So, not only have you managed to get signed, bought a boat, a motorhome and have amassed a garage full of cars that cost you a fortune on tax, insurance and storage, but you’ve only gone and won a bloody race. Here’s everything I know about what to do next.
It’s Canada, 1991, Nigel Mansell is on the home run, cruising to victory, when he starts waving to the crowd.
‘Nigel, don’t wave to the crowd too soon there, buddy,’ remarks a commentator, and they’re prophetic words, because Nigel’s revs drop, his engine cuts out and that’s it, his race is over.
It’s been said that Nigel – ‘our Nige’ – knocked the ignition switch while waving to fans, which would be gutting for him if it were true, although as to whether it is, I couldn’t say. Point being, don’t go too early. Don’t celebrate until you know you’ve got it. Rule One.
A similar thing happened at the Brazilian Grand Prix in 2008 (yet another race that was very dependent on tyres, in this case, the swapping from wet to dry and then back again). In order to win that year’s Championship, Felipe Massa, in a Ferrari, needed to win the race with McLaren’s Lewis lower than fifth.
As a result, the race was a proper nail-biter (although my car caught fire, so I had other things on my mind), not least for Lewis who didn’t fare well in the pit stops.
Cut to the chase, though, and Massa crossed the line in first with Lewis back in sixth, which, as it stood, meant that Massa had clinched the Championship, not Lewis.
Sure enough, the cameras went to the Ferrari garage, which erupted into the kind of rapturous celebration that shakes the camera because it’s being jostled. Except that this was one of those premature celebrations I’m talking about, because back out on the track Lewis was busy snatching back a Championship-winning place. Indeed, on the very last corner of the last lap of the last race, he took fifth, making him the Champion, and not Massa.
In the McLaren garage they went nuts. Back in the Ferrari garage their own celebration died on the vine, just like that. The blood drained from their crestfallen faces. Their heads went into their hands. One of the Ferrari guys was so pissed off that he headbutted a marketing stand, and it is said that Ferrari president Luca di Montezemolo was so cheesed off that he destroyed the television he was watching (although Ferrari still won the Constructor’s, so come on, mate, keep things in perspective, eh?).
Your steering wheel comes off, safety straps unbuckle, headrest unplugs, you jump out and you’re on the car and you’re just, like, ‘Hell, yeah!’
At the same time, you’re looking around and you see your team, and they’re going wild and you’re giving them the full beam while at the same time you’re looking for specific people, whether it’s friends, family, whatever, and you wave at them and you wave at the crowd, who are hopefully cheering for you and not booing you (we’ll talk about Monza in a bit) although it doesn’t really matter because you’ve still got your helmet on and nothing could penetrate that bubble of joy anyway. And then you run over to the team, jump on them and they’re all kissing your helmet – your crash helmet – and then you get dragged away to do the rest of your stuff.
And that’s what it’s like to win.
I did the winner. Arms up, number one finger. I’d do that to my dad and he’d do it back to me in reply. I’d be out of the car in five seconds (see above, and see also, ‘we don’t talk about crashes’) arms up, finger aloft. Even in the excitement of the moment, with my helmet on and well-wishers jostling me, I could always pick my dad out in the crowd. It was that father–son bond.
That and the fact he always wore a pink shirt.
In the last six years or so they’ve had cameras in the pre-podium room. There you are, about to bowl into the podium room for a breather before the trophy ceremony, and the steward reminds you, ‘Don’t forget the camera’s there, don’t swear.’
Other good things to remember about being in the pre-podium room when you’re being observed by the entire TV-watching world: don’t go flinging your cap around like a spoilt child. If you have an issue with another driver, don’t air it there and then. You know, the basics.
Before the days of cameras in the podium room? Now, that’s a different story.
At Suzuka in 2011, I’d started in second behind Sebastian in a Red Bull but got up the inside of him on the straight down to turn one. I was about to put him in my mirrors when, bosh, he pushed me into the grass, allowing my McLaren teammate Lewis to overtake me on the outside which, if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know is right up there in the ultimate indignity stakes, along with taking out your teammate and crashing under the safety car.
I thought Sebastian should have been penalised for that. He used the SMIDSY defence: Sorry, mate, I didn’t see you. So I went up to him in the podium room afterwards.
‘Right,’ I said, ‘so that’s how it’s going to be is it? We’re going to be pushing and shoving each other off the circuit.’
‘Hmm,’ he said with furrowed brow, ‘What do you mean?’
I said, ‘Turn one, you pushed me on to the grass.’
He said, ‘There was no penalty. This means I did nothing wrong.’
I said, ‘Mate, you know you did something wrong.’
He still looked confused.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Fine. If we’re going to be like that, fair enough, let it be.’
Now, as confrontations go, it was hardly Bromley Wether-spoons on a Saturday night, but that was about as angry as it got. And it was all forgotten about in the next nanosecond because even though I’d won the race he’d won the Championship and we both had the all-important business of celebrations to attend to.
Thinking about it, there were quite a lot of times in 2011 when I spoke to Sebastian. I might had had a word with him after the incident at Spa in 2010, when I was defending my Championship and holding second in the race, and he lost control and virtually T-boned me, putting us both out of contention and thus putting a massive dent in my chances of the Championship.
He was one, like Max, who calmed down as a driver. I think he probably just realised that he was messing up too much. He was in that period of his career where he was super quick, but was in the habit of pushing it too far and making mistakes.
In Max’s case, he had the team saying to him, ‘Max, you can’t do that, you can’t just throw the car up the inside and cause accidents’, and whereas before he was just shrugging his shoulders and refusing to change his driving style, he’s taken those comments on board, is finishing every race and doing a bloody great job.
The champagne we have for Middle Eastern races is actually rose water. It doesn’t fizz properly and it tastes horrible, but you still have to play the game – you have to swig it, even if it tastes horrid.
Watch Kimi Räikkönen, who likes a drink, when he’s on a podium in a Middle Eastern race. You can see his face, it’s like, Ugh.
Personally, I love a swig on the podium, even if it is only just rose water. I think it’s an important part of the show. And if it is champagne then you’re so dehydrated after a race that two swigs of it and you’re anyone’s. You’re suddenly a very cheap date.
They take the cork out for you in Formula One, which is luxury, a blue-chip valet service compared to Super GT where you’re expected to remove the cork yourself. Now, as a veteran of Monaco Super Mondays, I’m a dab hand at removing corks so it’s not a problem for me, but there’s a driver called Nick Cassidy who struggles to such an extent that even the presenters have started taking the piss out of him.
