Racing

`4:42:34`

— And this was probably my favorite battle of my career. — [Commentator] And Heinemeier Hansson has beat past to add five... — Yeah, so this is me driving against Nico Muller at the Shanghai International Circuit. — You're on the outside here? — I'm on the outside in the... — How cool is it? — Blue and white. And we go a whole track around with basically a piece of paper between a seat down this back straight. I get so close to him because I wanna force him over on the other side of the track, such that he can't just box me in. And we've been fighting already at this point for basically 40 minutes straight. I've been managing to keep this professional driver behind me for 40 minutes. And he finally passes me, but we just keep the battle on for the whole time. And it really just shows both these kinds of cars. The Le Mans prototypes. We don't actually ever touch. We get within about an inch. And keep going around Shanghai circuit too. — What a cool. How did you get so good? Like what? I mean that's a fascinating story, right? That you are able to get so good. — I'm pretty good for the kind of driver I am,

`4:43:36`

which is called the gentleman driver, which means I'm not a professional driver. And like many good gentlemen drivers, when we're at our really best, we can be quite competitive with even professional drivers who have been doing this their whole life. The difference between us and the professionals is the professionals could do it every time or more or less every time. So I can't be this good all the time. When everything is just right, I can be competitive with professional drivers, but that's not how you win championships. That's not how you get paid by factories to drive. You gotta be good every time you go out. So that's a huge difference. But some of it was also just, I really put my mind to it by the time I realized race cars is what I want to do as my serious hobby. I put in thousands of hours. — Have you crashed? What's the worst crash? — I've had a lot of crashes, but thankfully, knock on wood, I haven't had any crashes where I've gotten really seriously hurt. — Have you like wrecked the car? — Oh yes, oh yes. I've wrecked many car. — So what's that feel like? Just you wreck a car.

`4:44:36`

Like how do you get... — It feels like total shit if you're in a real race and other people depend on you. It's not even so much to car, although it's also sometimes that these cars are expensive to repair and that sucks and it feels so wasteful in a way when you crash some of these cars. But the sense that you're letting a team down. Endurance racing is a team sport. Not only do you have your mechanics, do you usually have co-drivers. So when I crash I just feel like, damn it, I could have avoided this. — Yeah, but also you could have died. — Do you know what's funny? I never think about that. I don't think you can. Because I think the moment you start thinking about being able to die, you can't do it. You can't go fast. — Well, I'm sure not to go all Carl Jung and Freud here, but I'm sure that's always present in the back of your mind somewhere. You're not just bringing it to the surface. — It is in the sense that it's part of the appeal, it's part of the sense that there's something on the line

`4:45:37`

that this isn't just virtual. I can't just hit reset, restart, reboot. If I crash this car, we're gonna be out or we're gonna be disadvantaged or it's gonna get destroyed or I might get hurt. I've gotten lightly hurt a few times. I actually had the year we won 24 hours of Le Mans in our class, I've been training in this formula 3.5 car. It's a really fast car. It's a really nice exercise to do, but it's also, it doesn't have power steering. So some of these race cars, especially the open- seaters, they don't have power steering. Which means that the steering wheel is basically directly connected to the front wheels. So if you crash one of those cars and the front wheel suddenly turn, you're really gonna hurt your hands if you don't get your hands off the wheel. I hadn't raced enough of those cars to know that I had to get, or to have the instinct, to have developed the instinct that I had to get my hands off the wheel. So I didn't, and I really hurt my hand and this was just I think a month before the 24 of Le Mans.

`4:46:39`

So I thought, ah man, I'm gonna have to miss it this year. I had like a, not a cast, it was just seriously sprained. And then somehow miraculously like a week before the event, I was like, yeah, actually it's okay now. So got to do it. And that would've been grave regret if I would've seen my team go on to win the race and I would have to sit on the sidelines. But I really have been quite fortunate in the sense that most of my crashes have just been expensive or sporting inconvenient. They've never been something where I got seriously hurt. But I've seen plenty of people who have in fact, my co-driver this year and for several years, Pietro Fittipaldi drove a race car at Spa. Spa is one of the great race tracks of all time. And it has this iconic corner called Eau Rouge, which is probably the most famous corner in all of motorsports. It has a great compression before you climb uphill. It's extremely fast, very difficult corner. And just as he does the compression, his car basically sets out