Something that we all need as drivers is good hand-to-eye coordination. For that you need the BATAK wall. It’s like a very big and sophisticated version of the old Simon Says game, where you have to hit the lights as they come on. So it’s testing and improving your reaction times as well as working on your peripheral vision, because the idea is that you’re supposed to just stare straight in front and rely on your peripheral vision to see the outer lights, which is good for drivers.
Most drivers have better than 20/20 vision. I don’t know what’s better than 20/20 vision: ‘20/20 vision plus’, I guess. They say my eyesight is as good as it ever was, but I’m not so sure. If I’m looking at a timing screen in a race, it’s not quite as clear as it used to be. Time will tell, I suppose.
Told you we’d get here. These days the younger drivers are taught the doctrine of good diet and fitness from the year dot. Whether they take any notice of it is up to them, and perhaps if they’re already the right size and shape for a racing driver (e.g., small) then they can get away with being a bit relaxed on that front.
The rest of us? Ah, not so much. I fell slightly between the generations: too old for the incomers who are taught the benefit of nutrition and exercise and provided with all the support they need to make the most of the advice they’re given; too young to be a fully paid-up member of the Watney’s Red Barrel brigade.
I was one of those who pretty much had to find out for myself. I’m not going to say that I was in the vanguard of a new way of thinking in Formula One, leading the charge, changing things from within. No. I’m going to leave you to come to that conclusion by yourself.
Neither am I for one second ragging on any of the generations that came before me. No way. I’ve driven an F1 car from back in the 1970s and I can tell you that fitness came a distant second to bravery where the drivers were concerned. Those things were dangerous. Drivers were surrounded by petrol tanks. One spark and the lot goes up in an inferno. They’re awkward to drive, too, because they’re not built with the driver in mind. It’s more like, ‘Here’s the car, get in and drive it,’ so your arms are sticking out at strange angles. You’re trying to manage the gear stick. You’re trying to not become a human fireball. Frankly, being a fearless contortionist is more important than being fit.
So the cars changed, and of course drivers had to adapt. I’d be interested to see a graph of the increased neck musculature in the average Formula One driver versus the increase in G-forces across the board. I bet there’s an exact correlation. It’s probably equally fair to say that as the engineers came up with more aerodynamic cars the G-forces increased, it took drivers a while to latch onto the fact that they needed to up their game.
Back in the day, nobody was promoting fitness. It was just me and Mark Webber pretty much. Nowadays, every driver’s posting and I think for many different reasons: one, because they need to train; two, because it looks good on social media and reflects well on them; three, because the team sees them working hard and focusing on their job.
This last is an important consideration, because when the driver’s away from the team, the team doesn’t know what the driver’s doing. Are they just partying or are they actually working on trying to make themselves a better racing driver? Oh look there’s a social media post of him doing some star jumps. What a good boy.
But why do you need to be fit, you ask, when all you’re doing is driving? Well, we’ve already talked about the effort involved in braking. You can’t run the power steering too high either, because you lose feeling from the car. Personally, I like to run the power steering low, because I want to feel more through the car. Another reason is the high-frequency vibration you’re subject to. They try and dampen it (because it’s bad for the car, not because they care about you) but even so, you still have a lot of high-frequency vibrations while driving, which for the driver gets very tiring because of the build-up of lactic acid, which is wearing for your muscles and mentally draining as well.
Being fit is the best way to quickly disperse lactic acid in your body. That and staying hydrated by putting in the right fluids into your body, the right salts and minerals.
For me, another way to help with it was to cycle, because cycling on the roads in the UK, you get a lot of vibrations and that builds up a lot of lactic acid and it’s how your body deals with the issue.
Added to all of that, you need high levels of fitness to withstand the huge amount of G-force you’re subjected to in high-speed corners.
A further thing you have to bear in mind in terms of withstanding G is your weight. For drivers like me who are tall, it’s a difficult balance because we have to be fit, we have to be strong, and we have to have good cardiovascular fitness.
But we also had to be the weight of a jockey.
So me, I’m super-light for someone who’s six foot tall, just 6 per cent body fat, which is at the very lower end of the ‘athlete’ scale (the ‘average’ is 18–24 per cent body fat), but I also had to be muscular as well because I had to have the strength to drive the car.
It used to be the case that the weight of the car and the driver were considered together, and that to bring the package up to the minimum weight requirement, teams could make up the shortfall by adding ballast to the car and thus optimise its balance. Clearly this gave an advantage to the shorter and/or skinnier drivers, especially when you consider the calculation that 10kg of extra weight on a driver translates to three-tenths of a second lap time, which in our world is longer than sitting through all three Godfather movies.
