The Peter Attia Drive - #95 - Luke Bennett, M.D.: The emotional, cognitive, and physical demands that make Formula 1 a unique and special sport

Episode Date: March 2, 2020

In this episode, Luke Bennett, Medical and Sports Performance Director for Hintsa Performance, explains the ins and outs of Formula 1 with a focus on the behind-the-scenes human element, and what makes it so emotionally, cognitively, and physically demanding for the drivers as well as the many team members. Luke first talks about his fascinating background with the Royal Flying Doctor Service in Australia, which lead to his current position with Hintsa working closely with F1 drivers to improve their health and performance despite jet-lag and sleep constraints due to an unrivaled travel schedule. Luke also sheds light on the underappreciated level of sheer physical strength and endurance it takes to drive an F1 car combined with the extreme cognitive aptitude, spatial awareness, and ability to navigate a socially complex environment that is needed to be successful as a driver. Additionally, Luke gives an overview of how the F1 season and races work, the incredible advances in car technology and safety measures, and what Luke and Hintsa hope to bring in the near future to the unique and special sport that is Formula 1. We discuss: What it’s like to be a “flying doctor” in Australia, and how Luke ended up working in Formula 1 with Hintsa [3:10]; Behind the scenes of Formula 1—crazy travel, jet lag, massive teams, and fascinating human storylines [10:45]; The incredible physical strength and cognitive aptitude needed to be a F1 driver [19:00]; The technological leap to hybrid electric engines [29:30]; The trend towards younger drivers in F1 [32:30]; Advancements in safety—the history and recent upgrades [36:00]; How Hintsa manages the athletes through the incredible social complexity of the sport [41:45]; Explaining the difference between F1, F2, F3, and F4, and the path to reaching the F1 [47:30]; Comparing F1 in the 60s & 70s to today—Incidences of deaths, number of crashes, physicality of driving, new regulations, and more [53:45]; Women in F1—Past, present, and future [1:06:10]; How F1 teams manage their cars and engine over the season, & some new regulations coming in 2021 [1:09:15]; What insights has Luke taken from his time as a triathlete to working with F1 drivers? [1:12:50]; How Luke survived cancer, and gained an increased sense of empathy [1:15:45]; How Luke manages his health against the brutal travel and lifestyle that comes with working in Formula 1 [1:19:40]; New training techniques, technology to monitor the physiology of drivers, and other things Luke is hoping to bring to Formula 1 [1:22:40]; How long does it take a driver to learn a new circuit? [1:27:45]; The incredible emotional control needed to be a successful F1 driver [1:30:00]; Which F1 teams are showing signs of competing in future seasons? [1:32:15]; and More. Learn more: https://peterattiamd.com/ Show notes page for this episode: https://peterattiamd.com/lukebennett Subscribe to receive exclusive subscriber-only content: https://peterattiamd.com/subscribe/ Sign up to receive Peter's email newsletter: https://peterattiamd.com/newsletter/ Connect with Peter on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram.

Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter, all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, full stop, and we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in-depth content if you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level. At the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are, or if you want to learn more now, head over to peteratia MD dot com forward slash subscribe.

Now without further delay, here's today's episode. I guess this week is Dr. Luke Bennett. Luke is the Medical and Sports Performance Director for Hinset Performance, a company focused on human well-being and athletic performance with a particular emphasis in motors sport. Luke received his medical degree as well as his master's degree in sports medicine at the University of Queensland. He then spent seven years training in intensive care before working for six years in remote emergency, aeromedical retrieval with the Royal Flying Doctor Service of Western Australia, something that we actually talk about in this episode that despite knowing Luke, I didn't know this about him and didn't understand what that meant.

I wanted to interview Luke because I talk a lot about my interest in Formula One, my passion for it. And I realized that a lot of people who listen to this podcast might not fully understand why. And I thought that no one could do a better job explaining some of the ins and outs of it the way Luke could. And he does a really great job of that. Again, you can come into this without having ever watched a Formula 1 race or finding any interest in it. And I think you're going to come away from this thinking, wow, you learned a lot and you have a greater appreciation

for the sport of Formula 1. What makes it special, why it's so emotionally, cognitively, and physically appealing. We talk a lot about Luke's background. We do, again, an overview of F1, including the races, the driving, the unbelievable travel, and physical, and logistics, and sleep constraints, and everything that are placed on all of the drivers and the teams. We decided to release this episode specifically to coincide with the release of season two of the Netflix documentary series Formula One Drive to Survive, which just came out on February 28th. And if you haven't seen season one of that, I recommend going and watching that first. I think I binge watched it in two days when it came out. I can't recommend this series enough. It does a really good job of showing

you not just the drama of what happens on the tracks, but perhaps more importantly, the drama of what happens off the circuit. My hope is that if you're not a fan of F1, this will give you a great overview of the sport. Why I love it so much, and if you're already a fan, you're definitely going to enjoy this. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Dr. Luke Peppett. Luke, it's so good to see you, man. Thanks for being back in Austin, huh? Yeah, and thank you for making time.

We had spent a couple of weeks trying to figure out how we were going to make this happen with your schedule, because obviously you have more important things to do than sit here and goof off with me. So I really appreciate you making time. That's why we're doing this so late at night. No problem. We got the races the other way around this year with Mexico and Austin. So we actually had a free day beforehand.

