How to Be an F1 Driver

by Jenson Button

  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.

  The bodily functions

  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.

  Other occupational hazards

  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.

  FINDING AN EDGE

  1. PEAK CONDITION

  Reactions, eyesight

  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.

  Diet, fitness

  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 bet
ter 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.

  Typical Menu

  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.

  Breakfast

  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.

  Post-breakfast

  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.

  Lunch

  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.

  Post-lunch

  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.

  Dinner

  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 n
ot eating pasta at lunch but eating brown rice or sweet potato instead.

  ‘Well done, vous,’ he said.

  Hydration

  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.