conjecture that, like, oh, he was pushing the car and himself too much, and that's why he ended up slimy into that wall, because he knew Schumacher's riding his tails. Who knows what the logic was. There was a transmission line

that was in his skull. What a fucking, oh, my God. A dangerous job. I know. It's not like, it's not like, you know, not dangerous. You should, you should read the autopsy of Senna on on um well you can actually watch it on on his documentary in Netflix um they they talk about it because there's so many things that entered his skull at once horrible so anyways back to Schumacher so he would win his first and second championships

for a team called Benetton in 94 95 and then he made his oh wait hold on i'm sorry i'm putting it on the crash video. How do I make the sound stuff? Hold on. No, but let's tell us, give us your live reaction. Give us your live reaction. Oh, this is from the film. It was that it? It didn't explode or anything, though. No, it didn't explode. It was very close to the ground. Oh, I see. Oh, God, yeah. He banged it to the wall and it kind of moved. I turned the sound off, but it says bad impact for Santa. And then it says, this looks bad. Yeah. crazy is from when you see him leading the track to him hitting the wall. So he managed to decelerate 50 miles per hour. Oh God. I see his body. And you'll notice his head tilts a little

bit. So everybody was like, oh, he's fine. Yeah. Yeah, he was already dead. Whoa. That's what I just saw. Yikes. Yeah, what's crazy. So he decelerates 50 miles per hour in that incredibly short window of time. He actually downshifts twice. That's how crazy. fast these guys are he downshifted twice to reduce speed as much as possible didn't didn't work obviously right because he like knew that yeah and then you might have seen a car whiz past him that would have been schumacher's car right behind him it's so crazy the other guys keep going like i know that they do that whatever but like didn't even notice no so the thing is they wouldn't have done that if they knew he was dead because he moved his head you know they put this wall of

this shield up and they airlifted him out of there and uh schumacher in interviews later would say i didn't know he was dead nobody nobody told us he was dead they told us he's in a coma or something we didn't yeah you know so um they would have stopped the race though if they actually if he if they knew that so in 95 he's coming off of being a champion for this team called Benetton and he ends up making a move to the Ferrari team and that's where he would stay from 1996 to 2006 and that's where he would basically become the face of Airborne Racing globally. Like I mentioned before, there's a movie now with Adam Driver about Enzo Ferrari. One thing to note is, and this is common knowledge, but like, Enzo Ferrari didn't give a shit

about selling cars to beat rich people. Like, that was not his goal. His only goal was to build fast cars to race them. Like, he just wanted a racing team. The cars, selling cars, was just the way to finance having a team. Like, later on, there's all these reports about how much disdain he had for people who drove his cars because he was just like, their status symbols. Like, none of these people were going to tracks.

None of these people are using his cars the way they're supposed to be used. And so, anyways. But that being said, he was part of, or sorry, Ferrari itself as a team was part of F1 since the very first day all the way through. No other team has that record, not even Mercedes. Mercedes was out of the game for like 50 years where they came back recently with Lewis Hamilton. And so...

Was that during World War II? It was after that. It was after. So in 1955 was the last year Mercedes was a part of F1. And then they came back. I think it was 2010, 9, something like that. Which actually, Schumacher was a part of as well, which we were to talk about. But the point was that this was incredibly important, the DNA of Ferrari.

And they fucking sucked at it. They were great for a number of years, and then they basically fell into complete obscurity in the 1980s and 1990s. Like, nobody wanted to race for Ferrari. Their cars were a laughing stock amongst drivers. Like, it was a joke. I feel like that was like the peak Ferrari poster time. That maybe it was. Yeah, for the consumer cars, it was.

Yeah, for the cars it was. Like, I remember the F40, the F50, the Enzo. Like, they were all amazing cars, but those were all consumer cars. Their race cars, their formula cars were an absolute joke. And the reason they were a joke was because they over-engineered the shit out of their V-12 engines that were big, bulky, and heavy. And all these companies that figured out how to get the same amount of power out of a lighter, smaller engine, the V-10 or V-8. And they were still chugging along with these big heavy engines. So they managed to bring Schumacher over from Benetton to Ferrari, which was a huge deal for them.

And it was a huge deal for him because by all accounts, he was basically able to get in the weeds the way he was when he was doing go-kart racing. and talk to the engineers and be in the garage with them and say, this part of the car sucks, this part, be tweaking. Like, he was able to get hands on. He was incredibly resourceful when he came to just, like, identifying where the car you'd be tweaked and augmented.

