DRIVERS
DRIVERS
TRAINING FOR SUCCESS
You might think driving a car is a low-energy pursuit, but racing a Formula 1 car for up to two hours is a very different matter. F1 drivers must achieve fitness levels similar to athletes to build the strength and stamina to survive the rigors of a race—which means training like athletes do.
F1 cars aren’t built for comfort. There’s very little compliance in the suspension; the seat is hard carbon-fiber shell; and, once at racing speed, the driver is hit by forces many times that of gravity as the car accelerates, decelerates, and goes around corners. For example, because of the effect of engine braking, aerodynamic downforce, and energy-recovery systems, simply lifting your foot off the throttle while travelling at speed makes the car slow down sharply—about as much as if you hit the brakes in your road car hard enough to make all the wheels lock up. And that’s before the F1 driver starts braking.
At Monza in Italy, for example, the cars must slow from over 200 miles per hour to just 30 miles per hour for the first turn. That takes just 100 meters and around 1.9 seconds, during which the driver is subjected to over five times the force of gravity while standing on the (unassisted) brake pedal with a pressure equivalent to doing a 135-kilogram single-leg press in the gym.
Cornering forces also put the drivers through levels of physical stress common to fighter pilots, particularly in the neck area. Drivers target this area in the gym, along with other parts of the body that must grapple with the car—but here they have to be careful: muscle bulk alone isn’t the answer. Adding muscle also adds weight, and since the driver is counted as part of the car’s minimum weight allowance, heavier drivers can be at a disadvantage.
Cardiovascular fitness is also essential, because drivers have to manage the onboard electronic systems of the car while racing. Fatigue would diminish their ability to do that.
DRIVERS
RECORD HOLDERS
It’s common for fans to say that a particular driver lucked into a win, or that he only won the world championship because he had the best car. But Formula 1’s list of all-time winners is headed by undisputed greats.
Michael Schumacher is the most successful F1 driver of all time. Over a career in two parts—he retired in 2006, after fifteen years at the top, then made a three-season comeback from 2010–2012—he won seven world titles and ninety-one Grands Prix, and set sixty-eight pole positions and seventy-seven fastest laps.
Schumacher started 306 Grands Prix, second only to his former Ferrari teammate Rubens Barrichello, whose record of 322 starts may stand for some time, since no active driver has reached 300 at the time of publication.
The second most successful driver of all time in terms of wins is Lewis Hamilton, who passed former second-place man Alain Prost’s tally of fifty-one victories in 2016; Hamilton still has quite a way to go to match or exceed Schumacher, though. Another currently active driver, Sebastian Vettel, is the fourth most successful, having surpassed the legendary Ayrton Senna’s total of forty-one in 2015.
Vettel also has the record for most consecutive wins—nine—set during a dominant 2013 season with the Red Bull team. He beat the previous record of seven, jointly held by Schumacher (2004) and Alberto Ascari and Nico Rosberg.
A three-time champion, Senna is regarded as one of the greatest drivers ever to grace an F1 grid. Had a tragic accident at the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix not ended his life at the age of thirty-four, he likely would have set many record benchmarks much higher.
Some drivers set records that are unlikely to be beaten. Four-time champion Juan Manuel Fangio started 51 races having set pole position in twenty-nine of them, and he won twenty-four. He was also the oldest world champion, being aged forty-six when he lifted the trophy for the last time in 1957.
DRIVERS
SUCCESSES AND FAILURES
Since Formula 1 is a cooperative effort between a human being and a machine, success depends on the excellence of both coming together at the same time. The best driver in the best car is most likely to win races—provided the car doesn’t break down—but there are exceptions that prove the rule.
Equally, there were some outstandingly talented drivers who never quite achieved the success they deserved, usually through being in the wrong place—or, rather, the wrong seat—at the wrong time (we’ll detail those later). And, though F1 is mostly a meritocratic domain, since most people reach it through achieving success in junior formula, there have been drivers who should probably have shelved their ambitions before getting there.
Michael Schumacher is a notable success story (we’ve already seen a few of his records). He was drafted in as a short-notice replacement for another racer who’d been sent to jail, so an element of luck opened the door for him. But he made such an immediate impact on his debut, even though he burned out his clutch on the first lap of the race, that a fight broke out between team bosses to secure his signature on a long-term contract.
More recently, Max Verstappen—the son of one of Schumacher’s early teammates—became the subject of a bidding war while still racing in a junior formula. The Red Bull soft drink empire signed him to their young driver program and promoted him to F1 within months at the age of seventeen, before he’d even taken his road-car driving test. He won his first Grand Prix in 2016, aged eighteen.
Just as great drivers can arrive from out of nowhere, others of great pedigree and ability can fail to deliver on expectation. Michael Andretti, son of US racing legend Mario Andretti and a successful Indy Car driver in his own right, had a miserable part-season in F1 in 1993, leaving before the end of the year.
DRIVERS
WINNERS WHO NEVER WON
Some believe that Stirling Moss would have been a more deserving winner of the 1958 World Championship than Mike Hawthorn. Indeed, he probably should have won it—Hawthorn had briefly driven the wrong way up the track to rejoin after spinning off at the Portuguese Grand Prix, and Moss would have been well within his rights to protest the result and have Hawthorn disqualified.
