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.
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.
Hi Friends! Our transcripts aren't perfect, but I wanted to make sure you had something - if you'd like an edited transcript, I'd be happy to prioritize one for you - please email doomedtofailpod@gmail.com - Thanks! - Taylor
in a matter of the people of the State of California versus orthal James Simpson case number ba09 and so my
fellow Americans ask not what your country can
do for you ask what you can do and we're back welcome back Taylor welcome back
par thank you thank you very very nice cut from on to the next very official so
I'm also going to talk so last week oh wait sorry we're doom to
fail that's this podcast is I'm far joined by Taylor um 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 I premise wise I have no
idea where we're at at this point so we'll just roll with it so um so I
mentioned this in the episode released on Monday that I have been so down this
whole Uruguayan uh rugby team story alive in now Society of the snow on Netflix again
if you haven't seen that on Netflix it just came out they're already talking about this going to be 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 I actually watched 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 unlik you you saw Benjamin Button they said that was supposed to be
the best movie terrible I was like what in the [ __ ] I think Benjamin but was it
was like probably the fourth movie or something I watched was just based on critic recommendations I was like stop
listening to these people like their movie suggestions are awful I definitely like yeah it it es and flows but I uh I
used to think that Oscars were fun and then I was like oh wait I don't care like I don't need to watch rich people gave themselves Awards anymore but
Benjamin Button was terrible well like like what didn't HT Locker win once and
I 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 gu 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 is actually really great and it's actually um filmed like unlike the alive version of
this where wait is it a documentary or is it a no it's a movie okay yeah it's a film but like but like it's actually
it's it's Rec it's filmed with like uruguayans and in Spanish it's in
Spanish but it's 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 a live where it's Ethan Hawk and it's like blonde hair blue wide you
know mean it was just you could have tried a little bit to match reality a little closer fantastic absolutely loved
it I know we all love Ethan Hawk we still do we have no issues with him whatsoever so yeah it sort of making me
think a lot about like survival stuff it 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 frame of mind was and just like tragedies and survival
situations and stuff like that soir that's that's what mine was about we have a theme is theme is is 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 mountaintops Ferraris cars I was like okay I know I know what I want to cover so I'm going to cover a
hugely popular sports figure throughout like the 90s and 2000s okay who met a
very very tragic fate in 2013 do you have any idea where I'm going with this
in 2013 is it is it like a race is a race car dri is that what you're saying yes
is it D Earnhardt that's the only one I know it's not D ear a really good guess though actually
because I think did he die yeah Dale nhart did die number eight um is it dard
Jr it's not no it's it's a different part of that sport it's Motorsports but
that's NASCAR and what I'm going be covering today is Formula 1 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 it's only is it because of Netflix
probably yeah probably um but in
Europe I mean this guy Michael shaku was like largely credited with like
popularizing um F1 Formula 1 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 mostly because of somebody else will be mentioning here quite a bit leis Hamilton is now like
one of the top guys of racing and he's with the Mercedes team and he kind of it
he's made it way more interesting and cool to watch and so now it's expanded
more and more into the US and so 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've done 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 well fun when you get into how big of a deal this guy was so I'm going
to start by mentioning that at the height of his Fame and his success in
this sport think like the N late 1990s early 2000s he beat out Tiger Woods Mike
Tyson and Michael Jordan as the richest or Mo 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 he only 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 like2 $2 million or
something was something like at that point so anyways um like I said F1
really wasn't that big of a deal here in the US uh 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 eron Senna which I'll get into a
little bit later usually it's Michael Schumacher and now it's going to be LS Hamilton although there's other ones that are kind of like people who are
more in attune to the stuff we're gonna pay attention to um the biggest name on that list of those three that I
mentioned has to be eron Senna um mostly because there's so many do memories about him there's there's a do memory on
Netflix called Senna which is incredible and he's also fascinating because the
way he died was just like crazy like 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 him instantly so we actually have no idea what killed him because like 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 GNA talk about it because it
also touches on the life of Schumacher so um again another Point real quick I
looked at the 10 most um winning drivers in the history of
Motorsports ever and sharco was number two he's only behind the current number
one which is Lewis Hamilton who had more years racing so that's kind of where where things stand so to start things
off I'm going to go into a little bit of a brief discussion about like F1 as a concept just to get a sense of like what it actually is so you can understand
what he actually accomplished within it are you familiar with F1 race get all Taylor do you just know that card is going around okay got it yeah um my my h
been 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 I don't I hav't watched it see I'm not
really into it either like I like you know we're all drawn to like kind of Cults personality and I was mostly drawn