However, the regulations in F1 have changed so the minimum weight for a driver is 80kg now and if you’re only 65kg, you have to ballast up, and that ballast has to go in the cockpit, not elsewhere in the car, so you no longer benefit from being skinny. But when I was racing, if you were light you were light, and if you were heavy then you were heavy, and the latter would really hurt you because the car would be overweight.
So it was a big deal. Some of the guys were starving themselves. Drivers like Nico Hülkenberg and Adrian Sutil, who were even taller than me, were just skin and bones. So we had a drivers’ meeting where the majority agreed that it was wrong. It shouldn’t be like this. And Felipe Massa, who was probably the shortest driver and definitely one of the lightest, piped up and said, ‘No, it’s the rules, it’s what it is.’
We were, like, Are you kidding? He was gaining lap time simply because he’s 20kg lighter than some of the drivers. How could you be like that? How can you want to win like that?
‘Well, it’s the regulations, isn’t it?’
‘Well, that’s why we’re trying to change it.’
He never understood how bad he looked by saying that. It never occurred to him to wonder why nobody else agreed with him. And the reason that nobody else agreed with him was because we all believed it should be a level playing field. Let the talent, let the cars do the talking, not how good you are at saying no to cream cakes. Very strange.
So to diet, and at McLaren we had the late Dr Aki Hintsa to advise on nutrition. I went to Finland to spend some time with him where we went cross-country skiing and he helped me with my diet, especially regarding my post-training nutrition. Below is the way I roll if I’m training, say to get in shape for racing, or for a triathlon.
A man should be eating 2,500 calories without doing any fitness at all. Me, I’ve got a very fast metabolism. I can eat a lot of ice cream, for example, and get away with it. Yeah, all right. Don’t hate me.
In the morning, pre-training, I find it difficult to get enough calories in my system, so to start with I would have porridge with berries and almond milk to give me more calories, not just water, and maybe some granola and chia seeds on top as well. So that would be my start to the day, which is about 500 calories.
I’d train for a couple of hours on a bike, eating every hour, obviously hydrating the whole time. You’re supposed to do a bottle an hour of liquid – 750mgs – although I probably didn’t do quite as much as I should, maybe more like 500mgs.
At the end of the ride, I’d have a protein shake with carbohydrates in powder form, about 300 calories.. This doesn’t taste of anything, it just adds to the carbohydrates that you need post-training.
If you’re doing a severe training session then you maybe need more carbs. You don’t need it if you’re doing a 30-minute run or a high heart-rate run. It’s the long stuff that you really need to get the carbohydrates in for a run of an hour or longer, or a cycle ride of two-and-a-half, three hours. That was my biggest issue: I couldn’t get enough carbohydrates in, but I didn’t want to eat sugar, because sugar deposits as fat, and you get a massive peak and then you drop.
I would eat lunch as soon as I could after training, which would be high in protein, Normally, it would be either fish or chicken, usually chicken, as well as trying to get the greens in, up to about 700 calories.
In the afternoon, I’d do an hour-and-a-half swim, or go for an hour run. Straight after that a protein shake again, so about 300 calories, I guess.
Again, protein. It sounds like a hell of a lot of food, but you’ve got to think how much you’re burning doing those activities. I was doing three to four hours a day, and even though I was eating that much I’d still struggle to get the enough food, especially enough carbs in. How would I know if I wasn’t getting enough carbs? My recovery would suffer. The next day I’d get up and I’d be in bits; I wouldn’t be able to train. So I knew I wasn’t getting enough energy into my system to refuel the muscles.
All this is what I learnt initially from Dr Aki. How you have to supplement your fitness with the right food and enough recovery time, and if you don’t do that, you get less fit.
Mind you, I still got it wrong. Training for triathlons in 2017, I was pushing myself too hard, not getting enough rest and probably not putting enough food into my body, so I was just getting less and less fit until it was just too much and every time I trained I was weak.
I remember going to see a specialist in Monaco. He was doing all the fat checks and everything.
He said, ‘You’re twelve per cent fat.’
I was like, ‘What? All the training I do?’
He said, ‘Oui, vous is putting beaucoup de carbohydrates into votre body you don’t need.’
‘Well, what do I do?’
He said, ‘Pas de carbohydrates pour le breakfast.’
Which translates as no carbs at breakfast.
I was, like, ‘But isn’t that the time you should eat carbohydrates? Aren’t they fuel that you can use during the day?’