It worked out well. So let's start with the most interesting thing on your CV and we're going to get to a lot of things that you do. But tell me what a flying doctor is. the most interesting thing on your CV and we're going to get to a lot of things that you do, but tell me what a flying doctor is. The Royal Flying Doctor Service of Australia is pretty unique. I don't think there's anything like it anywhere else in the world even considering the continent of Africa. Western Australia in particular is a state that's about the same size as Western Europe. It has only two million people by way of population and only really one thing. And one of those is,

I mean, most of them are in Perth, right? Exactly. So all of the clinical services are sent there in Perth. And it's actually more economical for the health system to fund an aromatic retrieval service by fixing aircraft for the entire state, rather than building and funding hospitals around. So it's this huge expanse with a vibrant sort of mining industry in particular lots of underprivileged indigenous communities, big tourist industry during the winter months and all sorts of crazy action happening out

there and a couple of these flying doctor bases where you have a crew of a doctor, a nurse and a pilot flying to retrieve patients, then taking them to the capital city. So regardless of the problem you are usually at best three or four hours from help, but more often than not up north half a day to a day away from tertiary specialist care and some really, really sick patients on a daily or weekly basis. So when you take something like childbirth, for example,

where there was at least some anticipation of when a person's gonna need medical care, do those patients just sort of come to birth or as childbirth something that would be done locally? There's often a plan to fly the patients to birth, and also there's high rates of unexpected premature labor, so we spent a lot of time actually on obstetrics, which terrified me to be honest, I came from adult intensive care medicine and learning obstetrics and pediatrics on the fly like that was sometimes a pretty nervous situation. So if somebody suffers a motor vehicle accident or a heavy machinery accident in the field,

the first responders could take how many hours to get there? So first of all, when I started, the first responders were often volunteer ambulance crews. So it might be the local teacher or the local shopkeeper going out to do the first response. They can be easily three hours each way, drive back to the nearest small hospital and there's even parts of the state where we would land on the road on the highway, because it was the fastest way of retrieving the patient. Now that was pretty uncommon, but typically patients have had a pretty good trial of life by the time we got to them. It was minimum three to four hours after the insult. Wow. So there's just things we take for granted as far as, I mean, do they have AEDs locally and things like that for people who are having heart attacks? Yeah. So there's reasonable basic resuscitation equipment in these small nursing posts. A lot

of really nurse-led clinics around the place and these nurses were unbelievable, you know, the stress. They must face on a daily basis having to deal with whatever comes in the door. Good resuscitation facilities were there, but it's a case of getting the patient to them and then the appropriate medical skills to them as well. Now you're from the other coast, you're from the east coast of Australia, you're from Brisbane. Yeah, grew up in Brisbane and lived more recently on the Sunshine Coast. Beautiful place called Noosa Heads. So what took you out to Perth that you trained there?

I did not. The flying doctor job was something that had interested me. And in fact, the Western Australian Division had a lot more of this primary retrieval work, which was far more interesting than routine shuttling of patients between regional hospitals, which is more the case on the East Coast. So it was really the nature of the work that attracted me to WA. And it's a beautiful part of the world. And it's an amazing remote desert and coastal scenery up there. And it was just a new adventure and something that I look back on as probably the most professionally satisfying part of my career, clinically so far.

So what was the transition from that, which I think sounds like it came out of critical care, big hospital critical care to that, to what you're doing today with HINSA, which we'll talk about what, of course, what that is. Throughout my time working in hospital intensive care and then in the flying doctors, I was essentially volunteering to work trackside, doing trauma and rescue for different motor sport events. So we worked at the Australian Grand Prix for about 11 years in Melbourne. The Australian team did the Korean race when it was there for a couple of years and then I also did a lot of rally and off-road and that stuff was a lot of fun and very interesting medicine-wise. You had long response times.

You typically had two injured patients. You had to do your own extracation and fire suppression and the patients were generally more heavily injured than in that circuit racing. So that was the overlap in terms of career during that phase. And then at the Australian Grand Prix I met a guy called Adam Costanzo who was Louis Hamilton's first physio. He was an Australian guy who'd been to university in my sister's year group and so we got talking to him when he'd year. I met his boss and our founder, Dr. Aki Hinser, who we can discuss, but perhaps, and kept in touch with them over subsequent years to the point where Aki was eventually looking to step back from travel and I was in the right place at the right time to take the role that we're in now.

And when was that? 2014 was my first year, so just coming up to the end of my sixth full season in Formula One. Tell me a little bit about Aki and his voice if he was training. So Dr. Aki Hinsa was a Finnish trauma surgeon. He was actually doing humanitarian work in Ethiopia in the mid 90s, and he was thinking about human well-being through a humanitarian sort of lens, but met Halle Gabriel Sulassi and those legendary Ethiopian Olympic runners during his time there and translated some of those principles into the needs of an athlete.

When he moved back to Finland, Mika Hakkanan asked him to start to support him and his family track side. And Mika won a couple of World Championships side by side with Aki in 98, 99. He became sort of the McLaren team doctor and then famously had long associations with Lewis Hamilton and Kimmy Rakin and Sebastian and other young drivers as they came through. And Aki unfortunately died a couple of years ago, but he attained this guru like status in the paddock. He was a really kind and inspirational figure, a great doctor and a real father figure to many of the drivers that we see doing so well today. And how did he overlap with Sid and the role that Sid pleaded beginning probably in the 70s, right?

Yeah. So Professor Watkins was appointed and employed by the FIA. So the governing body of the sport, Sid was doing all of the trackside rescue. He was in the medical car which chases the first lap of the race. In those days, he was kind of the only doctor around through the 70s and the 80s. I guess as the 90s wore on, there was a little bit more of a trend towards teams having some of their own doctors, which is what Akki was. I don't think Sid overlapped directly with Aki. There was a gentleman called Gary Hartstein who followed Sid and did a great job. Sid retired what in the late 90s? That's correct, yeah. It was the mid to late 90s.

Yeah, and he was around at FIA conferences and things for a number of years. I made him a couple of times. A guy who really established trackside medical care from nothing in the 1970s and a number of drivers probably owe their lives and their health to see and his successes. I was recently rereading Damon Hill's biography and it's sort of interesting to go back to even 25 years ago and think about how dangerous that sport was and it went through sort of these step functions of improvement and safety sort sort of in the mid-70s, there was a big step up, and then there wouldn't really be another huge step forward until the mid-90s after Senna's death.