to like schacher as like a race car driver for this brand for fer 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 this episode before then I really didn't know much about it so wait is it is this what
the Adam Driver movie is 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 um and later on we're going to
discuss how sharker 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 um but we'll get into that know so
Formula 1 racing is essentially the highest level of racing in the entire world um 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 coming in and out of being part of Formula 1 like sporadically so
Honda will have a team one year then drop out Jaguar will have a team then drop out ason will have a team and then drop out so on and so forth so the
revolt it's a revolving door but these three are fairly dominant as of as of now um and Frey's been a part of it
since its Inception it's the longest running um team that's been a part of the Formula 1 circuit go ahead sorry no
no the craziest thing I ever heard in my whole entire life was being on British Airways and hearing a commercial for
hondai the car and the way they pronounced it was like H and it was like just unbelievable that is one team that
is not an F1 racing got it predictably so uh there are 20 F1 racetracks or
circuits in the world and uh what 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 got to stay in got to be in like a nice box and watch John Legend and all that is that
cool yeah so that that's that's really so I actually look this up like those tickets are so expensive F1 tickets are
crazy expensive so I mean if you're able to get in to see the one of these like
you should definitely do it um and and I think the the first year they did the Las Vegas circuit was actually last year
wasn't it oh ju it just started it was like a couple months ago yeah yeah so now because of that that c that track
now there's two um races that happen in the US so it's Austin and now it's going to be um Austin Las Vegas which is cool
so one thing I didn't know uh 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 um we'll go into like the details of that here in a minute but it's 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
familiar familiarize themselves with the track they use that time to kind of dial in the car and do all that stuff if they
anticipate rain they can do stuff to the car to kind of make it better in the rain um 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 like 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 poll positions they've had and you get a poll 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 got
it whoever is at the top of that who whoever is the fastest is closest to the
front it's just a way for them to seed basically so when you start out you really want to be at the front obviously
right and then because of because you're there to race exactly and and if you get
pole position or if you get to the very front it's called taking pole position and that's the ranking that they use to determine how good of a race car 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 make sense no wait but
but it's a 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
there's 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 some I mean think about 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 they it's
not gonna look the same as like Kota that makes sense so the there's a point system
associated with this so basically um depending on how high you are or how
close to the front you are in finishing yet Award 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 and 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 total 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 a prize essentially you're award the championship but so you also want to be in a bunch of all the races
you got to be in all the races you have you 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 in 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 midseason 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 C doed in for the
next season so on and so forth right CU you couldn't like if you miss one you're [ __ ]
right um you're you're actually not [ __ ] 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 shoe marer and then shoe marer drove into him like
sideswiped him basically totaling both their cars and everybody was pissed on that other team because like 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 ah head that you just have to
prevent the other guys from getting points so that's kind of fun yeah um
so all these drivers so there's the the scoring system is like you there's a driver and then there's a team the the
points from the driver go to the team but the points from 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 [ __ ] their team they want to be
number one because when you're number one you get a shitload of of money yeah number one so totally so right now the
number one as of 2023 the number one highest paid driver is this guy named Max bur Stampin um 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 bill billion dollars his name is
Logan sergeant 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 one million that's a huge yeah yeah difference so the cost of doing this so
each team usually spend somewhere between 200 million to $500 million a year in doing this Ferrari and Mercedes
are obviously the ones that are in the higher bracket they're in the half 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 right you want that you it all kind of works together and
the other big thing is engineering so the way I've 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 right for Formula 1 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 in 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 I was going through um who what
was I on I I I was just looking at Ferrari's it's called scaria Ferrari is
like the name of their stable their racing team and it's a separate website from their commercial website their
consumer website but I was on there and on the front page was like um rest in peace and 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 yeah had a crash and just flip the car and just [ __ ]
crazy unbelievable um so I'm going to talk a little bit about
like who again all this is kind of shaped like understand like 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 he yeah while smoking cigarettes it's
probably not athletic and like I stupid also I mean look I'm probably stupid