He said, ‘Non. If you eat them at breakfast, votre body’s going to crave them pour le rest of the day. It’s all to do with your insulin spiking.’ He said, ‘I promise vous, in two weeks that if you don’t eat carbohydrates pour le breakfast and instead of eating pasta at lunch eat sweet potato or brown rice you will lose a significant amount of fat.’
‘Okay,’ I said,
So I did as he said and went back two weeks later: 6 per cent body fat. I’d lost 6 per cent body fat by not eating carbohydrates for breakfast and not eating pasta at lunch but eating brown rice or sweet potato instead.
‘Well done, vous,’ he said.
A driver will lose about three litres of fluid during a race. As you can appreciate, then, you need to stay hydrated and you need to do it right or you will undoubtedly struggle with dehydration. (And this is why I get surprised when I hear about drivers needing a wee on the car.)
At McLaren, I spent quite a lot of time with GSK, GlaxoSmith-Kline, who were the team sponsor. I went to their offices and their sports facility in London, which was great fun. I gave them a rundown of my training schedule and told them what I eat during the day. They did all the tests to tell me where I was in my fitness and where I should be, how much carbohydrates I should be eating, how much protein and so on.
‘Your carb intake is good,’ they said, ‘but you’re a little bit high in fat. You need to cut down on your fat and make sure that the fat you have is from nuts rather than animal fat.’
On my next visit I met the Brownlee brothers, triathlete Olympic Champions Johnny and Alistair, and what GSK did was to pit me against them: we did strength-training comparisons, and then they put us all on bikes, monitored our perspiration, heart rate and so on.
I was against Johnny for that one, and I caught him looking across at me and realised that he was nervous. I was like, ‘Mate, you’re an Olympic athlete, you’re going to kick my arse.’
But he said, ‘You’re not sweating, you look so relaxed.’
So we did the test, the results came in, and mine were good, but obviously not on the same level as his.
Then we did reaction tests and I destroyed them as I expected to, even though I’m older, because that’s part of my job, and really the only area where I’d expect to better them.
GSK also did caffeine tests. How much caffeine should I have before the race? I did six separate goes in the simulator. The first day there was no caffeine at all, the second day they gave me tablets to take, did a reaction test, jumped in, did the simulator, got out, did a reaction test.
The next time was, like, three tablets of caffeine and so on, until it went up so much that by the sixth day I was wide-eyed and shaking and they realised that it was too high. Literally, high.
What they worked out was that for me the perfect amount of caffeine is like a double espresso before a race, which is 150mgs of caffeine. Well, that should have been okay, but I started doing it, and I remember my foot bouncing on the throttle pedal through corners, I was that jittery. I can only assume that the boffins at GSK somehow forgot to factor in the adrenalin, or didn’t make enough allowance for it.
Aside from that, though, it was a great experience with GSK, and I really enjoyed working hard on those areas. For me, it was an area where I thought no one’s better than me. You may have pockets in your overalls, but you won’t beat me on diet and fitness.
GSK also did all the tests for my salt levels in order to determine how much I should hydrate over a race weekend. They do salt checks, to see how much salt you lose in your sweat, and used those findings to create a special saline solution just for me and Lewis. This is the solution we have in the car that’s fed to you via a straw that comes up through the helmet, and is dispensed via a button on the wheel.
I’m not sure if it’s an apocryphal tale that NASA spent millions developing a pen that would work in space and the Russians just used a pencil. But there’s a similar irony at work when it comes to our fluid-dispensing button. Really, it would be easier to suck. Why we don’t just suck I have no idea. Possibly it’s thought to be a marginal gain. Maybe it’s the fact that the fluid-dispensing button is every driver’s favourite button and who wants to get rid of that particular comfort blanket?
To be honest, though, sucking would be easier, especially as the button can be a bit fearsome, fire out more quickly than you’re expecting (every time – gets you every bloody time) hits you in the back of the throat and makes you cough up saline solution onto the inside of your visor.
Furthermore, what happens if the little motor that powers the fluid-dispensing gizmo breaks? What then?
I’ll tell you, because it happened to me in Malaysia in 2001. It was 33 degrees that year. I was jabbing the button, expecting to feel the refreshing and ultimately life-giving burst of liquid into my throat – only nothing was happening.
Kept jabbing in the hope that it was a temporary fault, that the motor was going to kick back into life, but it didn’t. Well, the race is an hour and a half and I didn’t drink at all. I’d hydrated beforehand, of course, but probably not sufficiently, and anyway, I only drank water in those days. This was before the era of the saline solution.