And even just two years later, you see how in just a span of a couple of years, this port got considerably safer, which is something I'd love to dive into with you. So let's talk a little bit about F1, because for many people listening to this, they probably don't understand so many dimensions of it. Starting with the way I describe it to my friends who don't follow it, it's like having a Super Bowl every two weeks. That's the only way I can explain it to people who don't pay attention to Formula One, which not a lot of Americans do.

Would you agree with that assessment? Yeah, it's the world's most interesting and expensive circus, really. It's endlessly fascinating on the social level and the human level. And I'm not sure if you saw there was a Netflix series which came out based on the last seasons four or one. I've only watched each episode 14 times. So I have no idea what you're talking about. My family knows every episode of a heart and then actually they keep calling for more and more. I heard there's going to be another season.

They are filming this year as well, but you wouldn't be surprised to learn that many of my friends and families and particularly female family members and friends, people who've never had more than a passing interest in motorsport have suddenly seen this series and understood the human story that's unfolding all through the midfield and the teams and the politics and the appreciation that you can have for not just the on track action but the human stories that are going on behind the scenes is phenomenal. In terms of a comparison to Super Bowl, I mean, it is a massive television event. It's outside of probably summer Olympics and football world cup. It's got, if not the largest TV audience of an annually recurring event,

it's certainly up there in the top three. I mean, it's not uncommon for 200,000 people to 300,000 people to show up at every race throughout the course of the weekend, correct? Yeah, I think we had 360-odd thousand attendance over the three days in Mexico last week, for example. Some races are better attended than others. The TV audience is there, regardless. And we got new owners of the sport a couple of years ago,

so they're modernizing a lot of the approaches to digital coverage as well, which is starting to get some traction. And this year, there are 20 races. 21 races this year. 21 and next year, 22. And possibly 23 or 24 the year after. So we're probably going to hit a ceiling there somewhere

of what the human beings involved in working this sport can take. There's a lot of discussion about how the teams will approach, for example, a 24 race season because there's a lot of travel. It's a great life. It's a great privilege to work in Formula One, but it's very, very hard on particularly mechanics, engineers, catering staff, people with families at home. There's a limit to how much you can sustain being away. And the teams are going to be budget-capped in 2021 at the same time as they're going to have this interesting problem of perhaps rotating staff. So it is never a dull moment.

Things are changing all the time. One of the things that first intrigued me when I really started to think about this through the lens of human performance was the management of jet lag. Walk me through what a typical travel schedule would look like, especially when they're on the one-week pace, which is quite common. Maybe just stepping back and thinking about the structure of the Formula One calendar. So we have these 20-year racers and they're organized in absolutely no logical geographical order. The racers pay to be the first or the last race of the season. They pay to be on a traditional fixed date. They might be aligned with a particular public holiday

or school holiday block. That's always the priority over any sort of travel planning logic. So we start the season with four races, which are long haul mostly in Australia and Asia. It can be five races next year when the Vietnamese Grand Prix starts. We then have a slightly nicer period sort of through the European summer where we are on the road working out of trucks in Europe a little bit less flying. And then we're in this phase now, which is the hardest part

of the year. So seven or eight long haul fly away races again. Back and forth to Asia a couple of times, Russia, three races in the Americas now and then finishing in the Middle East. And again, most personnel will go back to Europe in between each of those races. So most people have done a dozen long haul into continental sectors over the last month or so. And this is the time when championships are being won or lost.

And it's in terms of sleep management. I listen to your Q&A with Matthew Walker a couple of days ago and there's an ideal to sleep management which we really try to adhere to as much as possible but there's a really pragmatic element to that as well. Particularly around the psychology of arriving at an event and this is not as much the drivers but the crews, the mechanics and the engineers, people who probably have a very narrow window to either get on to the new time zone or not. And if they get to a point where there's been two or three nights of disrupted sleep

getting into the phase of the week where the cars are on track, it can be actually a quite a disturbing thing. So we try not to use sleep aids, sleeping medications too much, but there is probably a case where athletes and others around them need to perform for just having that one night reset with a sleeping pill on arrival in the new location as much as that's kind of the lesser of two evils it can improve somebody's outlook and mindset for the rest of the weekend to come. We do quite detailed sleep and jet lag planning for the drivers and on occasion for the teams as well, but the reality of the schedule, the weekend schedule, the flights that can be chosen as a limited number of flights to take a thousand people into each destination with limited flexibility. So it's a case of being very

pragmatic, not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good and things just move so fast you have to just keep getting through each day the best way you can. not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good and things just move so fast you have to just keep getting through each day the best way you can. I think a number of people watching Formula 1 casually might not appreciate the magnitude of the team that supports the two drivers. So again, let's start at the top of the food chain with the two biggest teams Mercedes and Ferrari. 10 teams, correct. 20 drivers, so two per team. How big is the entirety of the Mercedes team or the Ferrari team? So you're looking at probably between 900 and 1,000 people

at the Mercedes Formula One factory, for example. Ferrari would be very similar. And then again, in the Mercedes case, you've got another 600 or 800 just building the engines in a separate facility, a separate company. So probably looking at an average of 1,000 people per car up and down the 10 teams. And again, that's going to be challenged soon when there's a budget cap and there's going to have to be a lot more rationalization and prioritization of how teams approach building the fastest car possible.