about that anyways about golfers I'm sure it is incredibly athletic 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 assume like you're driving a car big deal right like
how how big of a deal could it be and then I sort like going deeper in like what kind of cars these were it's like kind of insane what happen so for
example as a regulation an F1 car at the absolute maximum has to be able
to go from 0o to 99 miles 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 what that essentially means these guys are usually
subject between two and seven G's on their bodies between acceleration and
breaking wow and then you layer on lateral turns you're basically doing
crazy hair pin turns with 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 yeah I'm thinking about how like I can't like play a ring around the rosie with my children because I get really nauseous yeah yeah like reading
reading I 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 just be like Gumby like your head would just be bobbling around
like you wouldn't be able to actually hold it up straight I'm sorry that is so gross wait did it did it start out that way or do their necks get thicker from
like the more they do it so they there's a training methodology so one one thing
that we're going to get to here in a little bit while bringing up now is that schoe marer is the first F1 driver to
incorporate actual um strength training as a core part of his workout regimen or
his like his driving regimen so he'd work out he lift weights four hours a day they have a special helmet that you
have to wear on his head so he actually just move his neck over side to side to
strengthen the side muscles of it I don't know why that's like one of the grossest things I've ever heard yeah
yeah I mean there's some pictures of him and actually it's funny because I was looking up pictures of his son his son
Mick is now um his son Mick is now a Formula One driver as well and it's more
pronounced in Mick than it was in in in Michael but his neck is like like
like it's thicker than his head it looks weird like it it looks a little unusual
and I started looking at here of lisis Hamilton and I was like his neck looks kind of normal oh my God okay I haven't
looked up yet I'm going to look them up now and I'm going to be like e 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 right you're 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 um drivers ever you know again Erton schoe
marer Hamilton like that's it like there there's really not that any outside of that because it's so unique to be
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 um 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 you can't um that's
like something probably was going on there his neck doesn't look weird look up mick look at Mick's neck Mick's neck
stands out for me okay Mick Schumacher I'm gonna look at it
too yeah he has like a neck that's the same width as his
face one yeah they're very what cute is 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-kart 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 would race go-karts 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'm G to go with it he's 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 3 and from there he graduated to Formula 1 so Norm
sorry I mispoke there he went from Formula 3 to formula 3,000 then to Formula 1 and the only real difference
there is between Formula 3 and formula between Formula 3 and 1 is the card itself so in Formula 3 and Formula 3000
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 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 around 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 he didn't even finish that race
on on that Sunday because his cars clutch blew out but nobody cared because they're like wow this guy actually is 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 like everybody was basically
like this is the guy that we want to approach and so they kept trying to throw money at him to trying to attract him over 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 Eric Senna died he died at San Marino the San Marino Grand Prix and my take on it was
it wasn't really that it wasn't coincidental so eron Senna and him had a rivalry because eron 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 um to the point where they actually had accidents and maps with each other it was it was a pretty
contentious point the race that Erton died at the San Marino Grand Prix
scharer was behind him he was always behind him and so like so this guy who's
fighting to be 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
um and the also he's also very cute you
D very cute I they they don't hire ugly ones though 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 um see all the more reason you got to attend one of these
races so part of what they use there's obvious footage of Aron's crash but one
of the footages 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 in himself too much and that's why he ended up slaming
into that wall because he knew schumach was R on his tails who knows what the logic was there was a transmission line
in his skull what a [ __ ] oh my God what 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 of senna on on um well you
can actually watch it on on his documentary on 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 beniton in 9495 and then he made his oh wait hold
on I'm sorry I'm putting out I'm putting it on the crash video how do I make the sound stop hold on no no put it like
tell us give us your live reaction give us your live reaction from the film wait was that it it didn't explode
or anything though no it didn't explode what I expected it's very close to the ground
oh I see oh God yeah he banged into 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 what's
crazy is from when you see him leading the track to him hitting the wall so he
managed to decelerate 50 miles God I 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 just so crazy the other guys keep going
like I know that they do that whatever but like did they 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 the shield up and they
um they airlifted him out of there and uh sharker and interviews later would
say I didn't know he was dead no we no nobody told us he was dead they told us he was in a coma or something we didn't
you know so um they would have stopped the race though if they actually if he if they knew
that so so in 995 he's coming off of being a champion for this team called
