"I was extremely lucky. I had some huge crashes and yet I am still here, thanks to God"
About this Quote
Luck is the only acceptable brag when your job routinely tries to kill you. Emerson Fittipaldi’s line lands because it performs a careful balancing act: it acknowledges the violent randomness of racing while preserving the driver’s aura of control. “Extremely lucky” admits the obvious truth motorsport fans and survivors share but rarely want to stare at for long: talent doesn’t negotiate with physics. You can do everything right and still get launched into the air by a mechanical failure or someone else’s mistake.
The phrase “huge crashes” is doing quiet cultural work. In Formula 1’s older eras, crashes weren’t highlights; they were funerals narrowly postponed. Fittipaldi raced in a period when safety was improving but still brutally incomplete, and his survival becomes a kind of credential. He’s not just recounting incidents, he’s staking a claim to having paid the sport’s deepest entry fee and walked away.
Then comes the pivot: “thanks to God.” It’s not merely piety; it’s a way to restore meaning to a life built around risk. Crediting God also dodges the uncomfortable ethics of spectacle. If survival is framed as providence, the audience can keep watching without feeling complicit, and the driver can live with the fact that others didn’t make it. The subtext is grief managed through gratitude.
It’s also a public persona move. Champions are expected to be fearless, but wisdom in retirement often looks like humility. Fittipaldi’s sentence turns danger into testimony: not invincibility, but endurance, and a reminder that every lap was, in some sense, borrowed time.
The phrase “huge crashes” is doing quiet cultural work. In Formula 1’s older eras, crashes weren’t highlights; they were funerals narrowly postponed. Fittipaldi raced in a period when safety was improving but still brutally incomplete, and his survival becomes a kind of credential. He’s not just recounting incidents, he’s staking a claim to having paid the sport’s deepest entry fee and walked away.
Then comes the pivot: “thanks to God.” It’s not merely piety; it’s a way to restore meaning to a life built around risk. Crediting God also dodges the uncomfortable ethics of spectacle. If survival is framed as providence, the audience can keep watching without feeling complicit, and the driver can live with the fact that others didn’t make it. The subtext is grief managed through gratitude.
It’s also a public persona move. Champions are expected to be fearless, but wisdom in retirement often looks like humility. Fittipaldi’s sentence turns danger into testimony: not invincibility, but endurance, and a reminder that every lap was, in some sense, borrowed time.
Quote Details
| Topic | God |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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