FORMULA 1’S 2026 season is just around the corner – with the five red lights going out at the curtain raiser at Melbourne’s Albert Park on March 8th. But, while all 22 drivers will be poised, ready for blast-off – their training schedules actually started months earlier, well before the sport’s three pre-season tests in Spain and Bahrain.
To understand how the drivers get ripped for the racing line, enter Australian F1 journalist Stewart Bell, who has covered the sport for more than 20 years – with a detailed excerpt from his new book Formula One: The World’s Most Brutal Sport. The 320-page read aims to give you the full picture of what it’s like to be inside the sport, well beyond what you might have seen on Netflix’s blockbuster show: Formula 1: Drive To Survive.
Getting grid fit
To prepare a driver for battle, fitness is a major focus – and they’re pushed to their limits every pre-season, whether it’s the first or last of their career.
‘If we can make the sessions that we do in the gym as hard or much harder than [anything] they’ve ever experienced in the car, then when they actually get into the car, it will actually feel easy,’ said Phil Young, who has trained World Champion drivers like Jenson Button and Fernando Alonso.
‘A lot of our focus is high-intensity interval training which will involve periods of heavy weight repetitions with very short recoveries. There’s a system called Tabata, which is where you do 20 seconds of effort, followed by 10 seconds of rest, and you do that eight times. That is a good form of high-intensity interval training that simulates what happens in the Grand Prix car.’
The gruelling schedule begins just after Christmas, when drivers will want to shed the excess kilograms they’ve put on by celebrating over much-needed holidays.
‘Generally, our season will start on the fitness side in January, and then from there we go into some fairly heavy endurance-based training. All we’re trying to do is get them back up to speed, as such. We will involve quite a bit of cycling, so be out doing as many kilometres on the bike – we would probably start them off on 60 to 80kms, and build up to about 120kms. We’d then increase the number of hills we do, and we base a lot of stuff that we do around our aerobic training on that.’
From there, the drivers head inside to the gym for both cardio and weights.
‘In most motorsport, endurance is the primary function of what they do. They do submaximal lifts over lots and lots of reps, which is basically what they do in a racing car. They’ll do submaximal efforts over one lap, and a lap can last anywhere from just over one minute to over two minutes, so we try and recreate what goes on in a car in the gym scenario. So that would involve lots of reps with minimal recovery. We also tend to do a lot of swimming.’
All of it is meticulously planned, as it has to be, so that when the driver gets to the season-opening event – wherever it may be – he’s in peak physical condition, perfectly ready to blast off from pole position and win that first race (if he has the car to do that).
‘That period between end of the season and the start of the next: month one is focused on recovery, months two and three are really building,’ said Young. ‘In a typical week, you’d be doing on some days four to five hours, and on others it’d be two to three hours – just depending on what exercise you’re doing. To get them to spend two to three hours in the gym would be difficult just on the motivational side of things, so we tend to try and do as much as we can outside in sports like cycling, where it’s a little bit easier.’
F1 drivers are, of course, elite athletes – with many of them at Olympian level – so the preparation goes well beyond the bike and gym, with cutting-edge tools.
‘One thing we also make use of is an altitude chamber, so we can set that altitude up to a maximum of 4500 metres – we generally run it at around 3000 to 3500 metres. That has major benefits on preparing the athletes for their sport.
‘It’s used a lot in cycling and triathlon, things like that. It’s a way of increasing your blood-oxygen-carrying capacity, because if you put someone into a low-oxygen scenario, then the body has to work harder, and what the body does is it adapts to that low-oxygen scenario and starts to produce more red blood cells. It’s something that we use quite a lot during pre-season. It basically speeds up their progress into full-training mode.’
Naturally, F1 drivers need razor-sharp reflexes – and not just for racing wheel-to-wheel, but consistent lap times, and making setup changes on the steering wheel. As you might expect, that too is factored into a driver’s training.
‘We get them playing squash and things like that,’ said Young. ‘That’s really aimed at getting their hand–eye co-ordination back into the right mode, if you like. So really trying to get their brains quick again.
‘We also test them by putting them through repeated fatigue, and then straight into a scenario where they have to concentrate.
‘We might put them on a rowing machine and work them very hard so they’re almost to their maximum capacity; they would then jump off there and have to get straight onto a BATAK [reaction training] machine, and have to concentrate to make sure they maintain the baseline score they set before the workout.’
That hardcore pre-season training prepares them for huge mental and physical loads in the car, with the toughest test the hot races – like Qatar and Singapore, both hot, humid night events that can make drivers want to tap out.
Now-retired F1 driver Daniel Ricciardo knows what it’s like to not be properly prepared for Singapore, where you sweat just by walking through the paddock.
‘My first race there [for now-defunct team HRT] in 2011, I didn’t know what to expect and it was, physically, the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.
‘I never wanted that feeling again because that wasn’t fun, so I made a point just to always prepare well, do a lot of heat training, and, from a confidence point of a view, when I get there knowing I’m super-prepared that helps my driving as well.’
Super-prepared is right, too, with Ricciardo’s pre-Singapore heat training then seeing him sweat up a storm in the gym for nine straight days in seven layers of clothing, with the heat maxed out to ‘get comfortable in the uncomfortable’.
There’s good reason for the punishing gym sessions, with the sport’s original night race a supreme physical test – where drivers endure cockpit temperatures of up to 60 degrees at racing speed, and 4.7G in corners and under braking, meaning they’ll lose two to three kilograms in fluid (through sweat) across an almost two-hour race.
‘It’s a mental game as well,’ said Ricciardo, ahead of the 2018 race, which the Perth-born driver saw as a chance for a last win for Red Bull Racing in his final season with the team, though it wasn’t to be, with sixth place his lot.
‘Knowing probably no-one else is doing this, to this level, and that when I see everyone on the grid on Sunday wearing ice vests and I’m there smiling without one – it’s already a little game, which gives me confidence.’
The 2023 Qatar Grand Prix still stands as arguably F1’s toughest-ever race, with extreme heat and humidity that left some drivers on the verge of collapse after the chequered flag, while others said it was more a game of survival. The track temperature at night never fell below 36 degrees, following daytime temperatures over 40.
It was an intense experience made worse by tyre supplier Pirelli’s discovery earlier that weekend that the Lusail circuit’s ‘pyramid’ kerbs caused a microscopic separation in the tyre’s sidewall, forcing F1’s governing body, the FIA, to mandate an 18-lap maximum per set of tyres in the race. That meant the race became an unprecedented series of high-speed short sprints between pit stops, forcing drivers beyond their limits.
Even that couldn’t stop Red Bull’s Max Verstappen in his and the team’s record-breaking season, with the Dutchman storming to his 14th win of 2023.
Some of his rivals struggled. McLaren’s Oscar Piastri, who finished second, called it the ‘hardest race’ of his life, Esteban Ocon – then with Alpine – vomited in his helmet en route to seventh, and Williams’ Logan Sargeant retired with heatstroke.
‘The main thing is Alex and I are both OK,’ said Sargeant post-race. ‘I’ve been feeling unwell all week which didn’t help with the dehydration in this heat. The last thing I wanted to do was retire the car, but I had to put my health first. Sorry to the team for not being able to reach the finish line. They’ve done an incredible job all weekend in these intense conditions.’
Formula One: The World’s Most Brutal Sport by Stewart Bell, Penguin Random House. Available now.
Related:
Lando Norris reveals the ‘gruesome’ training behind his F1 World Championship win
Oscar Piastri’s performance coach reveals how F1 drivers stay fit