Well, that budget cap apply, for example, you have some teams that aren't building their own engine. Mercedes is building the engine and the other team is buying the engine from Mercedes. Will that cap still apply the same to those teams that seems a bit unfair? So this hasn't been announced yet. I think the final regulations are usually drop any week now, but these are precisely the topics

that have been so controversial. A car manufacturer under a budget cap faces a completely different scenario to one of the traditional private tier teams like Williams or McLaren. So for precisely those reasons, it's not resolved yet, and I suspect the regulations will continue to evolve over the next couple of years. Now of those people, how many are actually traveling to support the drivers and actually be at the race versus stay in the factory. So there's a core race team of about 43 people with a specific pass, which is all electronically

regulated in terms of the times they can be at the circuit. So those 43 people are operational. They're allowed to touch the car and interact with the race event itself. At a typical large event like Monaco or Austin, the traveling staff might be something around 150 per team where there's a huge marketing and communications and media apparatus that goes along with the team's activities for that week.

There's a core bunch of engineers, of course, and the catering team and the truck logistics guys, because they all are guys at the moment. And those teams are pretty constant, but they'll vary, for example, the European versus the Long Hall Flyaway race. Yesterday I was in the car with my daughter coming back from a cross country meet,

and we were on the freeway and driving 75 miles an hour, which feels like nothing when you're just driving in a straight line. And I said, Olivia, do you realize that those cars we watch every Sunday can go three times this fast in a straight line? It was fast enough that she sort of got what that felt like. And then I tried to explain to her the difference in G forces that we feel when I would break really hard for her to feel a hard break or turn relatively quickly. It's very hard, I think, for people who haven't been inside a race car to even try to extrapolate what's happening in Formula One.

I was actually trying to reflect, as I was having this discussion with her, about the greatest G-forces I've felt inside of race cars that I've been driving, nothing like what those guys experience. Maybe 2G, 1.9, 2.1G. What type of forces do drivers experience in F1 today? So we're between 5 and 6G on some of the fastest very high speed constant radius corners like the final turn of Monza for example, a couple of the Suzuki turns as well, so it means you're ahead, you're 4 kilo head, plus helmet is 4 or five or six times it's normal weight and you've

got to resist that with your neck muscles. So it's an extremely physical activity and I had a ride in as a two-seater F1 car which is used at some corporate event so I did some laps of Mexico as a passenger last year and go to drive. Two of the X minority drivers with the greatest names ever in the history of Formula One. We had Patrick Freezacca, Drone Around In, and Zolt Baumgartner was also there helping out. So I honestly couldn't have done five or six laps as a passenger. The forces and the experience was so brutal. And our guys are, it's probably equivalent to doing a pretty intense crossfit circuit for two hours with a maximum of five or 10 second breaks around it. While someone else is doing CrossFit, trying to push you out of the way of your equipment

and someone's in your ear asking you to solve maths equations and there's two or three hundred million people watching and maybe you don't have a contract for next year either of it, sort of thinking about it at the back of your mind. So there's an enormous amount going on while a driver has to hit that millimeter perfect apex every lap. And it all just happens so fast. It's a lot more instinctive. I think then people think, especially when the drivers are in traffic, but very, very physical.

Yeah, I think I'm probably more empathetic to the mistakes that drivers make. What race was it when Seb came back on track without looking left, stroll almost hit him and then stroll did the exact same thing 30 seconds later. So the Italian grown pretty a couple of months ago. Yeah, that was that was that's right, those moms. So I got to tell you people were up in arms and oh he should know batteries a four-time world champion. My view is in the heat of the moment, I don't even understand how people can be critical. I mean, I guess that's

the nature of what we do as spectators. And you can't see it. No, that's the other thing. The cockpits are so high now. Yeah. And you can turn your head only a couple of degrees in each direction. The mirrors give you a little bit of view. The halo, which we'll discuss, it does restrict a lot of vision as well. And it's a difficult problem.

The drivers can see sort of the top of their tires, they can't see most of the extremities of the car. So those front wings hang out a long way and they're very susceptible to damage. So it's almost unfathomable the way they can race in close quarters and literally millimeter perfect, sweeping the front wing of one car across and missing the tires of their colleague and the other.

So crazy. It never gets old to me when I'm trying to show someone what type of precision and proprioception is necessary. Because when we think of athletes having proprioception, I mean, that's one of the hallmarks of all great athletes. They sort of always know where they are in space. But driving takes it to another level because it's not just where you are in space, it's where this car is in space

and I mean because I'm biased of course watching Sennah on board laps in Monaco I mean I could do that all day long Because you realize he's coming within three to six inches of curbs of walls Lap after lap after lap at speeds that are sort of dizzying. Yeah, changing gears manually, no power steering, incredible footage and all that stuff. But you touch on an interesting point there, Peter. I think this proprioceptive aptitude is something that really separates the great drivers from the good.

And as someone who thinks about driver performance, I haven't worked out how we could even study this let alone modified but the way a driver senses what's going on in the adhesion between their car and the track the fine movements of the car they sense it sort of through their back through their legs through the contact that they have with the seat and I think the truly great drivers just have this unbelievable level of trunk all proprioception and sensory awareness that allows them to feel what the color is doing. And I think perhaps if there's ever a way

that we can measure and train that, it might lead to some step forward in driver's skills training. Well, that's a great point. I mean, I think anybody who's been in a simulator will tell you that's true. I mean, I have a simulator at home, and I know it's so much harder to catch

oversteer in the simulator because you don't have that feeling of oversteer that comes before your visual change. Whereas, understeer is all visual anyway, so the simulator seems great for helping you correct that, but that to me just says exactly what you're saying, which is when you deprive somebody of the ability to sense that in their trunk, in their butt, there's that scene in rush when the character playing Nikulada talks about how he was gifted with a great ass, and that's how he sort of knew that this tire was a little bit low in pressure.

But I think that stuff's all true. I mean, I just think that the great ones, they feel something. Now, of course, the more interesting question is the one you pose, which was, how would you train that? Most great drivers come from a carting background. Off the top of your head, are any of the 20 guys on the grid now, not from a carting background? No, everybody would have started in carting. They've taken different paths through Formula 4, Formula 3, and different ways to the top. But everybody starts out, carting. Yeah. Carting is thought to be probably the best training that a Formula 1 driver can do.