I feel for him, actually. You want to be able to go out and enjoy yourself on the podium without having to deal with the extra stress of extracting a cork from a bottle. What’s more, it’s fizzy sake most of the time. Last year our team appeared on the podium four times, and it was sake each time. It’s sticky, sweet and seriously strong but I stick to my ritual of always taking a swig.
My teammate Naoki Yamamoto doesn’t touch alcohol but won the Super Formula Championship last year, and every single driver on the podium covered him with champagne, poor guy. Or was it sake? Either way, he wasn’t happy.
In Formula One, all you have to do is stick your thumb over the end, and it’s so big – a jeroboam, which is four bottles in one – that spraying is awesome just as long as you make sure to a.) get your thumb right over the end when you shake and then b.) release a tiny bit to spray, being careful to angle it.
Obvious, you’d think, but in the heat of the moment it’s easy to get it wrong and I’ve seen some drivers shake it up without their thumb over the end, going, ‘Wahey!’ as it hiccups out of the bottle in a foamy waterfall, completely oblivious to the fact that they’ve just ruined the spectacle.
So, no, you have to remember your thumb placement, you have to keep on shaking it as you spray and you have to make sure that you soak as many people in the vicinity as you can.
That’s very important, that last bit, and you’ll need to be quick, catch them unaware, because what you’ll find is that while there are a lot of people on the podium at the beginning of the ceremony, they all disappear as soon as you pick up a bottle. In any case, you aim it at the other drivers on the podium. They also have another senior staff member from the team on stage – your engineer or the chief mechanic or something, it’s different every race – and so you’ll probably try and get them as well, and you’ll always try and really soak those guys, because you know they’ve got to go back to work and finish the debrief.
I’m really good at that, even if I do say so myself. The trick is to grab it, turn, and shoot. Kapow. Don’t give them a moment to think. I’m not saying that I’m competitive about it (of course I’m competitive about it) but I think I’m pretty good at getting people without being got in return, not that it’s in any way an extension of the competition on the track (which of course it is).
Plus you spray the guys below, of course. Guess who I’d always be aiming for? That’s right, my dad again! He was my bullseye. Even now I can picture his face down below, laughing.
You have your interviews, too, of course. We’d have an ex-Formula One driver or a celebrity come up and do it. It was fun if it was a celebrity, but only if they knew a little about the sport, which was relatively rare; better was when it was an ex-driver, someone like DC who you could have a good crack with.
Incidentally, it has to be said that in F1 our nickname game is pretty weak, with Christian names – Lewis, Kimi, Sebastian – being the most common informality, and initials like JB and DC reserved for the truly adventurous. That said, Team Button was responsible for one or two good ones, and having been the victim of them at school (‘Zipper’, ‘Jennifer’), I was more than willing to dish them out. Dad became ‘Papa Smurf’, named after he grew a Papa Smurf-like beard, but perhaps the best one was ‘Britney’ for Nico Rosberg, because he used to have long, wavy hair. I remember him walking into a night club in Tokyo, spotting our lot and looking very happy to see us until I stood up and yelled, ‘Britney! Hit me baby one more time,’ across the club at him. The smile turned upside down pretty quickly.
And of course now the world has turned and instead of being the one interviewed, I’m the one likely to do the interview for Sky. I did it at Silverstone, which was the first time I’d ever been on the podium at Silverstone – and if you think I failed to make that joke then you really don’t know me at all – talking to winner Lewis, as well as Sebastian and iceman Kimi.
The good thing in a situation like that is that you forget that the whole world is watching, you just think of the people in the vicinity, and it’s a special atmosphere for all concerned.
Post-ceremony you have the choice of either dropping your jeroboam over the side for the crew, which is a bit dangerous because it’s a long way down – unsure whether health and safety approve, not that I’ve ever checked – or carting it around with you as you go on to your next round of tasks. You give your cap and your trophy to a team member and will be handed another cap to wear (how many different caps does a driver wear during a Grand Prix weekend? About 50 million) for your post-race press conference, which you’ll do while soaked in champagne.
There are lots of questions, obviously, but because emotions are so high it’s also a time that you should be at your most guarded, because the last thing you want as a driver is to let your feelings get the better of you and start going off-script and running off at the mouth. Keeping a lid on it at a time like that is far more exhausting than you might imagine.
The whole thing, in fact, is incredibly tiring, and the likelihood is that you’ll be absolutely knackered by the time you reach the rest of your team. You’re probably more shagged out from the interviews than you are from actually driving the car.
But if you’ve got any thoughts about coming down then the team will put you right about that, because those guys will be sky high with emotion and adrenalin, and it’s a very special occasion when you return to the fold. For your teammates, your arrival is the amazing encore and together you surf that celebratory wave. Which means draining the last of that bottle together.
As for the empty. If you’ve won the race the chances are you’ll want to keep that bottle, and it’ll end up in storage somewhere, something to show your disinterested grandchildren. But if you haven’t won the chances are that you’ll give it away to the team. Same with your podium cap. Honestly, if I’d kept all the caps I’d been given I couldn’t keep up with the storage.
A lot of drivers have a contract which says the team keeps all the trophies. I know that because I had it at BAR and McLaren and, initially, at Honda as well, although things changed at Honda when it transpired that my teammate, Takuma Sato, didn’t like the number four, believing it to be an unlucky number. Having finished third in the previous year’s Championship, I was number three, and so he asked me to swap.
I was, like, ‘Uh uh, I’m not just going to swap numbers, I finished third in the Championship, so I want the number three that I earned; you didn’t even earn the number four – you were eighth – you only got number four because I was number three.’
Or words to that effect. I’m sure I put it more diplomatically than that. Or should I say that I’m sure somebody put it more diplomatically than that on my behalf.
The team said, ‘Oh, go on, Jenson, just to keep the peace.’
‘No way,’ I said.
They said, ‘Okay, what can we do to sweeten the deal?’
I said, ‘Give me all my trophies. Whatever trophies I win this year, I get to keep.’
And they said, ‘Okay. You’re on.’
‘Great,’ I said thinking what a result, because I didn’t give a damn about the number four; it was only a number; I just wanted something out of the deal.
So I got my trophies, which cost about £15,000–£25,000 each. Cool. What’s more it’s not like they deliver them to you in a bit of bubble wrap and brown packing tape. They come packaged in the most gorgeous box. All the trophies are different designs, but the one thing they all have in common is their beautiful presentation boxes.