So, in a round, so from start to finish, his racing career, he was active from 1991 to 2006, so about 15 years. He makes a comeback briefly for the 2010

and 2012 season. overall he won seven world champions which is the which is currently tied with louis hamilton for the most wins in f1 racing history like he like i mentioned earlier he ranks number two only behind louis hamilton senna for example is number six but the reality is he died pretty young so if he'd stayed on he probably would have gone higher up but he was already out of the game by that point so he makes a brief return because in 2010 mercedes decided they want to come back first time since 1955 to f1 racing and they bring him out of retirement and say hey will you be basically our technical advisor on things and basically just helped put this whole thing up and he decided

during that time that he also wanted to keep driving so he comes out of retirement after four years and starts driving from Mercedes vans again um and he basically lasts two seasons he realizes that he's done i was listening to other race car drivers talk about this and they were like yeah like when you were before when I'd be driving, I could see a gap and, like, find a way to get my car through the gap in, like, a turnaround. And the older I got, the gap just disappeared. I just couldn't see it anymore. And I was like, okay, that's the time. That's when, you know, you know, you got to hang it up.

And that's kind of what he ended up doing. And it was with him hanging up his racing helmet in 2010, or sorry, 2012, that's when Lewis Hamilton showed up. So it was literally just the passing of the torch from one grade to the next. And that would be basically the point when he would retire. 2012 was officially last active years of a race car driver. So you might be asking yourself, Fars, what is doomed to fail here? Come on Fars. Come on Fars.

Right. So going over Shubi's personal life, in 1995, he married a woman named Perina. They had two kids. We mentioned one of them earlier, his name's Mick. He's currently an F1 driver. I think he's 21 to 23 years. somewhere around there. These people were crazy, crazy rich.

Yeah. It's funny because it's so much different than like, I don't know, like any other sport. Like I think about like golf or NFL or maybe tennis is on the same line. Like these guys feel like royalty. Like they're not like normal rich. They're like royalty rich. They do like crazy things. So for example, this guy had homes in Monaco and Switzerland and Colorado.

Like, there were, it's wild how much fun, cool shit they can do with the amount of money. They have, but they were also super generous. So apparently they donate tens of millions of dollars to all kinds of charities. They built hospitals. They built schools. They built drinking wells, all this stuff. They also did like traditional rich people things. They wrote horses, attended sporting events.

And they loved skiing to the point where they actually had a home in Switzerland, which is where the Swiss out obviously are. So in on December 29th of 2013. So, like, right over 12 months after he officially retires from racing, he goes out skiing with his aforementioned son, Mick, in the Swiss Alps. Sorry, the French Alps, not the Swiss Alps. He has a home in the Swiss Alps. He was in the French Alps. So they were in the French Alps, and they go off-Pist, which is the non-ski sanctioned area.

and by all accounts from what we gathered from news reports at the round this time, this was like sub-ideal skiing time. Like even if you stayed on-Peast, you'd have a hard time finding really great fresh snow to snow on. It was just not the time of the year to find that, and especially not off-east. So he was out in this area with his son, and the details around what actually happened are a little bit murky

because his family's kind of mercurial. anyways all we know is he's wearing a helmet but he somehow fell and hit his head on a rock that's it people come in first responders come in to figure out what's going on with him and by all accounts he's talking to them he's lucid all that good stuff and what they do is they take him this local regional hospital to figure out what's going on with him they know he needs help but he's not in that bad of a condition but over the course he's taking him there he just starts going downhill super super quick his cognitive function becomes very clearly impaired and they realized, oh shit, we don't have the facilities to treat this guy.

We need to get him to this other hospital that's much larger that requires a helicopter flight, which they should have done at the very beginning. It might have changed everything I'm about to say going forward if they had done that. So they airlift him to another larger hospital, and that's when they realize things are pretty bad. So what they do is they put him into a medically induced coma. they performed two surgeries on him. They removed two blood, sorry, they removed blood clasper's brain, and then they force induce him into a coma.

And he's in that coma for about six months. So, oh my God. Yeah. So roughly 11 months after the accident is when details kind of start emerging about his condition. So after six months, they start kind of reducing the drugs they put him on to bring him slowly out of a coma. It took him a while after the medically induced coma for him to come out of his own naturally induced coma. And at that time, it became clear that he was completely paralyzed and that he was unable to speak, unable to communicate. So regardless, like it sounded like he was slowly gathering a little bit more and more functionality here and there.

