F1 pundit that made Michael Schumacher health joke blames ‘jetlag’ in apology

Michael Schumacher injured in a skiing accident in the Alps

Spanish F1 pundit Antonio Lobato has apologised for making a joke on live TV about the condition of Michael Schumacher, who has not made a public appearance since a serious skiing accident nearly 10 years ago. Lobato has claimed that jetlag played a part in the comment, which he described as “pure clumsiness”.

Schumacher, considered by many to be the sport’s greatest-ever driver, is level with Lewis Hamilton as the two F1 stars with the most Drivers’ Championships in history. Having retired from the sport for a second time, a year later in 2013, he was skiing with his son Mick, when he hit his head on a rock and sustained a severe head injury before being placed into a medically induced coma for six months before returning to his home in Switzerland.

During the Japanese Grand Prix, Lobato mocked Schumacher’s condition after a fellow pundit said: “Let [Red Bull engineer] Adrian Newey be shaking because Antonio Lobato is coming,” before Lobato responded: “Let Michael be shaking! Well… not Michael, he cannot shake.”

Lobato has received immense backlash on social media as a result of the comment, leading him to post a video on X (formerly known as Twitter) in which he apologised for the remark and partially blamed it on his jetlag.

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“I think it is necessary to explain and admit that I was wrong,” Lobato wrote alongside his video as a caption. “Please listen to my video. It’s a little long, but I think it’s necessary.”

During the video, he said: “I made a mistake without any bad intentions. It was simply a mistake of pure clumsiness, of pure inability to express myself correctly, maybe because of too many hours up, jetlag in Madrid, or whatever – which is not an excuse for those of you who didn’t see it.

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“What happened is that I went too far and made an expression that is not good, it is not accurate, it is not fine. I didn’t mean to make a joke, I didn’t mean to make fun of Michael Schumacher. I think that everyone who knows me and knows what I’m like knows perfectly well that I would never make a joke about something like that. Never, but I was clumsy.”

Schumacher’s health has been kept private by his family, though his son Mick – who is a reserve driver for Mercedes – did open up as part of a Netflix documentary released about his father in 2021.”I think dad and me, we would understand each other in a different way now,” he said.

“Simply because we speak a similar language, the language of motorsport. And we would have so much more to talk about. That’s where my head is most of the time. Thinking that it would be cool that would be. I would give up everything just for that.”

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