So a lot of the time – maybe even most of the time – the team will keep the trophies, and if that’s the case you do have the option to get a replica made at a cost of £15,000. Having been on the podium 50 times, I drew the line at spending that kind of cash on third- or even second-place trophies, but I do have all of my first-place ones. They’re pretty special.
The World Championship trophy is different again, because the trophy changes hands, so you get the same trophy that everybody’s had, inscribed with the actual signatures of drivers such as Juan Manuel Fangio, Jack Brabham, Graham Hill, Jackie Stewart, James Hunt, Niki Lauda, Alain Prost, Ayrton Senna. It makes you feel giddy just to look at it.
You have to give it back, though, of course – mine went to Sebastian who won it in 2010, and when I enquired about getting a replica made I was a bit put off by the £35,000 cost, thinking, Really? Am I really going to pay that much for a trophy? Until my manager, Richard, bought me one as a gift. Now that is a manager.
The Championship year was of course a big one for souvenirs. I’ve also kept all of my helmets and suits from that year, and of the three cars that were made, I was given one. As I said way back, I took a pay cut to drive for Brawn, as a result of which there were various sweeteners built into the contract, a car being one of them. Mind you, they tried to wheedle out of it, and though the one I’ve ended up with is one of the proper three with a functional engine, they tried to palm me off with a replica version. ‘We’ll make you a fourth chassis,’ they said. Thing was, they didn’t want me showing other people the engine.
‘But I’m not going to take a fourth chassis,’ I insisted toughly (through a third party). ‘I want one of the three that we used.’
‘Oh, no, it’s not worded like that in the contract.’
‘I don’t care how it’s worded, you know what the deal was.’
In the end they gave in and I got my original car. Ross Brawn has another one, and the third went to Mercedes, the engine supplier
Not that I can start it up, mind you. You don’t just turn the ignition key on a Formula One car. No, it would cost me £50,000 to start it up, because I’d need the assistance of three or four people, all the computers and the electronics. It’s not the kind of thing you use for popping to the shops.
Ideally I’d like to put it on show here in LA. There’s the Petersen Automotive Museum, which is the most beautiful car museum I’ve ever been to. Seriously, put this book down, Google it, you will not be disappointed. So it would be great if it could go in there. I’ll ship it over, they’ll look after it, free storage, people get to see it and I get to visit. Something else to show my disinterested grandchildren.
After a race, you go and see the engineers for a debrief while events are still fresh in your mind, and this is something you do whether you came first or last. If it’s the latter then you’ll be more than happy to escape the scorn and pity of the outside world and shelter among familiar faces in order to lick your wounds.
If it’s the former, however, you might well stagger in, plastered already from your three swigs of champagne, at which point you’ll share it out into little plastic beakers from the water machine and everything’s great fun and very convivial.
The crucial ‘but’ is that while you’re all in a celebratory mood, you still have to remember the debrief bit, because no matter how well the race went, there are still things to improve. You never just say, ‘Well, that was a great race, let’s do exactly the same thing next time,’ because firstly, there’s no such thing as a flawless Grand Prix weekend, even if you win, and secondly because the influencing factors are changing all the time. Maybe the pit stop wasn’t as quick as it should have been or, ‘Are you sure we should have been that late pitting on that set of tyres?’ So we’ll talk through those issues first, and then go through the whole procedure of the race, from the start to the last lap of the race.
How was the start? Was the clutch working okay? Was the throttle working okay? How was turn one? How were the brakes? Oversteer? Understeer? Any issues within the car that you would like to change? It’s a whole menu of things that you run through which takes at least an hour and a half, and only then do you…
Winning the Monaco Grand Prix is fun, because you go to a special after-party, a black tie do attended by the royal family. I ended up dragging everybody to a club afterwards, thinking, ‘Hang on a minute, I’m a bloke from Somerset, and I’ve just won the Monaco Grand Prix and now I’m in the Amber Lounge partying with Prince Albert.’
And the whole time I was half-expecting my mum to shake me awake, going, ‘Jenson, Jenson, you’re late for school…’
Losing’s a funny thing in F1. Even though the perception of the sport is that of the driver as winner or loser, it’s really much more of a team thing, so you do at least share that burden – maybe even more so than you share the glory of winning, if I’m guiltily honest about it.
How do you define losing? That’s the first thing to consider. After all, you turn up to a race weekend knowing that one of the top three will win. You have to go back to the opening race of the 2013 season to find a race where the winning constructor was anyone other than Mercedes, Ferrari, or Red Bull. It was Kimi for Lotus, and that itself was a complete anomaly, the first time it had happened since 2009, when I won the Championship, when it was us, Red Bull, McLaren and Ferrari in contention. That’s very nearly a decade of total stranglehold at the top.
With that in mind, those outside the top three are forced to revisit their expectations of what it means to win and also, it follows, to lose. So losing, then, is no longer ‘not winning’, it has become ‘doing worse than expected’.
So if you approach the weekend knowing you’re capable of fifth, and you finish ninth or tenth, or you don’t score any points at all, that’s horrific. That’s losing. It’s all about your expectations of yourself, the car, the team – about what you know you can achieve in the circumstances versus what you actually do achieve.
What really hurt was when you were expected to fight for a position and you were a long way off. Or if the car just didn’t perform. An accident? Well, shit happens, as Forrest Gump said. But when you’ve actually got a serious issue with the car and it’s just not working, that’s like shit that shouldn’t happen. It’s the point at which you start having meetings that go on forever, sucking up time and brainspace, hoovering up all the heart and passion you had for the battle. You never see teams more collectively despondent than when technical gremlins have ruined the weekend.
As for how you feel as the driver when you don’t do as well as you’d hoped? How do I feel? Well, the answer is pretty down and frustrated. I don’t normally raise my voice, but it has happened and it’s happened in situations like that, because what really grinds my gears is hearing that we’re quick, that our car is great and that we should be winning. You go through four or five races, and each time they say the same thing. ‘Yeah, we’re this quick, we’re this good, we’ve got the best car.’ And yet you keep finishing eighth.
It was at times like that that I may have let my frustrations get the better of me. ‘Solve these problems, and stop saying we’re good when we’re not. We clearly do have issues, and instead of sticking our heads in the sand we need to work out what they are and how we can solve them, because right now it’s embarrassing.’