There's very limited testing nowadays, so if a driver does want to train skills, then carting is typically the go-to activity. Why do you think that is over, for example, being in a simulator? Is it because you still get the feeling of the experience, you still have to manage the slide and all those things. Yeah, it's a very raw experience. It probably comes back to the very stripped out basics of feeling tired, adhesion and car control and car movement in a very accessible way. Going and running our Formula One car of any recent era on a track is not a trivial exercise. It probably takes a team of at least 20 people

just to get the thing fired up. But cutting is yeah, pure technical skills exercise that's still worthwhile doing. I know I sure enjoy it. Anytime I can take my daughter carding, I'm like, this is the greatest thing in the world. There is no greater smile on your face than when you're sliding around on your side on those things. So you alluded to the complexity of the cars today. Give people a sense of that. You also talked a moment ago about how one of the, in addition to doing the CrossFit thing and getting screamed at and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you've got an engineer talking to you.

When we're watching television, we hear a fraction of that discussion between the driver and his engineer. How much is actually going on? And what are the sorts of things that a driver is actually being expected to manage? So there's a number of layers to that. On the team level there's probably 10 or 20 different radio networks involving all of the key personnel, so from the team boss to the strategist to the chief engineer to the individual driver engineers. There's also a huge infrastructure back in the factory in the UK and they might be looking at the radio messages from other vehicles.

They might be looking at all sorts of telemetry from the car. There's hundreds and hundreds of streams of data which sort of ultimately have to feed through this one person which is the individual driver's race engineer. So it can get pretty busy on the radios. And the art of being a race engineer is probably being able to not only understand and manage your driver emotionally, but to filter that information and deliver it in a way

that's concise and useful. A related question, I guess, is what is the driver doing around a lap? And there are limitations on what the car is allowed to do. I mean, just for a perspective, when I'm in a car and my coach is talking to me, there are only certain parts of a circuit when I can even talk back. I have to be on a straight away to even just have the presence of mind to push the radio button and say, got it, okay, we'll do, yeah, noted, next lap, I'll hit that apex,

a little different. I can't do that when I'm cornering. Yeah, for sure. And in the ideal world, there are structures to the radio talk that occur at a certain point around a lap, but there are times when you don't have that luxury and you reference sort of button pushing, but the modern formula one steering wheel is an unbelievable piece of complexity in its own right. I mean these steering wheels are worth 50 or 60,000 pounds each and there's probably 20 or 25 buttons on there, all of which have sub menus and sometimes sub-sub menus and the drivers by regulation have to drive the car themselves, they can only be given a limited amount of instruction from the pit wall as to what settings to use.

And it's got to the point now where they're more or less changing their settings of the car between each corner so that it's optimized for each particular corner. So the really great drivers not only have this proprioceptive feel, they've got a bandwidth excess where they can really tune into the car, they can make all these changes fairly automatically around a lap, they have just the experience and the knowledge to understand how the car is going to work. And then on top of that, they have enough cognitive capacity left over to sort of sit above the race to understand what their competitors are doing, what is the context of their pit stop strategy and when they need to push, when they need to conserve tires.

So it's really an incredible cognitive load. And that's a big part of what we are managing with our coaching staff across a race weekend. Give me an example of some of the complexities that can be managed corner to corner by the driver. Things like brake bias, diff settings, and then these modern engines are absolutely incredible hybrid pieces about their hybrid electric engines. Tell folks what that means. So we had the last

reg change. So these came in in 2014, 2015. Okay. Yeah. So prior to that, we were talking a pure naturally aspirated, was it a V10 V6? 6.0 V6, yeah. The V10s were the good old days, sometime ago now. But these are electric hybrid engines, so they have a couple of different methods of energy recovery. There's braking energy recovered from the vehicle. There's heat energy from the turbocharger. And these are fed back through a battery to, or, and probably about a quarter or a third of the engines power comes from this recovered electric energy. But to reference your previous question, so deploying that energy in the most appropriate way around a lap is an enormous part of driving a current F1 car and save the energy for a period where you might be trying to defend from an overtake, but deploying it in the parts

of the lap where it's going to give you the maximum benefit in terms of lap time is just a massive engineering puzzle in itself, which the drivers have to keep on top of. So the engines themselves, I mean, this is incredible. The internal combustion engine was invented, what in the late 1800s early 1900s, and for the entire history of the engine to 2014, the thermal efficiency went from maybe 20, 25% to 28% or 30% at the very best scenario. But since 2015, Formula One has taken that efficiency from about 28, 29% to over 50%. Now, so just a massive quantum leap in the way engines work. And for all of its faults in terms of carbon footprint flying this great circus around the world and racing cars when you multiply that kind of engine technology by 80 million new cars sold around the world each year you can see

that there is a case to be made that Formula One does a lot of good as well in developing these technologies. I think it does good on two main fronts that being one of them and of course auto safety being another one. Let's go back a little bit to the efficiency. How long do you think it takes for those types of benefits to trickle in? Certainly it trickles to the very high-end halo supercars, quite quickly within a couple of years, but I think if you look at some of the technology that's coming into your average medium, family sedan nowadays, it's probably a reasonable

say within 10 or 15 years, a meaningful amount of this stuff becomes relatively standard. And I guess it depends on regulatory pressures in different jurisdictions around the world, but the technology is there if governments mandate the use of it, I suppose, and we'll see, I guess, where we are on this planet over the next decade or so, we're going to see a lot more emphasis on these technologies. I want to come back to safety in a moment, but I can't help but ask a question that actually, I mean, I've thought about in the past, but I still don't really understand all of the complexity you've discussed.

