Daily Inspiration Quote by Alain Prost

For a sport built on flirting with death, Prost is doing something quietly radical here: he frames restraint as courage. "I'm brave to say" is the tell. He’s not bragging about taking a blind corner flat-out; he’s talking about the social risk of refusing the mythology that real racers are fearless, or at least performatively so. In Formula 1’s testosterone economy, opting out can read like weakness, disloyalty, even cowardice. Prost flips the script. The bravery isn’t on the track, it’s in the press pen.

The wording is also defensive in a very Prost way. "This sort of risk" implies a line he’s already drawn in his head: not risk as a necessary ingredient of racing, but a particular kind of gratuitous hazard - a setup, a condition, a culture of escalation. He doesn’t say "I won’t race" or "I’m scared"; he says he won’t take this kind of gamble. That distinction protects both his identity (elite competitor) and his argument (risk should be managed, not worshipped).

Context matters because Prost’s whole public persona was the counter-myth to the romantic daredevil: "The Professor", the calculator, the guy who won by thinking. In an era defined by lethal crashes and macho bravado, the subtext is a refusal to be emotionally blackmailed by the spectacle. It’s a small sentence with big stakes: a claim that professionalism includes survival, and that saying no can be as competitive as saying send it.