Jenson’s pissed off. Jenson hardly ever gets pissed off.
‘We’re tweaking. We’re tweaking.’
‘No, we need to make a big change. We need to make a big change in order to find our performance.’
Then we get to Monaco, and, ‘This is the one for us, we’re going to be quick here, because we don’t have the power, but it doesn’t matter so much around Monaco.’
Except that you go and finish worse than you did the last race.
‘Come on, guys, we’ve just proved that we don’t have the best car.’
By which time they might decide to listen, and you’re already several races behind.
In many ways I think it’s realising where you are that’s the most important thing in F1. We’re the fifth-best team but we have issues and we’ve got to work on it. And that means accepting that you’re the fifth-best team, not thinking you’re the third best. You’ve got to realise where you stand and what you need to do to improve.
I remember being at BAR, Honda or Brawn and knowing what the other teams were up to. Little details we could find out about them, what they were bringing to the next race, what improvements they’d made to the car, major set-up changes, things like that.
Then I moved to McLaren. I was, like, ‘So, do we know what other people are doing? Do we understand how their car’s going to look?’
They looked at one another. ‘No. How are we going to know that?’
‘Well, every other team I’ve been at has had an interest in other teams. They make sure they know what other teams are up to.’
They said, ‘No, we’ve never done that.’
I think it was because they thought they were the best, so why would they need to understand what other people were doing? But in the smaller teams, there was always a way of finding out what other teams are doing and learning from it, which was always quite fun.
After all, the competition never stops, because there’s always something to play for. All the teams get money for taking part in the Championship. It’s not quite as clear-cut as saying that the better they do the more money they get, because Ferrari always gets the most thanks to a special ‘Ferrari’ payment, but it more or less runs along those lines: the top ten get an ‘equal share’ payment of around $42m, and then there are performance payouts, a ‘Constructor’s Championship bonus fund’, ‘historic payments’ and the aforementioned ‘Ferrari payment’ to take into consideration.
It’s all very complicated, which I’m sure suits a lot of people fine, but what it does mean is that a top four Championship place is worth a lot of money (Ferrari will get well over $200m), while a number ten place should be worth at least $50m.
Anything below that, though, and you might want to think about taking on a paper round to help with the rent.
It is, of course, a vicious and ever-decreasing circle, because the less money you’re given, the fewer resources you have to develop the car for the next year. One bad year and a team can find themselves spiralling out of control.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that even if you’re having a terrible season and it feels like the best thing to do is concentrate your aim on the following season, you can’t. You have to keep on pushing.
Okay, maybe – now I come to think about it – if there was a massive rule change coming, then perhaps the team might think, ‘Hang on, there’s no point in working on this, we should develop the new car more, spend more time on that.’ But aside from that scenario you’d work tirelessly all the way through the season to develop your car because, firstly, you can’t afford not to and, secondly, because you can carry most of that development work into the next season. The tub might be different, but a lot of the stuff you will test and if it works, you’ll put it on the next year’s car as well.
I think that I found it easier to deal with loss, defeat and failure when I was younger. These days, if I have a bad race it hurts on some kind of weird primal level because I start thinking, ‘Okay, am I as good as I used to be? Am I over the hill?’
This happens in Super GT now, of course. Not long ago I had a bad weekend, running in fifth, my pace not quite what I wanted it to be, and then ended up in a crash with someone and came away with no points.
But it wasn’t the crash that annoyed me; it was the fact that I was off the pace. I left thinking, What am I doing?
And Am I as good as I used to be?
And Is all this worth it, for how I feel right now?
You end up asking yourself not just if you’re not the driver you used to be, but how much less good you’re prepared to be before you jack it all in. I find myself wondering how mentally tough am I to accept that dip in quality? Can I accept that dip in quality? Can I accept any dip in quality?
After all, I’m a driver who asks a lot of myself. My biggest and toughest rival is the guy in the mirror.
It’s one of the reasons fitness is so important to me. A lot of sportsmen as they age will let their fitness go, and that to me goes hand in hand with throwing in the towel, which I’m not prepared to do yet.
On the other hand, do I want to be that guy who carries on well past his sell-by date, churning out less and less impressive results?
Sometimes you see amazing comebacks. David Beckham appeared in a Manchester United Treble Reunion match and scored a brilliant goal with the last kick of the game. But for every one of those there’s a dozen failed or fizzled-out comeback stories, and while there are always highs, it’s the lows that hit you hardest.
I feel that now, in Super GT. In 2018 we won a race and carved out a Championship win, which was amazing. But it’s the lows – like that zero-pointer – that really hurt me.
Actual conversation: ‘You know that hat you wear, with all the colours on it?’
‘My cap?’
‘No, it’s not a cap. It doesn’t have a peak. The other one.’
‘Um…’
‘Oh, you know the one. It’s got all the colours on it.’
‘Oh, wait. Is it quite a bulbous thing, made of like a hard shell?’
‘Yes!’
‘And it has a visor that comes down over my eyes like this?’
‘Yes!’
‘That’s a helmet.’
‘Yes, that’s it. Your helmet hat.’
Monaco, 2017. I was making the grand comeback, as detailed earlier. The team presented me with two caps to wear. One of them was a baseball cap, the sort I’d been wearing my entire career. The other was like a baseball cap, but a sort of flat-peaked and starchy version. The kind you see in gift shops at theme parks – like a baseball cap before it’s been properly worn in.
I looked at it, the way you might regard a dead rat on your dinner plate. ‘What’s that?’
‘That’s a snapback,’ I was told, like I was in the presence of something new and great. And now it made sense: the caps that I’d seen Lewis and Daniel Ricciardo wearing. They weren’t just nobby-looking box-fresh baseball caps, they were actually supposed to look like that. Jesus.
‘No, mate, I’ll have the cap,’ I said.
Apologies if you’re a snapback cap fan – each to their own, and I’m not immune to terrible fashion choices myself – but to me they just look bloody stupid. They don’t even look like they fit properly. They blow off too easily because the huge peaks act like sails. Some people even put their ears inside them, for the full ‘I bought this in the Harry Potter Experience’ effect.
No, for me it’s the baseball cap, arched peak. In fact, I employ someone whose sole job is to arch my baseball cap peaks to the right angles.
I’ve definitely had my life saved by a helmet. Not necessarily through crashing – although who can say to what extent a helmet saved me during my crash in Monaco qualifying 2003 – more through strikes. I’ve had bits of metal hit my helmet, and on one particular occasion very early in my career I was testing with Williams in South Africa, hurtling down the back straight when a bird hit me. It didn’t dent the helmet but it scratched the visor and it did my neck in.