beniton 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 alorn 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 [ __ ] about selling cars to be 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 car 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 like none of these people are going to tracks none of these people are using
these cards the way they're supposed to be used and so anyways um but that being said he was part of or Enzo 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 before they came back recing with Lis Hamilton um
and so was that was that during World War II or is this after that it it was
after so 1955 was the last year Mercedes was part of F1 and then they came back I
think it was 2010 n something like that which actually schearer was a part of as well which we going to talk about but the
point was that this was incredibly important the DNA of Ferrari and they [ __ ] sucked at it so 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 it was a joke like
that was like the peak Ferrari poster time that yeah for the
consumer yeah for the cars it was like I remember the F40 the F50 the Enzo like they were all amazing cars 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 [ __ ] out of
their V12 engines that were big bulky and heavy and all these companies they figured out how to get the same amount
of power out of a lighter smaller engine a V10 or V8 and they were still chugging along with these big heavy engines so um
so they managed to bring Schumacher over from beniton 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 needs
tweaking like he was able to get hands on he was incredibly resourceful when it came to just like identifying where the
car need to be tweaked and and augmented so in around so from start to
finish his racing career he was active from 1991 to 2006 so about 15 years he
makes it comeback briefly for the 2010 and 2012 season overall he won seven
world champions which is the which is currently tied with Lewis Hamilton for the most wins in F1 racing history like
he like I mentioned earlier he ranks number two only behind Lewis Hamilton Senna for example is number six but the
reality is he died pretty young so like if he 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
decides they want to come back for the 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 boot 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 for Mercedes-Benz 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 be driving I could see a gap and like find a way to get my car through the Gap and like a
turnaround and the older I got the gab just disappeared I 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 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 leis Hamilton showed up so it was literally just the passing of the torch from one great to the next uh
and that would be basically the point when he would retire 2012 was officially last active years of race car driver so
you might be asking yourself fars what is Doom to fail here come on fars come on fars right so going over
shu's personal life uh in 1995 he married a woman named Karina they had two kids we mentioned one of them
earlier his name is Mick he's currently an F1 driver I think he's 21 to 23 years old somewhere around there these people were crazy crazy rich
yeah like they were like it's funny because the 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 um they do like crazy
things so for example they this guy had homes and Monaco and Switzerland and
Colorado like there were it's wild how much fun cool [ __ ] they can do with the
amount of money they have they were also super generous so apparently they donated 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 rode horses attended sporting events and they loved skiing to the point where they actually had a home in
Switzerland which is where the Swiss outs 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 um 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 past which is the nonski sanction area um and by all accounts
from what we gathered from news reports around this time this was like sub ideal
skiing time like even if you stayed on piece 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 Feast so he was out in this area with his son
and the details around what actually happened are a little bit Marky because
it's he's he's kind of 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 my God 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 locid all that good stuff and
what they do is they take him to 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 of just taking there he just starts going downhill super super quick his cognitive
function becomes very clearly impaired and they realized oh [ __ ] 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 and 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 remove two blood sorry they remove blood clots from his 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 um and at
that time it became clear that he was completely paralyzed and that he was unable to speak unable to communicate
wow so um regardless like it sounded like he was slowly Gathering a little
bit more and more functionality here and there but in the in the years 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
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 meral family and that's how 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 Lair this underground tunnel so that people wouldn't even have to get out of their cars to go inside the house it was
pretty cool looking um but because of that his family's been really secretive about his condition and so really what
we know comes out in trickles he's still alive so years on after this accident
he's still here but I'm going to go into some conversations that I read about his
friends and family have reported out so basically um in 20 in 2022 his wife
Karina 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 in
the same way and she'll like say certain things like that there was another story where the former head of the Ferrari
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 Kina 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 ious 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 of Schumacher so it wasn't
even of him it was his wife ended up buying this giant Palace in like mayorca
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 of this guy at this point is these like random
little tidbits that come out every now and then like what when Kina 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 neurosurge and
