Picture this: Heart racing, muscles straining, mind racing, sweat dripping off the brow, fighting not just your own body but the bodies of others to achieve one goal: Victory. If that’s not a picture of an athlete, then what is?
Despite the surplus of evidence to suggest they are, tons of people will still argue that professional race car drivers aren’t real athletes. These people have never driven a race car.
People don’t realize that race cars aren’t like the cars you and I use for the daily commute. It’s not uncommon for them to lack power steering and power assisted brakes. Turning the steering wheel of a car that weighs over 4,000 pounds at top speed takes a lot of force, and stopping takes even more. The brake pedals on race cars are tuned to provide maximum feedback to the driver, which also means they’re extremely hard to push. It can take up to 330 pounds of force to depress the brake pedal on an F1 car.
Think back to the last time you went go-karting. Remember how awkward it was to move around with that bulky helmet on your head? Now imagine that it was four times heavier and the go-kart went 160 miles an hour. That’s basically what some race car drivers are dealing with.
G-forces are the #1 enemy of the racing driver’s body. During some Formula One races, drivers sustain up to four G’s for several seconds at a time. That kind of lateral force can cause blood to pool on one side of the body, forcing muscles to rely on anaerobic respiration for oxygen. If driver’s don’t train to accommodate for that, they risk muscle fatigue, vision impairment, and even reduced neural processing power.
On the topic of blood, let’s talk about heart rate. On average, an F1 driver’s heart rate is around 170 BPM during race conditions. For reference, basketball players will see a heart rate around 180 BPM during the most intense parts of a game, usually no more than ten minutes at a time. An F1 race however, typically lasts an hour and a half.
High temperatures are a reality in every discipline of motorsports. Despite being held at night, cockpit conditions at the Singapore Grand Prix can reach 140 degrees with 65% humidity. That would be unbearable in a t-shirt and shorts, let alone a fire resistant race suit, plus the clothes or bodysuit a driver chooses to wear underneath. In 2023, Mercedes F1 driver George Russell lost 8.8 pounds over the course of the race. That’s a lot for any driver, even in Singapore, but it’s even more when you consider that the car’s are equipped with drinking bottles. Russell was drinking throughout and still managed to lose that much weight.
There is perhaps no human factor more important in racing than reaction time. F1 cars typically average around 160 miles per hour over a lap of any given circuit on the calendar. It takes about 120 milliseconds for our brains to react to visual stimuli, which means that if a driver crests a hill at 160 miles an hour and sees another car stopped on the track 25 feet ahead of them, the cars will collide literally before the driver has even realized what’s going on.
And 160 is just an average, it’s not uncommon for F1 and WEC cars to reach speeds far exceeding that. The highest recorded speed on the Mulsanne Straight at Le Mans is 251 MPH.
Let me say that again, 251 miles per hour. If you blink at that speed, you’ll travel 37 feet with your eyes closed. In one second, you’ll cover one and a quarter football fields.
Still not quite understanding how fast that is? Consider this: the neural impulses that are helping you read this very sentence are moving at about 268 miles per hour.
As extreme as they are, those physical requirements barely hold a light to the serious motivation it takes to go racing.
So yes, racing drivers competing at the professional level are unquestionably athletes. If you’ve read this far and you still won’t believe me, well I’m afraid you can’t be helped. Not until you’ve actually been through what professional drivers go through. Not until you’ve retired from your cushy job as an armchair quarterback and actually driven a race car.