It's mind-boggling. I know that if I spent the rest of my life, I could never drive one of those cars. I could do goofy sedan laps, but I could never do a real lap, let alone a race with anyone else out there. We might have trouble just driving it out of the garage, and then that's not easy. And yet the drivers are getting younger and younger. Sometimes again, I'm sitting there, we always watch the races together every Sunday, and because we're in California, we actually like watching them in real time. So we do get up at five to watch them first thing in the morning or whatever. And I'm trying to explain to my daughter in particular, because she's old enough,

how old Norris is and Lecler and even Verstapp. And like, I'm like, these guys are really young. And there was a day when a 30 year old was in his prime, a 30 year old is not in his prime in this sport anymore. And certainly by the time your 30-year-old couldn't break into the sport, put it that way. Whereas Damon Hill was 30, in effectively his rookie year 29, perhaps. But how is it that these drivers are getting younger and younger as the complexity of these cars is getting greater and greater? I'm just blown away by it. I think there's a couple of dimensions to that. One of them is purely cultural. I think people

just didn't think you could be a Formula One driver at all before the age of 23 or 24 previously. I think maybe some of that complexity plays into a gaming culture. A lot of our younger drivers do a lot of gaming and it's kind of a bit of a cliché to make the comparison but I think there probably is an element to that but I think now that it's been done we had Max Rostappen come into the sport just out of his 16th year I think and we've had a couple of teenage drivers since then Lance Stroll, Espanocon and others. I think now that it's accepted that it's possible the teams are more open to looking at younger talent. I think the pathway to Formula One previously, let's think about the 90s or the early 2000s, when we did have these brutal V10 engines and the cars were physically very much harder to drive.

I think there was a physicality about that that probably suited us like the older driver as well. The cars are not easy to drive nowadays by any means, but they are probably less of that brutal raw explosive muscular power required for perhaps a more an individual more well developed physically. And it remains to be seen, of course, but does this mean that Formula One drivers will have longer careers today coming in earlier and staying longer or or does it mean that the turnover is gonna be higher? And it's sort of interesting when you consider, like I always think of Lewis as really young. I don't know, 2007 seems like it was sort of yesterday.

And yet Lewis is what, 34? Yeah, Lewis and Sebastian are both 33, 32, 33 now. Which would make them two of the oldest guys in the grid, right? Yeah, we had Kimmi turned 40 this week. But he's a bit of a hammer. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's an opposing sort of trend though.

The seat time is so valuable now. There's so little testing. It's relatively difficult to get a super license, which is the qualification. You need to collect points in other series. You need to do well in other series just to get to Formula One. So, and then on top of that, the cars are just so complicated to drive that there's a huge premium placed on anyone with seat time and seat experience. So I think that will trend very strongly towards longer careers.

So people will come in early and they'll be retained for longer. You'll have to have a much stronger case to bring an unproven rookie into the sport. Let's take a step back a little bit and kind of talk about some of these changes that have really taken over. You've alluded to the halo. Explain what the halo is when it came about and what the effect of that has been. So the halo is a cage-like device which sort of sits over the top of the driver's cockpit. So I'm just going back to basics. We're talking about open cockpit racing here and that's one of the classic characteristics of a formula car. It's got open wheels and an open cockpit and traditionally you could see the driver. The halo is this device which has been constructed

over the top to protect the head of the driver which was the one last remaining big vulnerability in terms of safety. And the halo has been in for two seasons now. I must admit, personally, I was a little skeptical. I could understand the rationale for it. I did wonder whether it was a solution in search of a problem. Having said that, we've had probably at least four distinct incidents now in Formula One and Formula Two, where the halo has prevented a significant impact with a driver's head. So regardless of what anyone thinks of it now, it's here to stay. The current halo is not a pretty thing. It's definitely probably in its first iteration at present and it will be developed.

I think in Indicare this year, they're using an evolution of the halo, which has more of a jet fighter screen around it, which is much, much more aesthetically pleasing. And I think instead of that bar down the middle, correct. And I think when things like fogging and airflow and you have to account for all weather conditions and all visibility conditions, and when those problems can be solved, probably will move towards a arrow screen with an opening out the top so that it's still technically open wheel racing. And it's a pretty impressive piece of kit. I mean, it's seven kilos of titanium, the test, the halo apparatus has to pass by FIA regulation is something like a 10 to 12 ton load, a large bus being sat on the top of this seven

kilo device and not deforming at all. Just again, another example of that. That's unbelievable. Remarkable technologies that go into these beautiful works about these cars that we can and not deforming at all. Just again, another example of that. That's unbelievable. Remarkable technologies that go into these beautiful works about these cars that we can sometimes take for granted. And there's another thing that we wear in a car called the Hans, which it's been around almost exactly 20 years now.

It's been in Formula One a little bit less than that, maybe 15 years. You've indirectly alluded to it by explaining why the driver can't turn his or her head, well in Formula One his head I guess, but left to right. What is the Hans doing and how is it saving a life? So the Hans is a head and neck support device. Hans is actually one of several brands that are on the market, but it's the one used most commonly in open wheel series. It's a carbon fiber device that sits on the top of the shoulders

of the driver. It has the raised harness, the seatbelt straps, over the top of the device pressing it down into the driver's shoulders, and then the helmet is attached by some very high tensile straps to this device. The effect of that is that if the driver has a head on or a rotational impact, the movement of that is that if the driver has a head on or a rotational impact, the movement of the head, especially the flexion of the neck is greatly limited. And the