About 45 minutes into the race, I started shivering. I was feeling cold, even though the ambient temperature was 33 degrees. After about an hour and fifteen minutes, my eyesight began to blur.
‘Er, guys…’ I began, and told them what was happening.
‘JB, just try and relax as much as you can,’ was their sage advice.
Either it’s a savage indictment of the sport’s cavalier attitude to health and safety, or a measure of our total and utter commitment that it didn’t occur to any of us that I should pit for water, or even waste five seconds taking on water during a pit stop. And the fact was that I overcame my sickness and I finished the race but, oh my God, I felt so bad that evening. I didn’t sleep, I felt so sick. I was drinking as much as I could all night but I was still destroyed. It was worse than any triathlon I’ve ever done. Everything gets affected. Going to the toilet is horrible. It doesn’t come out the way it should. You get headaches, dizziness and sickness. You feel sick, you’re spaced out. It’s the worst feeling. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
The idea of marginal gains came from the Sky cycling team, although I think that was more in the sense that they put a name to something we’d been doing anyway, because one thing Formula One has always been pretty good at is detail. Sports that deal in tenths of seconds tend to be.
So what are marginal gains? They’re the little things that when you add them all up add up to something greater. There’s a famous story that in 1934 Mercedes scraped the white paint off their car to save weight, giving birth to their silver livery.
Well, that was what you’d call a marginal gain – decades before the term was coined.
These days it can be anything. At one end of the scale it’s the sensors – over 100 of them – that we have all over the car. They measure stress and downforce, brake temperature, tyre tread, fuel use, G-force, everything, and this information is fed back to the strategists, every tiny bit of it analysed to see if any setting can be improved.
One quite famous one is the sensors they have on the pit guns so they know the optimum angle for the gun operator to use when he applies the gun to the nut in order to loosen it faster.
We’re talking a fraction of a second here – but that’s what marginal gains is all about: it’s hundreds, maybe thousands of tiny changes that taken together all add up.
Remember the marbles we were talking about? The little bits of waste rubber that flick off the tyre. Sometimes this rubber would sit on a part of the car where they might affect the aerodynamics, so teams would oil it up or apply a special glaze on it so that the rubber would fly off so that you wouldn’t lose any down-force. They worked very hard on making sure that the car was seamless. Everything should fit together absolutely perfectly, any seam should be taped. They worked incredibly hard on making sure that gear shifts were as smooth as possible. Normally in a race car the shift is so short that there’s a jolt, quite an aggressive one, but we worked out that those shifts were costing us 0.008 second per shift, so they made them seamless. For the driver it wasn’t great; you’d be driving and not feel it shifting, no jolt whatsoever, but the trade-off was the gain, and we were always working on that. Always trying to be quicker.
We’d always be trying to make sure the car was as light as possible. So not only did you used to have drivers starving themselves, and they took away our Velcro belt and even our pockets (sniff), but they took a closer look at the overalls, and what we decided to do was have two suits. There was a ‘going out’ set, which was the suit we wore to sponsor events, photo shoots and meeting the Queen. These overalls had the beautifully embroidered sponsors’ badges sewn on.
Then we had the suits that we raced in, where the sponsors’ badges were heat-treated onto the fabric, so that they added no weight to the suit. Next they took the straps off the gloves, which was a weight saving of 20g per glove. Then the boots we wore became shoes. Then the shoelaces in our shoes disappeared.
There were other little tricks, too. You’d often see cars driving off the racing line after the race. That’s because they were trying to pick up all the marbles in order to increase the weight of the car because they’d been running underweight, and so after that they’d drive onto the dirt and be picking up all kinds of rocks. You could get a couple of kilos that way.
On second thoughts, I’m not sure if that counts as a marginal gain.
It was Benetton’s Team Director, Mike Gascoyne, who said to me, ‘You’re never going to get anywhere unless you have an understanding of the car.’
That was the year 2001, a shocking year for me, as I’ve already said. But in fact, I’d started my racing career with a not-bad understanding of vehicle basics. In 1995, I’d joined Paul Lemmens’ GKS Karting team in Belgium. There, I became teammates with Sophie Kumpen, who was then dating Jos Verstappen and who would go on to have a baby called Max with him and oh God I feel old.
Anyway, staying with Paul and Co. in Belgium we were asked to pay our way by maintaining the karts, which meant building the karts, taking engines out so they could be re-tuned, replacing them.