‘I’ve hit a bird,’ I yelled over the talkback.
‘You shouldn’t do that, young man,’ came the reply (different times, different times…).
I was a bit sore afterwards and I had bits of bird dribbling down my visor, which was fairly upsetting, and of course I felt terrible for the poor old bird whose death was the very definition of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But I was alive, which was the main thing.
Years later, at Brawn, there was a terrible incident during qualifying at the 2009 Hungarian Grand Prix where part of the suspension came off Rubens’ Brawn and struck Felipe Massa in the Ferrari on his helmet, just an inch above the eye and knocking him unconscious. The thing was, it went through his visor and gave him a head cut and bone damage to his skull.
He was fine eventually, thank God, but as a result of that accident they introduced a carbon-fibre piece that sat on top of the visor and made it smaller. It was an interim measure before they could introduce a regulation to make the visor slot even smaller, which they did eventually, so the visor slot is tiny.
The helmets we used were made of carbon fibre so not only are they very light – about 2kg – but they’re safe, too, which is in fact their primary function: safety. You would be amazed if you picked up a crash helmet how light they are, but also how robust. It brings it home to you when you’re driving around and see people on bikes, especially some of the ‘biker’ type helmets you see, that would be less than useful in a crash and would be better suited to a mantelpiece than your head on a freeway.
The funny thing is that a helmet has to dent on impact otherwise your head takes all the impact, your brain moves and you get brain damage. There has to be some flex in the helmet in order to absorb the impact.
So say if you’re at a photo shoot, suited and booted, you hand your helmet to the PR guy and he plops it down the wrong way up. Not only is there the risk that the paint will get scratched, but it’s a respect thing – respect the lid.
Obviously, we have no input whatsoever in the livery of the car. Nobody asks a driver what colour they’d like the car or where they think the sponsor logos should go. When it comes to helmets, though, we have most of the input and it’s a right and privilege that we guard jealously and treasure because it’s the only personal thing that we have. The only thing that we can actually sit down and design ourselves.
Me, I go for a bright colourful design. I’ve got my Union Jack on the back and it’s me all over. Daniel Ricciardo’s is always fun, He was sporting a half-pink, half-blue number the last time I saw him, and very fetching it was too.
Daniel’s been able to benefit from leaving Red Bull, of course, which is the only team who have any direct input into their drivers’ helmets, and then only because they pay them to have the Red Bull logo around it. At McLaren, we had certain parameters, so you had to have a white ring around the helmet for the sponsor’s logo but the rest of it was your choice: your colour, your design.
The genesis of my helmet design comes from karting days. In 1994, I was literally handed a helmet with a Union flag on the back and sides, and I liked it so much I used that design – or variations of that design – in karting, Formula Four and Formula Three. It was only when I got to Formula One that a helmet designer at Bell Helmets told me I couldn’t copyright the design, which meant that anybody could wear my helmet. And since the whole idea was to create something unique to me, that felt like defeating the purpose.
Instead we came up with the ‘JB’ design, which looks almost like a Union flag. It did by then anyway, and I thought it was really cool, so that’s how the JB started.
A lot of my career was with Bell Helmets, and then the relationship went sour for one reason or another, and so I started working with Arai helmets, who were like, ‘Why don’t we change the design a bit?’ And I began with this guy, Uffe Tagström, a Finnish guy who also designs Kimi’s helmets, and what he did was to integrate the JB flag design, along with a little Johnnie Walker figure, who were one of the main sponsors, and that was pretty much the basis for all of my helmet hats from then on.
I’ve changed the colours a few times – I’ve had red and white; silver, red and white; pink, and the Brawn colours, which is what I have now – and I’ve added bits to it, so now there are dragons on the back, while at times I had the Ichiban team triathlon logo on the back, and I had a Papa Smurf on the back for a couple of years after the old boy passed away.
The sponsors are painted on if we know we’re going to keep them all year, otherwise it’s stickers. I’d say we get four or five helmets a year. Well, that’s nowadays, in Super GT. But when I was in F1, it was 18 helmets a year, a helmet per race, each of which would be bagged up and put away after the race. I was never superstitious about my helmet. I’d rather have six helmets that each won one race than one that won six, but that might be because I love collecting them, which I think is common to all drivers. I make sure that I hang on to all of my winning helmets so I have all 15 of my wins. Others I’ve given away to charity, and I’ve given a fair few to friends and family and there’s a bit of swapping that goes on between drivers.
You have to be choosy, mind. I only want to swap helmet hats with certain drivers, and they would be drivers with whom I have some kind of history, either because we were mates off the track, or because we had some great racing on it.
That time the bird hit me, and I had bits of bird sliding down my visor? That’s when I needed the tear-offs, which are removable plastic strips on the top of your visor that you rip off to remove the oil, dirt, bits of rubber and occasional dead bird that you may encounter during the drive. There are four of them, and it’s a rare race that you don’t use all four. It’s designed to make it easy to remove with your gloved hand, so you just reach with your opposite hand, pull it off and then you…
Ah, well, therein lies a tale. Because in ye olden days we’d just toss the used bit of plastic out of the car, but I think it was Valtteri Bottas who threw one out of his and it either went into his airbox, or the airbox of the car behind, and overheated the engine.
No doubt this sport that prides itself on detail and perfection decided that maybe it wasn’t the best idea to have random plastic booby traps flying around the track like discarded McDonald’s wrappers, and so we were asked to get rid of it in a pocket in the car, which meant that all the teams were testing various sticking pocket things and it was all a bit of a joke. So they’ve gone back to chucking them out of the car.
Meanwhile, on a car with a roof and a windscreen, the tear-offs will be on the windscreen itself. Big, family-size tear-offs. At Le Mans you have something like 16 tear-offs on the screen and at every pit stop one of the mechanics will lift the wipes, tear off the plastic and suddenly you have a brand-new pristine-clean windscreen. It’s ace.
In motocross they have one on a reel on the helmet visor, which sounds like a good idea, because at least you don’t gets bits of plastic flying around, and after all, it’s that bit better for the environment. But I guess in Formula One it would be (official reason) aerodynamically inefficient and (unofficial reason) just not cool enough.