Hans device has no doubt across many categories of motorsport, saved many, many drivers from high cervical fractures. So fractures of the neck that would have killed them or severely disabled them for their life. It's interesting. We probably only have anecdote about this and don't get me wrong. I think the harms and other devices like it have been an innovation in motorsport that shouldn't be questioned at all, but the force transmission down the spine is interesting to think about. And I think if you look at a lot of the accidents we get in rally nowadays and also in close work with racing, we seem to get these thoracic and lumber crush factors a lot more commonly and I don't think this has been formally studied but it seems like the harns probably changes

the loading on the spine and produces something that's transmitted more actually down to other parts of the spine. Do you think that's something that the experience when they hit a bump or is it more when there's a head-on collision? It would be more in a very high-speed impact way. The loadings on a drive-in and impact like that vary with the exact circumstances. I mean, it totally makes sense because if there's a vector that's going forward and that normally would have been distributed between C1 and C3 and now you've locked that up with the hans. Well then you're going to see that

presumably below about T1. The force has to go somewhere. I think the thoracic spine is braced somewhat by rib structures and the drivers in their cars are in a highly recumbent position. They're almost lying flat on their backs which a lot of people don't appreciate and that also adds to the unbelievable skill required to just control one of these vehicles, the fact that you're more or less lying flat on your back with limited visibility. So that changes the force distribution as well. I was in Italy last year and I got the chance for my wife to see a Formula One car and get inside one. And she's like what, five, seven or something like that. And I'm like, okay, so a Formula One driver might be a total of an inch taller than you, two inches taller than you. Get in there and now try to imagine doing what

they're doing from the position. And she couldn't believe how little she could see from being in this position. It was just it is overwhelming. The modern F1 car is very long and very wide and very heavy as well. and controlling those cars with limited visibility in traffic is a very underappreciated part of the art. I think it's the hardest, I mean there's nothing I've ever dabbled in that I could extrapolate to and say that's harder. I just don't think anything is. People say, oh you've swam from here to here or something and I'm like that is a trivial, trivial task. That is simply a matter of just putting your head down

and trying harder. That doesn't speak to what you're describing here. It's a sport with many complex layers. And a lot of that social complexity too. Yeah, how do you manage, I mean, is that part of your job description or is that just something that based on your own personality, you're obviously very thoughtful, you're very introspective, that you've sort

of gravitated to, which is you have the luxury of not being, you have the luxury of being sort of there to serve everyone, but you have huge personalities, you have a sport with only 20 athletes, but 10 owners, and they all have to be under one roof effectively 21 times a year. Yeah. First of all, yes, with reference to our position, where it's extremely privileged to be working across multiple teams. How many teams do you work with of the 10? We work with at least one driver in every team at present.

So about 14 drivers in some form under our care. I never take that for granted. It's an enormous privilege. And it goes back to Akis' time really. When the model we use is medically led and the medical services that we provide, I think I kind of the glue that cement those relationships. And I would say, so our model is that we have a performance

coach, people would refer to as the trainer or the physio who accompanies each driver. This coach will attend all of the races and normally train with the driver in between races as well all year. So they have a very close one-on-one relationship. We tend to use mostly sports scientists in our team. They have a good broad understanding of the physical preparation, the nutrition, the sleep management, and the other things that we need to think about across the race season. We do use some physiotherapy stuff as well, and increasingly dual-qualified sports scientists, physios are probably the idea for this job, but

all of that specific preparation aside, probably the most important role for our coaches is management of the cognitive bandwidth of the driver across a race weekend. So we discuss driving the car and the driver will have about seven hours in the vehicle across a race weekend. But on top of that, there's probably 10 hours of engineering meetings in which they get very, very deep in the data and the analysis of what's happened on track. and then endless other hours of media and marketing commitments as well as just all managing the politics of any athletes career. So as you referenced, you might think about the NBL or the NBA, sorry, or the NFL where most weeks you're going to have two team bosses under one roof at any one time, but in Formula One, every two weeks you have 100% of the competitors in the world,

all 20 seats, they're all there. You've got all the team principles, you've got a good percentage of the team owners, you've also got the principal regulators of the sport and the owners and promoters and all of those people are mingling freely with the media. You know, there's nowhere to hide in a Formula One panic. It's a big traveling family. That does out a certain level of political, I wouldn't say tension. That's probably pejorative or negative.

It does add a real social complexity to what these athletes need to get out and do, which is ultimately drive the car. Our coaches get to know their drivers. They manage a lot of their key relationships. They manage the time of their driver. They will usually develop a role where they can sort of interface between the marketing team and the media commitments and things and certainly recognize when their driver needs to be left alone where they may need a holiday when they can push when they can train. When they can do more or less. So, that's probably, and these drivers are all human beings.

People think of professional sport, and especially Formula One as a place where everything is done with an unlimited budget to absolute perfection. And I think Peter, you probably have contact with enough professional athletes in various categories to understand that it's just not like that is it? Regardless of the funding, regardless of the techniques and the science and the innovation available, professional sport is just about human beings and all their flaws and faults. Well, yeah, I probably don't have nearly as much experience as you, but I think what's most interesting to me is that even the people who are the best, most of them still have

the same sorts of doubts that, quote unquote, normal person would experience. And you see it across seasons where people get into slumps and you get a bad bounce, you get things that just don't go your way for a period of time and all of a sudden it sort of shakes your confidence. And I don't know, I mean, I think in a sport like Formula One, I would have to guess that the toll of that is really great. There's nowhere to hide. It's like tennis.

There's no ambiguity about who's driving that car or who's on that side of the tennis court or that side of the tennis court. And yes, there are plenty of examples when a driver is doing everything right in the car fails. Certainly said a couple of weeks ago, best line of the whole formula one season, by the way. Bring back the bleep in F12s, V12s or other. I just have, like I said earlier, I think I just have great empathy for the load that they must be under. And yeah, you can say, well, come on, they're athletes, they're doing something really fun and it's really great.

But I often wonder if it's as fun as we think it is compared to. I'm always reminded of Senna at the very end of the documentary talking about how you get the sense that Formula 1 just wasn't as fun to him at that point in his life because he was harkening back to his days of carting. He just kept saying like there was no politics there was no money it was just about the pure joy of racing and I I do wonder when you talk about some of those obligations that these guys have in the political games that they have to play and just the unhappiness.

