How to Be an F1 Driver

by Jenson Button

  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.

  The day my favourite button broke

  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.

  2. MARGINAL GAINS

  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.

  3. KNOWING YOUR ONIONS

  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 J
os 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.

  HOW TO NOT QUITE, NOT NEARLY, WIN LE MANS

  Show me a racing driver who doesn’t want to compete at the Le Mans 24-Hour Race, and I’ll show you an imposter. Every driver wants to do that race. Speaking for myself, I wanted to win Monaco. I dreamt of winning the Formula One World Championship, and I wanted to race – and, needless to say, win – at Le Mans.

  Incidentally, the other race that they say should be on your racing bucket list is the Indy 500, but I’m going to be an iconoclast here and say I have no interest in doing that one.

  Reasons: in 2015, Justin Wilson, an excellent driver from the UK, was killed when he was struck by debris from a car that had hit the wall up front. I knew Justin from having competed against him at karting level. What had hit me even harder than that one was the death of another karting competitor, Dan Wheldon. He’d been perhaps my greatest rival during those days, and we’d had some great races together. He lost his life during a race in 2011.

  Both of these deaths were a huge shock to the racing community in the UK, where the safety of the sport has been addressed very thoroughly and with great success. The last death in regular Formula One was Jules Bianchi in 2015, who became the first death since Ayrton Senna in 1994, when he succumbed to injuries sustained during a crash nine months earlier.

  So, yes. No Indy for me, thanks. But Le Mans is definitely one I’d love to go back and challenge for the victory. Why? Because it’s all about pushing a car to its limit for an entire day.

  And you really do push it to the limit as well. Two decades ago, they would tell you to take it easy with the car, every gearshift would be gentle, don’t touch the kerbs because it might damage the suspension, be very, very careful with the brakes.

  But things have moved on, and these days you just drive flat out, and it’s very tough mentally and physically.

  To do Le Mans you have to enter the whole World Endurance Championship, but to be honest all anybody cares about is Le Mans, and that’s because it’s such a mental race. It’s superlong (obviously) and the track’
s an absolute doozy. Even though they’ve recently added some chicanes, there are a lot of straights, so you go through the first section which is five or six corners, and then you get on to a loooong straight. You sit there, you’re reaching up to 230mph.

  Then, bang. You brake for a chicane, go through the chicane, back on to the same straight. Bang. Brake for a chicane, go through that. Back on the straight at 230mph…

  It’s mostly straights before you get to the last section, the Porsche kerbs, which is a section of high-speed corners. There, you go left, then you go right, double left, right, left, right, left and that brings you to the end of the lap on what is a phenomenal section.

  The race is very fast. There are some slow corners but it’s the fast ones you remember – the ones you take at 160mph, so it’s crazy, and that’s just during the daytime. At night it gets even more mad. You’re coming up fast on the slower cars, watching for fatigue in yourself and in the car. The sheer effort of remaining focused is exhausting. Which is, of course, a massive part of the appeal.

  Don’t get me wrong. It’s 24 hours so it isn’t brilliant racing action the whole way, but then again, an F1 race is only an hour and a half long, and that has its boring bits. The point is that we racing drivers like a challenge. We like down and dirty grass-roots racing. We like something to be a bit gruelling. As a result, it’s always been a source of fascination. When we were racing in F1, and Le Mans was on the TV, we’d cluster around to watch before and after our own race, and everybody had seen the famous Steve McQueen movie, whose name escapes me.

  So anyway, we went there knowing that our team, SMP Racing and its SMP BR01 car, could not beat any of the Toyotas competing in their own team, Toyota Gazoo Racing.

  Toyota are the Mercedes of that class. They had 1,000 horsepower, we had 700. They had more downforce than us, more efficiency, more reliability, greater experience; they had hybrid power so their fuel tank was 35kg and filled up in like two seconds, whereas our fuel tank was three times the size and took forever to fill in the pits; their car was four-wheel drive, designed to have forward motion and power through all four tyres, so they can wheel-spin all four and get the right temperature across the board, meaning they can have all four tyres of the same construction. Whereas with a two-wheel drive, like ours, you don’t have that, you have no power going through the front tyres so you can’t wheel-spin them. This means you have to change the construction of the tyre, otherwise you can’t put enough temperature into the front tyres. They just never work. You’re just always sliding around.