Gasly emotional after the race: ‘I’m not ready at 22, 23 to live this kind of moment to lose one of your best mates. We’ve been roommates, we’ve lived in the same apartment, in the same room for 6 years. We’ve been classmates, I have studied since i was 13 until 19 with him.’

Ok, so hear me out. This sort of confirms something for me that I was thinking about yesterday. The drivers on the lower end of our age scale are freakin’ young. I lost my best friend at 18. You simply are not prepared mentally for the life lessons you learn from an event like this. I had been bouncing it around in my head, whether drivers would be an exception to this, given they are around danger and death more than most in their lives. But after reading this quote, I can see that Pierre may be struggling with the same things I did. You grow up thinking that you’re invincible, that death is some far off thing that happens to old people, that you have a TON of time to do all the things you want to do. When something like this happens it can shatter that perception in devastating ways. For me, it lead to crippling anxiety that I may die unexpectedly in weird ways: heart attacks, brain aneurysms (how my friend died), car crashes, etc. For Pierre to see another driver go exactly as he might if something were to go wrong on track, I can’t imagine. I really hope that the drivers, teams, and anyone else working in F1 can get support services, but most especially our young drivers. I know for a fact they’ll need it.