Being a gentleman, Moss did no such thing. Although he won the last round of the season and netted an extra point by setting fastest lap, he missed the title by one point. Circumstances meant he never got that close again, although he finished third in 1959, 1960, and 1961.
In all, Moss scored sixteen victories in the sixty-six world championship races he started before an injury brought his racing career to a premature halt in 1962. Beyond F1, he won the Mille Miglia road race, many non-championship F1 events, and in sports cars won the Le Mans 24 Hours once and the Sebring 12 Hours twice. Not for nothing is he regarded as the greatest driver never to win the F1 world championship.
Moss is at the head of a decidedly small category. A separate but related one is perhaps sadder still: great drivers who never even managed to win a Grand Prix. On pole position here is New Zealander Chris Amon, of whom Mario Andretti once remarked, “If he became an undertaker, people would give up dying.”
Amon won major sports car events, but luck was never on his side in F1. In 1971, he was leading the Italian Grand Prix in a Matra when his visor parted company with his crash helmet; and, in 1972, he was well in front of the field in the French Grand Prix when he picked up a puncture. Amon, though, disputed the “unlucky” tag, pointing out that he had lived in an era when many of his friends had died in accidents.
DRIVERS
RACING INTO RETIREMENT
Racing drivers are super-competitive beasts, and this temperament makes them fundamentally disinclined to go quietly into retirement when the time comes, or even to recognize when that moment has arrived. After a lifetime of racing for a living, occupied by the sport for every waking hour, they simply don’t know what to do with themselves.
There are exceptions, of course. Most recently, the 2016 world champion Nico Rosberg announced that he was hanging up his helmet just hours before he collected his trophy. Beating his teammate Lewis Hamilton had required so many sacrifices, explained Rosberg, that he couldn’t face doing it again. Alain Prost also quit the sport after winning his fourth title in 1993, though many believe this decision was influenced by the fact that his team had signed his old nemesis, Ayrton Senna, for the following season.
In 2006, after a decade with the Ferrari team in which he won five World Championships for them, Michael Schumacher was nudged ungraciously into retirement by management, who believed that the young Finn Kimi Räikkönen was a better prospect for the future. Schumacher struggled with a post-racing future and took up superbike racing, in which he injured himself several times, before making a three-season F1 comeback for Mercedes. He finally retired in 2012 at the age of forty-three.
Comebacks in general are often inadvisable. Nigel Mansell, the 1992 world champion, went to the US to race in IndyCars in 1993, but was tempted to return part-time for Williams in 1994, after Senna’s fatal accident left a vacancy. He planned a full-time comeback in 1995 with McLaren, but the redesigned car that was enlarged to fit him wasn’t competitive. He quit after two races.
GLOSSARY
FASTEST LAP
Today, points aren’t awarded for setting the fastest lap time in a race (although they were in 1950–1959), but drivers like to set that goal as a badge of honor. In recent years, the sport’s official logistics partner—DHL—has sponsored a trophy awarded to the driver who has set the most fastest laps over the course of a season. The optimum time for logging a fast lap is generally toward the end of a race, when the car has less fuel aboard and the ambient temperature and track conditions are most favorable.
G-FORCE
A form of acceleration produced by mechanical force, g-force is expressed as a multiple of standard gravity. When a Formula 1 car brakes, accelerates, or goes around a corner, its mechanical components and the driver experience this movement as a sensation of weight.
INDY CARS
These vehicles are considered the premier category of single-seater racing in the US. Some drivers have “swapped codes” with great success, including Nigel Mansell, Jacques Villeneuve, and Juan Pablo Montoya; others have been less successful.
LEYTON HOUSE
This Japanese real estate company sponsored, then bought, the March Formula 1 team during Japan’s property boom in the late 1980s. Notable mostly for allowing design genius Adrian Newey his first opportunity to create an F1 car, Leyton House collapsed when the owner was implicated in a financial scandal and arrested.
MILLE MIGLIA
This famous Italian endurance race is set on a road course of around 1,000 miles, hence the Italian name (which translates as “a thousand miles”). Many F1 and prewar Grand Prix drivers entered it, and their names dominate the winners’ list. Since drivers in this era were paid by individual race promoters for appearing, rather than receiving a salary from an employer, it was not unusual to see names from F1 appearing in rallies and sports car events as well as single-seaters.
NON-CHAMPIONSHIP RACES
Before F1 became a globally televised sport commanding billions in sponsorship money, it was rather less structured. Any promoter could lay on an event open to F1 cars; if they could put enough prize money together to make attendance worthwhile, the teams would come. Non-championship races began to fade from the scene during the 1960s, although UK-based events such as the Daily Express Trophy (at Silverstone), the Race of Champions (at Brands Hatch), and the Oulton Park Gold Cup persisted until the 1970s.
SUPERBIKES
A production-based racing category for motorcycles, Superbikes enjoyed Michael Schumacher as a notable convert after his first retirement from F1.
VANWALL
The first winner of the constructors’ championship was a British prestige project led by industrialist Tony Vandervell, initially to promote his company’s patented Thin Wall bearings.
WILLIAMS
Sir Frank Williams founded his eponymous team in 1977, though he had been entering cars in F1 since 1969. It is one of the most successful outfits in the sport, and the only one remaining in which the person whose name is above the door remains the majority owner.