so what they talked about was these two operations to remove blood C clocks from their brain and the fact that they um
had to induce him into a medically medically uh sorry they had to put them into a medically induced coma talking
about kind of the the reasons for this and what the alchs 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 causes problems 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 variable in terms of recovering for something like this are 0 to 100% so yeah so what they noted they
cited several cases of situations that had the details this had which was
surgery to remove um brain clots six months more coma uh 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 B based on what's called brain plasticity which is the
brain's ability to 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 uh
and by all accounts it seems like he's probably past the age he's been in some
version of this condition for since December 29th 2013 and like I mentioned as of 2019 his
wife built this crazy Villa in mayorca 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 247 at a cost of around $150,000 per week so Jesus
yeah we I've watched there's also a shoe marker documentary on um on Netflix and I
watched that as well and again you it's a lot about his racing history and then
it goes into Karina and Mick and um Gina Maria's the daughter talking about their
dad and it is just gut-wrenching like oh that's
terrible like think about like the coolest most active most outgoing like
he he was just like I can't think of a more opposite to like
just sitting in your chair because what they were saying was during the years that he retired like to whatever extent
he actually fully retired they were talk about how you know he would just go bungee jumping and horseback writing and
he was constantly doing [ __ ] and right like one story Kina would say was 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 um 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's 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 you know wow yeah I I didn't actually make that analogy but yeah the only
reason I would have made that analogy the only reason why I think it might have been even a little bit different is because Christopher re was able to like
still sort of get around and do things it sounds like he's it sounds like yeah
it s vegetative yeah yeah which is like crazy to think about
just like a human in this shell but I so 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 that ice I like if you fall on ice like that's the worst thing that could happen and it's crazy
how quick that can happen and like again we're we're pretty much um at the whim
of um at this point Karina to talk about it it's interesting because I went and added um make shoem marker on on Insta
uh 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 asking about his dad what's going on Mick like like we we
want to know like what's the latest and like you know their their family is so closely guard about this stuff um as of
this last Christmas Kina posted a picture of the family minus Michael in front of the Christmas
tree um they literally don't want anybody even see him and so 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 and so but I mean
$150,000 a week on Medical Care like it's got 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 you know yeah absolutely absolutely
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 bad you know yeah Ski's bad like don't
100% didn't didn't Sunny Bono die from the ski accident absolutely remember
that one remember like when we talking about the kennedies how they would play ski football like idiots and of course one of them died doing that yeah just
don't ski do that it's not worth it no not at all you're not gonna be in the Olympics let not yeah my brother my
brother King Kade he fell um snowboarding had to go to the hospital and like if he wasn't wearing a helmet
he would have been dead probably yeah my cousin broke her like like two years ago sking oh my God and oh 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 what do you mean at the boot like where the top of the boot was
is where her feet cracked God awful God
that is so it makes home home 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 the the whole correlation of Sid and the snow and alive and the Yuans 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 and I just it was that just came to mind I was like oh
yeah what happened to Michael Schumer like the thing is I was this 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 and and I started
digging into 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 onea this neurosurgery Association um document that's like
here's what the best guesses as to his current condition based on the limited details we have yeah nothing else yeah
it just sounds like they don't want to even need to know which makes sense you know you just want to be like let's
just but it sounds like a terrible way to live also I know I know
um yeah there you go that's my story well thank you that was interesting maybe I'll watch some
F1 I mean I am for sure watching I'm rewatching the Senna documentary tonight
that's Al that's the one on Netflix I already watched the shoe marker one but the Senna 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 d this guy this guy was like Michael Jordan for like the entire other
part of the world um 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 in the books like he like um meloy and I have the same
birthday he's a year older than me if you look at his birthday um but I saw a
meme that was like there's no way that 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 just where did you
hear that it was like a meme on Instagram okay okay yeah yeah yeah then I saw that too but yeah but but but you
know we're exactly we're thinking like basketball in the rest of the world is like uh we're playing soccer and like it's a lot bigger yeah yeah well we live
in two different parallel universes yeah um but yeah that's the story if yall have any thoughts about it I would love
to hear again do to Philpot gmail.com um yeah yeah that's it that's
all that's all I have to I didn't do re-release last week cuz 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 um well thanks for listening
everyone please do uh let us know what you think and we'll be joining you all again next week cool thanks thanks
Taylor [Music]
bye