Felipe Massa believes his life-threatening accident in July will not affect his ability and desire to race.
The Ferrari star’s skull was fractured when it was hit by a spring from Rubens Barrichello’s car during qualifying for the Hungarian Grand Prix.
Massa said “If I don’t drive then I am not the same person.
“I really hope, and expect, nothing will change inside of me when I go back into the car and start pushing to the maximum again.”
The accident happened after a spring that fell from fellow Brazilian Barrichello’s Brawn GP car hit Massa’s helmet while he was travelling at more than 160mph.
Pressure on the brakes reduced Massa’s speed to about 60mph when he hit the tyre wall but his injuries were described as “life-threatening” and there were fears for his sight.
Yet the 28-year-old has revealed that the hardest part of his recovery has been his absence from the track and he insisted he has no fears about returning to the sport that almost cost him his life.
“The worst thing that happened was not being able to race. If you can’t drive that’s terrible,” he added.
“My wife has already asked me, at least 10 times, ‘Are you sure you don’t feel any doubts or worries?’ Always, I say, ‘No, because this is what I like to do.’ Ever since I was a small boy this is my life. This is what I like to do.” BBC Sport
“You need to think about luck in different ways,” Massa said. “I was actually very unlucky with the spring in my face,” he says. “But I was very lucky as well. Every doctor said the same. If the spring had gone one millimetre to the right I would have lost my sight. One millimetre to the left and who knows? I could have been brain damaged. So I was very lucky. And this is more important because it is my life.”
Last week Massa returned from a battery of neurological tests in Miami – that provided absolute confirmation that he is almost ready to resume his career. “Actually, I am OK. The only problem is I need surgery to close a bone in my head that they had taken away because it was completely damaged. A normal guy can live like this without any problem. But for a driver, if you have an accident and you have this problem, the recovery is more difficult. That’s why I need this surgery to close the bone. I will have it soon because that’s the only reason they won’t allow me to race now. Otherwise I feel the same as before. I’m going to Europe to use the simulator and drive some go-karts and then I will know very well if I’m 100%.”
Does he believe Barrichello can overtake Button? “Look at me – I came to Brazil six points behind [Hamilton], and I almost won the championship. That was one race. Rubens has five races to close 16 points. It’s a big possibility. But it depends on Jenson. If Jenson carries on in this bad way it will help Rubens a lot. In my opinion, Jenson has gone down because of the pressure. It’s the only reason.
“At the start of the season everything was nice, everything was easy. He was in a new team winning six out of the first seven races. That’s different to fighting hard for the championship. Now he has a different kind of pressure. In the earlier races he was almost half a second quicker than some teams. You win the race easy and there is not so much pressure. But now we have races where things are more difficult. So for me the pressure has had a big impact on his mind – and he needs to deal with it better. If he does not cope with the pressure he will not win the championship.”
This has been a strange season for Formula One; but for Massa it has been a year like no other. Beyond his crash, the 28-year old is preparing to become a father. “I am very excited. The baby is due just after the middle of November – and we know it is a boy. We will call him Felipe. I don’t think I will ever forget 2009 because of this crash and, more importantly, becoming a father. Positive things come out of even the most difficult times.” When I last met Massa, in Bahrain, just before the season began, he spoke of his belief that “our lives are already written” – and how that philosophical outlook had allowed him to deal with the anguish of losing the title to Hamilton so cruelly. That same positively fatalistic approach has strengthened him these last six weeks.
“That’s the way I always think,” he stresses, looking across the city where he first learned to race. “Everything in life has a meaning. If something bad happens it’s because you need to learn, to grow. My life was once very difficult – when you think of the position I used to be in and what I had to do to arrive where I am now in my professional career. It was very difficult to reach this point. I had many races in the various categories where I knew if I did not win then I would not get to race in the next race because I did not have the money. So a lot happened that helped me become stronger. I think there is a reason for this accident. At the moment I don’t quite know what it is but …” Guardian.co.uk
| 
|