Meanwhile, I’m often asked if I’d be buried with my helmet hat and the answer is no – because I’ll probably be cremated. But it’s certainly true that if you see the funeral of a driver, you generally see their helmet on a stand. You might wonder if it’s in bad taste, especially if the driver died racing. After all, the helmet didn’t save them. But I don’t think it matters, really. It’s more about the symbolism. The fact that they died doing something they loved, and that being a racing driver was very much a part of their identity.
As for me, the helmet I’d take with me to the afterlife would be my 2009 Monaco-winning helmet. It’s the only helmet I’ve got stored in a Perspex case, and is one of two helmets that are supremely precious to me. That’s because it was such a special race. I’d gone into it as Championship leader, not done as well as hoped in practice, and in qualifying was trailing Rubens and Sebastian. Until I put in a late lap – the lap, the lap that I’m still likely to say is my favourite-ever, depending on when I’m asked and how I’m feeling at the time – which put me on pole.
After that, I won the race only to park in the wrong place, which meant I had to run down to the podium. And then I partied with Prince Albert at the after-race knees-up, and then on Monday we invented Super Monday. Special, special, special.
The other helmet is the one I was wearing in Brazil that same year, when we actually clinched the World title.
We used to have baggier overalls with pockets in them and a Velcro belt. You’d do a photo shoot and have your hands in your pockets looking like something out of the Littlewoods catalogue.
I’m taking the piss but I liked that, actually. I liked the fact that you had something to do with your hands. Here I am standing looking out over Monaco harbour, what should I do with my hands? Oh, I know, I’ll store them in this handily placed pocket.
Other than that you don’t really need a pocket. I’m sure in the days of James Hunt and Co. they required pockets for a packet of 20 Embassy and a gold-plated Ronson lighter, but these days there isn’t quite the need, and with the emphasis on keeping things lightweight, they’ve got rid of the pockets, and the Velcro belt has gone, too.
I’m not so bothered about the Velcro belt but I do mourn the demise of the pockets. I think that removing the pockets has made the job of looking cool in overalls – which is, after all, a driver’s primary role – that bit harder.
At least we’re all the same now. The worst thing was that it was one of those marginal gains (more of which later) that took a while to catch on. We at McLaren lost our pockets early doors, but not everybody did. Other drivers would see you coming in the paddock and deliberately put their hands in their pockets, openly mocking you. I think most people are the same nowadays, thank God, but it was tough.
Obviously, your suit is plastered with sponsors’ logos. But so is your underwear, so that if you unzip the top bit of your overalls there are more logos underneath, like a Russian doll. Mind you, it’s frowned upon, unzipping your overalls. The teams like you to keep the overalls zipped up, ostensibly because it’s smarter but who wants to bet that it’s really to do with sponsorship. We prefer to unzip them, though. Firstly, because they can get a bit hot, and secondly because zipped up they don’t leave a lot to the imagination.
Yup. It happens. It really does. I remember my second-to-last race in 2016. Brazil, it was, the penultimate race of the season – the race before Abu Dhabi, at which I was due to retire.
It was wet, which should have been perfect conditions for me, and one of those races that I could wring the neck out of and maybe do a little better than expected. I certainly hoped to beat my teammate at the time, who was Fernando.
Turn one, it hit me. I had a bit of wobble, figuratively and literally. The circuit was treacherous with rain and I was sliding all over the place. This was the race I mentioned earlier, where Max Verstappen really showed his skills in the wet. Well, as he was doing that up front, muggins here, the former wet-race specialist, was sliding all over the place at the back, feeling very much not in control of his car, desperately trying and failing to find grip, and feeling…
Fearful.
For the first time ever, I was scared.
I didn’t tell anyone at the time. I’ve hardly told a soul since. But I suffered a loss of nerve that day. It was because I knew I was retiring, and as a result all I could think about was hurting myself. The race was super wet, a tough circuit that even though it had been so good to me over the years was still a dangerous one.
This is not something you’d normally think about. Usually, in fact, you’re not thinking in those terms at all. I’ll talk about distractions in a bit but I can save you the bother of reading that section by saying that you don’t let anything distract you when you’re driving. It’s not a case of having to consciously banish distractions. They simply don’t occur to you. You’re a driving machine and that’s it.
But here I was, thinking. I was thinking, There are two races to go. I don’t want to hurt myself. Not when I’ve achieved so much, come so far.
I was scaring myself, that was the problem. My head was not in the right place, and I think that’s probably the most dangerous scenario. You tense up, and when you tense up like that it’s so easy for the car to snap. A bit of oversteer, a bit of understeer, it just goes. You might be going through a corner, hit a river, and if you snatch at the steering you lose grip and it’s bang, gone, you’re in the wall at 150mph. I didn’t want to finish my career like that, or possibly not walk away from something. Ask me my scariest moment in a race car and that was it.
And here’s the kicker. Because it was a wet race I was finding it tough to drive the car, which was exacerbating the psychological issue, which made it even harder to drive the car, and because of that I couldn’t get heat in the tyres, and because of that it made the driving more difficult, which in turn made the psychological issue worse.
As soon as you get tyre temperature in the wet, things get easier, you can start pushing the car and taking risks, but I couldn’t even get to that stage.
It’s not uncommon. I’ve heard it said by other drivers that the fear kicks in once you decide to retire. For that reason I think it would be better if you decided, announced and did it all in one go, but of course it can never work like that for many reasons.
Of those who finished, I came last. Fernando, miles in front, was over a second faster than me. I was embarrassed with my performance; I was gutted. Coming in and seeing the team, was the most embarrassing to me. Crashing: shit happens, you say sorry. But to put in such a lacklustre performance was just mortifying. I didn’t tell them that I was scared. I just said I didn’t turn the tyres on, which I couldn’t, because I didn’t drive fast enough to turn the tyres on. I don’t mind saying that I don’t think anyone’s better than me in those conditions, but that day, nobody was worse than me. All I could think was that a year ago I would have destroyed that race.
Not to be confused with the above, but I do also struggle with nerves, excitement and adrenalin – it all comes at once. How do I deal with it? I don’t think I do. I think I just breathe and tell myself, You’ve got this. You know what you’re doing.
It’s the same with anything I do: triathlons, racing, presenting. And I think it’s because you care. That’s why you get nervous. Which means, of course, that it’s a good thing to get nervous: it’s because you care about what you’re doing. It also means that when you do achieve something it’s going to mean so much more to you.
