When you say motorsport most people just assume it’s just cars driving around in circles for three hours. In reality, it is so much more than that. Yes, the drivers going around a track that most of the time is an oval, a road course or a street course. Within that, there is much more strategy and skill needed to win. There are many different types of motorsport worldwide but the big three series are Nascar, Indycar, and F1. Indycar and Nascar only race here in North America but F1 is a worldwide racing series that travels around the world to race different tracks.
If you’ve ever gone on a long road trip, you know how uncomfortable it can be. Driving a race car is on a whole other level of uncomfortable. Drivers are fitted for a carbon fiber seat that fits snug around their body and has very little padding to make it comfortable, so they are not thrown around during a crash.
To keep the drivers in the seat, the cars use a five-point harness. That harness is similar to your basic seat belt, just with more straps holding down the driver. Finally, the drivers wear a hans device that keeps their head and neck in place in the event of a crash. All of these safety measures have definitely made the sport a lot safer but in return, these safety measures have drastically reduced the range of motion for the drivers.
To make the cars as light as possible so they can go faster, engineers leave out a lot of the creature comforts we take for granted. One major system that is left out is the air conditioning. Everyone knows how much it sucks when your air-conditioning isn’t strong enough or doesn’t work and your car is super hot causing you to sweat. Well, race car drivers do that week after week. Temperatures over the course of the race can get to 104 degrees or higher in the car and drivers lose close to nine pounds in sweat during the course of a race. During a race weekend F1 drivers are weighed before and after the race to ensure that they are not at any health risk after the race.
During a race, drivers must make several split-second decisions just like every other athlete. The difference is that these decisions have to be made while going over 150mph. F1 drivers have a ton of knobs and switches on their steering wheel to change various settings on the car during a lap. All of the top motorsports series have one thing in common all of the cars are manual and drivers have to shift up and down throughout a lap to ensure they can make the corner. For Nascar drivers taking a corner comes with a load of g-forces that would make an abnormal person pass out but Nascar drivers have to train their bodies to withstand them for hours on end. Motorsport has to be the only sport where a split-second lack of concentration could result in a massive crash and instant death.
Many people work out every day and they know how much your heart rate can spike and stay high as you work out but most people only do that for a short time. Racecar drivers however see their heart rate goes up to around 170-190 BPM and styes there over the race distance. To maintain that level of heartbeat drivers need. to be extremely fit. many drivers do marathons, cycle and especially weight lifting. A former Nascar driver and now Indycar driver Jimmie Johnson is the most shining example of how race car drivers are athletes. Johnson ran the Boston Marathon in 2019 finishing with a time of three hours and nine minutes qualifying him for last year’s marathon that was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Johnson has also been the most influential driver in getting the garage area to start taking fitness to another level. Other drivers have competed in Ironmans and other triathlons.
http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KTccgbe2ME&ab_channel=RyanChybinski