But in the year since then, some things have kind of trickled out in terms of what's going on. So his philosophy on his personal life was always that family, everything family should remain private. So his kids were never in the media. His wife was only in the media to the extent that she literally went to every race with him. But they would never do interviews. It was just like a very private mercurial family. And that's like I kind of wanted to keep things. If you look at the pictures of their house, there's one picture where it looks like they actually built like this Batman layer,

there's underground tunnels so that people wouldn't even have to get out of their cars to go inside the house. was pretty cool, I think. But because of that, his family's been really secret about his condition. And so really what we know comes out in trickles. He's still alive. So 10 years on, after this accident, he's still here. But I'm going to go into some conversations that I've read about his friends and family have reported out.

So basically, in 2022, his wife, Corinna, accepted a award on his behalf from his hometown and what she talks about is how much her and her kids and his parents miss Michael they're like we miss him he's here with us we miss him every day but he's still here um not the same way and she'll like say certain things like that there was another story where the former head of the frari racing team who was really close to him went to his house and in 2019 they watched an f1 race and again he was his statement was i don't want to say anything that corinna wouldn't want me to say um about his condition i'll just tell you that we couldn't communicate with each other but he was

conscious like he was aware but we couldn't talk to each other there was no communication there was no movement um so i went into a little bit of a technical finding details is so hard the last picture i could see of schumacher so it wasn't even of him it was his wife ended up buying this giant palace in like majorca and he was airlifted there via private helicopter and they took a picture of the helicopter like that's it like that's all like all we get at this guy at this point is he's like random little tidbits that come out every now and then like when corinna was speaking of that award ceremony so what i found was there's this association of neurosurgeons and it's i assume it's a reputable organization

neurosurgeons. And so what they talked about was these two operations removed blood clots from their brain and the fact that they had to induce him into a medically, sorry, they had to put him into a medically induced coma, talking about kind of the reasons for this and what the outcomes of this actually are. So this is basically a traumatic brain injury is what you generically call an issue like this. And apparently their take on it was that pressure within the brain was probably the biggest thing that caused his problem. So what they were saying was, for the most part, they probably had to cut part of his skull out as he was in this medically induced coma to reduce swelling in the brain. And basically, the variables in terms of recovering for something like this are zero to 100%.

So, yeah, so when they noted, they cited several cases of situations that had the details this had, which was surgery to remove brain clocks, six months more than coma. Removing skull to remove pressure. Those are the details we know. And there have been cases of specifically children recovering from this. And what they say is that recovery is almost entirely based on what's called brain plasticity, which is the brain's ability kind of adapt to the environment that it has to operate in. And that that plasticity reduces based on age. So if you're young, depending on how bad the brain injury is, you can recover 100%.

If you're older, you might not recover at all. That's basically the variables that we're looking at. So as of right now, Schumacher is 54 years old, and by all accounts, it seems like he's probably past the age. He's been in some version of this condition since December 29, 2013. And like I mentioned, as of 2019, his wife built this crazy villa in Mayorka, and she expanded it to include a medical wing. So as of right now, there are 15.

full-time doctors and nurses at this center taking care of him 24-7 at a cost of around $150,000 per week so yeah I've watched there's also a shoe marker documentary on

on Netflix and I watched that as well and again it's a lot about his racing history and then it goes into Corinna and Mick and Gina Marie is the daughter talking about their dad and it is just

gut-wrenching. Oh, that's terrible. Like, think about, like, the coolest, most active, most outgoing. Like, he was just, like, I can't think of a more opposite to, like, just sitting in your shoe. Because what they were saying was,

during the years that he retired, like, whatever extent, he actually fully retired, they were talking about how, you know, he would just go bungee jumping and horseback riding, and he was constantly doing shit. And, like, one story Quina would say was how, you know, they were their French house or something or their Swiss house.

And he was like, let's just grab the plane and go to Dubai to go jump out of airplanes. He was like, he wouldn't do it once. He would do 24 times in a row. Like, he's just the most active guy always seeking that kind of thrill. And to think of him just sitting in this, like, giant palace, like, in a chair. Like, it sounds. like a nightmare it's a nightmare it reminds me it sounds like it kind of reminds me of Christopher Reeves how it's like he was like this like big strong man and then he was paralyzed

after an accident you know wow yeah I didn't actually make that analogy but yeah the only reason I wouldn't make that analogy the only reason why I think it might have been even a little bit different is because Christopher Reeves was able to like still sort of get around and do right sounds like it sounds like yeah it sounds like there's something vegetative. Yeah. Yeah. Which is like crazy to think about.