For that reason I’d never want to get rid of my nerves completely, even if I could; they help you feel present in the moment, they’re how you understand that you’re doing something different and special. You should nurture and treasure them, not fear them.
That’s the difficulty for some people, I think. They let nerves get in the way of Doing Cool Stuff. They don’t do the stuff because they’re too nervous about it.
Me, I get nervous. No doubt. If it’s something worth doing I get nervous. And I also know that the only way to get over your nerves about something is to do it. I mean, it would be so easy to go through life and not be nervous, but that would mean never being out of your comfort zone, and then how would you get the best out of yourself?
I do speeches onstage and in the first 30 seconds I can hear the trepidation in my voice. You might make a little slip-up or rush the answer to something. I say to myself, why the hell are you nervous? Just relax, breathe, take your time,
Thing is, though, although I say that to myself every time, it doesn’t really get better.
I nearly had a panic attack while driving once. It was in 2004, the first-ever Chinese Grand Prix. It was, and still is, hosted at the Shanghai International Circuit where there are four corners where the G-force is so intense that you can’t breathe.
Fair play, I was warned. My engineer said, ‘You probably won’t breathe on those four corners, because the G-force is five-plus’ like it was nothing.
I was like, Really? Come on... And then I went out, tried to breathe, couldn’t breathe, and got a bit… well, worried. Not panicked. That tale is to come. But certainly more than slightly concerned, a feeling that was characterised by a sense of incredible claustrophobia. I didn’t faint, though, thank God, because driving a car around the circuit in China is not a time you want to be fainting.
The panic, though. That was another time. In 2014 I was fitness training someplace overseas that I won’t name for reasons that will shortly become clear. Perhaps training a little too hard, I developed quite serious back pain. So bad that I couldn’t walk, and if I lay down I couldn’t get up.
So I took myself off to this little sports clinic they had in the hotel, where the nurse took a look and said, ‘Right, we’re going to give you an injection.’
‘Where?’ I said.
‘In here,’ she said.
‘No,’ I said, ‘whereabouts on the body?’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘it’s in the bum.’
‘Okay,’ I said, and assumed the position.
In went the needle, and I can only assume she got it wrong. Well, something went wrong anyway, because all of a sudden I was in very serious pain.
And I mean big pain. Proper searing agony.
‘I’m going to faint,’ I managed. ‘I’m going to faint, I’m going to faint,’ and she removed the needle but by then it was too late and I had indeed lost consciousness.
My companion at the time said I had gone white and then purple and that I’d stopped breathing. I remember coming round and finding myself in a weird state of suspension between conscious and unconscious. I could hear things. I could hear people talking in the room. But I wasn’t there with them yet. It was as though I was underwater and very slowly moving towards a light-dappled surface.
When I eventually opened my eyes, I was even more confused and that gave me a moment of full-on, almost-losing-the-plot panic, which I’m pretty sure is the only time I’ve ever properly panicked in my life. All I can say is that when it comes to panic you know it when you feel it, and I certainly felt it then.
Still, I left it there in the clinic – or thought I had.
Then, about five months later, it happened on a plane. Suddenly I felt terribly claustrophobic. It wasn’t as though I felt trapped on the plane. Maybe a bit. But it was more that I was trapped inside my own body. Gripped by an overwhelming urge to get out.
I had a word with myself. Got through it. Feeling very rattled about it, though, I took myself off to the doctor. He gave me an X-ray.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing wrong with you.’
‘Are you sure?’ I said, squinting at the X-rays in search of strange shadows or bits of shrapnel.
He said, ‘I’m sure it’s a mental thing. We can give you some drugs to sort it out, but to be honest it’s something you’ve got to deal with on your own. It might be tough and it might be freaky at times, but you’ve got to try and get a handle on it.’
It’s a type of anxiety, he added. According to him it’s like a brain fart (my terminology, not his). It’s when you’re not doing anything and your brain goes into a kind of zombie slumber state. It’s like a form of accidental meditation. Then, when your brain kicks into gear, it feels as though it’s behind your body.
‘That’s the feeling you’re having,’ he told me. ‘It’s your brain trying to play catch up.’
And he was right that getting a handle on it is very much something that I’ve had to sort out myself. Sure enough, I’ve found myself in a situation in which I’m struggling, like being on a plane or in a confined space, I sort of flash back to that moment in the hotel sports clinic, and I can sense a residual feeling of panic wanting to return. At these times I have to be careful to manage it, not let it find its full expression.
It’s no longer an issue because I’ve learnt to control it, which is mainly down to controlling my breathing. Or, rather it was about remembering to breathe, because that, essentially, was the problem: I was not remembering to breathe.
Like I say, I told no one. This is because, a.) if you tell someone that makes it A Thing, and I didn’t want to give it that lofty status, b.) I’m British and we tend not to discuss that sort of thing, preferring to drink tea, slice cucumber for our sandwiches and address the important subject of the weather, and c.) I’m a Formula One driver and if there any chinks in our armour we cover them up; we do our best to hide them, because our rivals certainly won’t be revealing their frailties any time soon.
Because I was still racing in F1 I’d occasionally get this feeling while at work. I remember being on the massage couch with Mikey working on me, and having to get up and walk outside. I told him that I needed some fresh air, and I did, although I knew there was more to it than that.
Sure enough, outside in the fresh air I felt no better. I was still thinking, I feel like I’m going to faint. (Only I know I’m not going to faint, it’s just that breathing thing again.) Except I think I’m going to faint. Which, of course, brings a whole new level of anxiety, in turn worsening the fear of fainting.
I got there, though. As with other times. I overcame the feeling by remembering to breathe and relax. You’re thinking, Yeah, easy. It’s not. It took me over a year to get a handle on that little lot.
It’s true. We talk about ‘issues in the race’. You know, if you get a puncture on the rear, you have to close and thus lock the differential or risk damage because one wheel’s turning a lot faster than the other. If you break a front wing, you need to let us know before you come into the pits. Things like that. Never If you have a crash and think your leg’s fallen off, this is what to do.
What we did have, however, was a procedure for quick extraction out of the car. This came via an FIA ruling, which said that you can’t race unless you can get out of the car and put both feet on the floor in five seconds flat.
It became a bit of a competition. The FIA steward would get to you and he’d been to five teams already and you’re, like, ‘What’s the time to beat?’
He’d be, ‘Well, Vettel did it in three point seven.’
So you’re, ‘Okay, let’s try and beat it.’
You’d do it. ‘Go on then,’ you’d say, ‘what was my time?’
