  We study a certain class of degenerations of Gushel-Mukai fourfolds as conic
bundles, which we call tame degenerations and which are natural if one wants to
prove that very general Gushel-Mukai fourfolds are irrational using the
degeneration method due to Voisin, Colliot-Th\'{e}l\`{e}ne-Pirutka, Totaro et
al. However, we prove that no such tame degenerations do exist.