Just like a human in this shell. Yeah. This morning there was ice on the sidewalk and I was like, the kids were putting their feet on it and I was like, do not fall on ice. I was like, if you fall on ice, like, that's the worst thing that could happen. And it's crazy, that's quick that can happen. And like, again, we're pretty much at the whim of, at this point, Corinna, to talk about it.

It's interesting because I find it added. Mick Schumacher on on Insta and I was just I was just curious like what's he like like what's his life like and um hold on let me find this one so yeah there's this one picture of him with his girlfriend it's in black and white and um somebody people are just asked him how his dad yeah what's going on Mick like like we want to know like what's the latest and like you know Their family is so closely guard about this stuff. As of this last Christmas, Corona posted a picture of the family minus Michael in front of the Christmas tree.

They literally don't want anybody to even see him. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like it's just terrible. It sounds really bad. But that's the thing. If you don't know, your imagination goes all the way to the worst case scenario, right?

Yeah. But, I mean, $150,000 a week on medical care. No, it sounds like it is the worst case scenario. Yeah. No, it sounds like, I mean, If he were poor, he'd be dead. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Like, one of those things, and that's crazy.

Oh, that's so crazy that he, like, has a ridiculously crazy job and then, like, doing something pretty normal gets him that, you know? Yeah, skiing's bad. Like, don't go skiing 100%. Didn't Sunny Bono die for the ski accident? Absolutely. I remember that one, like, when we're talking about the Kennedys, how they would play ski football, like idiots?

And, of course, one of them died doing that. Yeah, just don't ski. Don't do that. It's not worth it. No, not at all. You're not going to be in the Olympics. That's not. My brother, my brother, Kincaid, he fell snowboarding, had to go to the hospital. And, like, if he wasn't wearing the helmet, he would have been dead probably.

Yeah, my cousin broke her like, like, two years ago skiing. Oh, my God. And we also know a girl who, this is disgusting. She fell off of a, like, a cliff and broke both of her ankles at the boot. They, like, crap. What do you mean at the boot? Like, where the top of the boot was is where her. her. Oh, my. God.

Awful. God. That is so... It makes them rest. Stay at home. Yeah. None of this is worth it. None of it is worth it. Oh, my God. So, yeah, that's my story.

I was just... The whole correlation of sighting the snow and alive in the Uruguayans was just like the mountain thing because, like, there's pictures of him skiing, and it's, like, the most beautiful, like, scenery in the world. And I just, it was... That just came to mind. I was like, oh, yeah, what happened to Michael Schumacher? Like, the thing is, I was, just like a big deal to me in 2013 when it happened.

And I just forgot about it. I was like, you know, just in and out. And I was like, what happened to him? And I started digging into it. I was like, dude, like, we literally don't know anything. Like, as much info we knew in 2013, we know now, except for this 1A, this neurosurgery association document that's like, here's what the best guess is as to his current condition based on the limited details we have. Yeah.

Yeah, it just sounds like they don't. don't want to maybe you know, which makes sense, you know. You just want to be like, let's just I don't know, but it sounds like a terrible way to live also. I know, I know. Well, that was, that's all right. Yeah, there you go. That's my story.

Well, thank you. That was interesting. Maybe I'll watch the F1. I mean, I am for sure watching. I'm re-watching the Senate documentary tonight. That's the one on Netflix. I've already watched the Schumacher one, The Senate one was incredible. It was like, man, like, we're so American-centric and we're like, you know, Michael Jordan.

But it's like, dude, this guy was like Michael Jordan for like the entire other part of the world. I know. That's so funny that, like, we don't know that. I saw like a funny meme that was like Harry Potter is basically my age in the books. Like he, like, Malfoy and I have the same birthday. He's a year older than me if you look at his birthday. But I saw a meme that was like, there's no way that, I saw that Harry Potter took place in the 90s because at no point does someone stop and say, man, the Chicago Bulls are having a great run, aren't they? Wait, someone, where did you hear that?

It was like a meme on Instagram. Okay, okay, yeah, yeah. Then I saw that here, too. But, yeah, but, you know, but, you know, we're exactly, we're thinking, like, basketball and the rest of the world is like, we're playing soccer and, like, it's a lot bigger. Yeah, yeah. Well, we're living two different parallel universes. Yeah. But yeah, that's the story.

If you all have any thoughts about it, I would love to hear again, Dupnafell pot at gm.com. Yeah. Yeah, that's it. That's all I have to. I didn't do a re-release last week because I'm between jobs and I decided to take a nap all day. But, you know, I'll get back to it. Love it.

Love it. Well, thanks for listening, everyone. Please do let us know what you think. and we'll be joining all again next week. Cool. Thank you. Thanks, Taylor. Bye.