At first I hated it, because I had no understanding of a racing car or kart. Mechanical engineering was definitely not a strong point of mine. But I learnt so much there that it really helped me later on in life and was to stand me in good stead when I took note of Benetton’s not-so-gentle urgings, put the life of a lazy playboy behind me and knuckled down to learning my trade.
I soon discovered that I literally didn’t know enough. Understanding what weight transfer does, for example. In my second year in F1 I was braking too gently too early. I was braking early, turning in, getting on the throttle, understeering through the corner, making a right dog’s dinner of it.
It was a really shit car but, still, my teammate was doing a better job. Over time, however, when I understood what the car was doing I found out how you get a car to pitch; I gained some understanding of weight transfer and because of this I realised that I was braking too early and not hard enough. It was a hangover from lower formulas where you brake early because you don’t want to drop your minimum speed too much, so you brake, carry the speed through the corner and get straight back on the power. Whereas, in F1, it’s all about being on power as long as possible, so you brake as late as you can, hammer the brakes, there’s so much stopping power, turn the car and then accelerate out of the corner. I didn’t understand that and I didn’t understand why braking early was an issue until I understood about weight transfer, how when you brake hard that makes the front grip and you can turn the car easier, and then get on the throttle.
It’s not just the mechanical side of it; it’s also caring about your car. In karting I learnt to have so much more respect for the karts as a result of having put them together myself.
That’s not something you do in F1, of course, but it’s definitely an ethos that I’ve carried across. It can be easy to divorce yourself from the human labour that goes into these things, especially when they just appear before you, ready and gleaming. But if you’ve put them together yourself – and / or if you remember that someone else has put them together and keep that human angle in mind – then you’ll find yourself being more considerate of the car. You’ll think, I don’t want to crash the car, I don’t want to damage the car.
I’ve always been like that throughout my career. I will go out of my way to not crash. Obviously, the whole idea of racing is to push your car to the limits, but I would normally build up to it, rather than going too far and coming back.
I remember doing an interview with Alain Prost – as in, I interviewed him – and he had exactly the same philosophy: you didn’t want to damage the car, you pushed it to the limit, but crashing was a no-no. He said, I would never normally do a manoeuvre where I thought I’m going to crash, or there’s too high a risk.
That was a proper eureka moment for me, because he had put into words what I’d always felt. As a kid watching Formula One you were either a fan of Ayrton Senna or Alain Prost, who were two of the greatest rivals the sport has ever seen. Youngsters especially gravitated towards Ayrton – I guess because he had that flair about him and could be very hot-headed. However, I always preferred Prost, the man they nicknamed ‘The Professor’. I loved his dedication and his methodical approach. It was like the tortoise and the hare. He wasn’t as quick as Ayrton over a lap but over a race he was just as fast – Prost was playing the marginal gains game way before it hit town.
So anyway, to do that interview with my hero and have him articulate exactly the way I felt about driving was a big moment for me. Unconsciously, I’d been emulating him. Not just in his racing style, but also in his whole approach to the sport, because he was definitely one who worked with the team, adapting the car to suit his style.
And to do that, you need to understand it.
I had a chat with another driver a couple of years back. ‘How was the car in the race?’ I asked him.
He said, ‘Yeah, good, it felt good.’
I said, ‘Did you do much set-up work before you went out?’
‘The team might have done,’ he replied, wearing his snapback.
I was, like, ‘Really?’
He said, ‘I just know I had to drive it really quick. But I don’t really know engineering-wise, I just tell them what’s wrong and they set it up for me.’
And I think that’s quite normal for drivers. The clue is in the job title.
But for some of us, it’s important to understand what’s wrong, as in, why the car doesn’t feel right. It’s about finding the right language to explain what’s wrong. And that can often come through developing a greater understanding of the machinery.
For example, you have understeer on the turn. They might say, ‘Shall we do the front wing?’
In other words: is the problem to do with aerodynamics?
And you go, ‘No, it feels like it’s more of a mechanical issue, because it’s at a lower speed.’
Already you’re talking their language. Because you’ve developed a knowledge of the car you have the confidence to meet them on their turf, and from that you get a proper meeting of minds. Yes, the engineer is the experienced one, he’s the one who’s educated. Most of these guys went to either Harvard if they went to school in America, or they went to Cambridge or Oxford. But they’re not the ones driving. Even if they were allowed in the car they wouldn’t be able to go quick enough to give meaningful feedback on how the car performs.
The person who does that is you. You’re the only person trusted to give feedback. It’s a cool feeling, being The One, but it’s also a scary feeling. And being able to give that feedback, being able to understand the car and communicating that to the team is of the utmost importance. That’s how you’ll give yourself the edge.