‘You did it in three point nine. Well done, you passed…’
‘Wait, wait, wait. Where do you think you’re going? Let me have another go…’
And you’d do it in three point five. And your knees are sore and you’ve done your back in, but it was worth it knowing that you’ve won.
Another thing: we were told not to exit the car until we were informed that it’s safe. Teams can tell from sensors on the car what sort of G the driver has pulled in the crash and if you’ve pulled 35G, which is the limit for possible distortion to the neck, you’ll need to wait for the all-clear to get out.
So if your car catches fire, say, you get out in your five seconds. If you crash, though, and it’s a crash at speed, you have to wait to hear, and it may well be that you’ll need to be seen by medics and attended to by FIA stewards who will extract you from the car still strapped into your seat so that your neck doesn’t move (the in-car rig that allows this was introduced to the sport by the late, great Sid Watkins, the neurosurgeon who probably did more to improve safety in the sport than anybody else). They can do this in about four minutes flat. They help you out, in the seat, having spoken to you first ensure that you’ve replied to them in the correct manner and then they take you out.
Crashing is a disappointment, of course, but I’ve never been upset with the team for something breaking, ever, even when I’ve had suspension failure and hit the barriers really hard in testing, which is a horrible feeling. The air is sucked out of your lungs, you’ve got nothing in you any more. It’s just that feeling of being winded. The worst, most horrible feeling.
Not only that, but if you hit a tyre barrier at speed you’re never sure if you’re going to come out the other side. It doesn’t matter how hard you hit it, you can always see the worst.
The real scary stuff is the car stopping so quickly, like when it hits something, because that’s when you pull the high G and your brain moves in your skull and you either get brain or neck damage or you’re dead. When you see a race car rolling it looks really bad, but of the ‘bad’ crashes it’s one of the safest, because you’ve got your roll protection, you’re wearing your helmet hat and the roll action is taking the sting out of the stopping.
The first race that Brittny attended was the opening race of 2016 in Melbourne, when Fernando Alonso had a nasty crash. Got airborne, rolled it into a wall. But he got out. He was dazed, but okay because he didn’t hit anything hard, because although he came to rest against the wall, it wasn’t like he ‘hit’ it. You look at the crash, it looks bad. Just the state of his car afterwards. It looks like it’s been through the crusher. You might even think it looks worse than me hitting the wall at Monaco in 2003. But of the two mine was potentially much worse, because of the sudden stop.
And I bet any money he went back to look at that accident on YouTube, because it’s a fact of life that you can’t help but feel proud of a crash like that; you watch it and you think, I got out of that.
With all drivers, especially younger drivers, if they have a big shunt and it scares them, you need to put them in a car straightaway. If they have a week to think about it they might not be the same ever again. So, you’ve got to get them over it immediately. I know it’s an old-school way of doing it, but it works.
As far as I’m concerned – and apart from that situation – I’ve never really been fearful in Formula One. It is, after all, a very safe sport, despite the obvious dangers. I guess that as a racer I take more risks in my life than a lot of people but I don’t tend to worry about myself as much as I worry about family and friends driving. As a family we often used to go indoor karting, and I remember feeling very anxious watching my dad and sisters tearing around the track. I didn’t enjoy it as much as I should have done for that reason.
Extend that feeling and I can understand why, as a parent, it must be tough seeing your kid race knowing that he could get hurt. I can understand how my mum didn’t like it at first. Maybe never really got used to it. Sorry, Mum.
Sometimes you can get in the car a bit early, feel like you’re dozing off and get an erection. Look, it happens, okay? Why do you think they call it a cockpit?
Farting’s great because it stays in the cockpit. I’d always call my mechanic over. ‘Mate, can I ask you something?’ and he’d put his head in the cockpit and know instantly. ‘Aw, you dirty bastard’ and then I’d hold his arms so he couldn’t get away.
I’m telling you, this is what passes for sophisticated humour in a Formula One garage.
I’ve never done a wee in the car, because I think it’s disgusting. (Whereas farting on your mechanic’s head is fine. That, in fact, is exactly where I draw the line.) I know that drivers have done it, though, and I’m sure it couldn’t be avoided but I still wonder how it happens, because if you’re managing your hydration correctly, then you should have drunk exactly the right amount. What’s more, you should be sipping it, and as you know, if you sip a drink you don’t wee as much; it’s when you drink in gulps that it goes right through you. These are the things you have to learn as an F1 driver: don’t gulp, sip.
When I started in F1, I got sick a lot, often when I turned up at tests. As a result, teams thought that I was trying to get out of testing the car, which is a fairly ridiculous notion, given that I lived and breathed racing. Why on earth would I not want to test the car?
So anyway, I’d say, ‘No, trust me, I am ill’, and I’d be in my hotel room feeling totally crock. It was the physio of the team who told me, ‘You can only drink rice water.’
I was like, ‘You what?’
It’s true. It’s a thing. Basically when they boil rice, they take the rice out and give you the water to drink, so what you get is a cup of insanely starchy water. And the brilliant thing is, it works: it helps you hydrate and helps everything stick together. You stop feeling so nauseous.
And then you’re put on solids, which would be rice or pasta with no sauce, something very bland, before they might let you have some proper, grown-up food.
I don’t get that problem any more. I think it’s because the standard of food across the board has improved so much, nowhere more so than on flights. Or maybe it was simply a case of me, a bloke from Somerset, adjusting to the life of a globe-trotting sex symbol. My constitution couldn’t quite handle it.
Other things: your neck goes. F1 drivers tend to have very pronounced neck muscles as well as greater-than-usual incidences of sore neck simply because there’s so much pressure on your neck. Coming in from the drive, you’ll be getting out of the car and just feel it go. It just goes solid. So you have to watch for that.
What else? I’ve had cramping in my leg before from the brake pedal. I’ve had a couple of cars where the master cylinder of the brakes is bigger, meaning the brake pedal’s even firmer and then you’ve got to hit the pedal even harder, making it almost undriveable at Monza. I’m not joking. At the end of an hour and a half, your leg is ready to give up.
I’ll tell you something else that racing drivers are especially susceptible to, and it’s not just dry skin, although that definitely is one, it’s wrinkles. Again, I’m not kidding. Put your hands to your face and now drag the skin downwards. That’s your skin when you’re wearing a helmet. Add that to the dry skin issue – which is a result of all the travel – and it’s wrinkle city in there.