Racing

`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

`4:47:41`

and he loses his power steering and he drives straight into the wall and breaks both his legs and basically faced the prospect that maybe his career was over. I've had other teammates and people I know have serious injuries that's really hurt them. And yet what's funny, as you say, you'd think that would sink in. The year before we won in 2014, that same car had a Danish driver in it at Le Mans at the race I was driving who died. He lost control of the car when there was a bit of rain on the track and the track went unfortunately designed in such a poor way that there was a very big tree right behind the railing. And he hit that tree at full speed, pulled 90 Gs and was dead on the spot, which was just such an extremely awful experience to go through.