You referenced the younger drivers coming through. Yeah, there's a lot of satisfaction to be derived, of course, from working with world champions and winning jammageeps, but actually one of the joys of my job as well is bringing these young kids through and we typically start working with them in F3 or F2. Can you explain to folks the difference between F1, F2, F3 and what does that look like? I mean, we're going to come back and talk about the recent events of F2, but help people

understand what those different formula mean. So this has been greatly simplified in the last couple of years to the credit of the FIA. There's a more or less straight pathway through F4, F3, F2, and then F1 nowadays. Formula 2 occurs at F1 race weekend, so the drivers in F2 are very much on the radar of the Formula 1 teams and bosses. They're a car which is maybe 5 to 10 seconds, a lap slower than an F1 car. A lot simpler in terms of the controls, they're not these remarkable hybrid sort of engines. They've got some similarities, probably the most important element being the tires, so tire management is incredibly important in Formula One, and the drivers

in F2 and to a lesser extent, F3 have to learn that art in those categories. F3 cars are a little bit simpler again, so no power steering a lot more physical, a lot more brutal to drive, but slower. And typically how older the folks in F3 and F2? You're probably talking an age range of 16 to early 20s. These guys and girls are playing for keeps. Every year could be the end of their driving career, so I commend anyone who has a bit of time to watch the F2 racing. It's genuinely exciting, we can week out, and it's a big job for the

students to keep on top of driving standards because you know, so much is at stake in those categories. And then F4 is more or less the graduation point from cuts to open-wheel racing and national F4 championships in many different countries that sort of feed through to the higher categories. So the cars get a little faster and a little more complex as you go each step up the chain. What's the role of money as one goes up the chain? When you look at a sport like basketball, you refer to the NBA a moment ago. If you're good, if you live in the United States and you are really good, you can make it to the NBA.

You don't need any money. Usually that'll take you through a college scholarship through to the NBA, but if you're exceptional enough, you could even go straight from high school into the pros. Same is true in baseball. Again, you almost always go through the minor leagues, you're very rare, you'd go straight from high school

into the major leagues, but you could go through college, you could go from high school into minor league baseball, et cetera. But formula one is not quite like that, which doesn't mean you have to come from wealth, but you certainly have to get the endorsement of someone with a lot of money. Where does that begin in the chain?

So you take a really promising kid in a go cart. How do they get to formula four, three, two, and one? So first of all, I guess, carting as a hobby and carting starts at the age of six or seven or eight years old. So it's not like strapping on running shoes or football boots. You have to have a parent with a little bit of budget and a little bit of interest in motorsport even to start carting. Typically, motorsport can run within families so often there's a father,

usually there's a father who's competed and who has the funding to bring out a young competitor through. And then I guess as you get good at motor racing there's two streams, there's those who continue to pay their way and roll the dice and take their chances and hope that their day will come. away and roll the dice and take their chances and hope that their day will come. And there's others who are really an obvious outrage, it's natural talent who will get picked up by one of the three or four big teams and inducted into a junior driver program. So those opportunities are relatively scarce, but if you're really good, you'll probably find yourself aligned with one of the big teams that are in the middle. And if there's geographically relevant, are you more likely to with one of the big teams. And are there three of them? And are there geographically relevant,

are you more likely to get one of those streams if you're coming out of Europe than if you're coming out of South America? I think Europe is absolutely the geographical center of the sport. It's very difficult to succeed from Asia or from any of the Americas without ultimately ending up in three or F2 in Europe, because that's simply

where the racing is conducted under the nose of the F1 teams, and that's where those top levels of category actually unfold. So yeah, and there's 20 seats in Formula One, unlike tennis or golf or football where there's 100 or 200 or more competitors at the very highest level. These drivers are competing for an extraordinarily small

number of positions. And everybody who's there regardless of how they've been funded is there on some kind of merit. They've had to win championships or do well in junior categories just to get the super license points to be eligible to drive in F1. So I would posit that the depth that we see in the field currently is by far the best it's ever been and it's getting better every year and really adds to the stories all down through the midfield where some of the most interesting action unfolds. It's not just about the Mercedes cars or the Red Bull cars in recent years dominating at the front of the field. There's all sorts of fun to be had.

I think that's actually, and I heard that this year for Netflix both Ferrari and Mercedes are being filmed, is that true? So the Netflix series has focused on the midfield where a lot of these stories are Mercedes have agreed to some limited involvement this year And I'm not sure actually what Ferrari is doing, but I think they probably will feature to a limited extent That'll be great because I'd love to see it But I actually think last year worked out really well not having them in the story because You could have just talked about Ferrari and Mercedes the whole time, but to talk about everybody but them made it incredibly interesting. I agree, it was one of the really powerful outcomes of the series and it's actually one

of the hazards of work in the paddock at the moment trying to avoid the camera. Well, I spent a lot of time talking to drivers about their health or their medical issues or the troubles that they're having in their career And it can be very easy to be having a private conversation in a corner somewhere and suddenly find a Netflix Boom microphone over your head or a camera for a distance So to be fair that the team are a relatively sensitive for that sort of thing And it's probably not just Netflix. I mean we are performing our work in front of cameras day in day out the entire year and it's just something you've got to be a little bit more in for love. How would you handicap the safety of Formula One today? To put it in perspective,

when the 1960s and in the 1970s, there was a very good chance that if you did this for a living, you were not going to retire. In fact, it's kind of amazing the exceptions to that rule, because they're the ones that we tend to know about today. Most people, unless you're sort of a diehard fan, you've forgotten the names of all the people that died. I think Yacht and Rent is the only one to have won a Formula One title posthumously. So by definition, if you're rattling off the names

of Formula One champs, they usually at least lived long enough enough to win and many of them went on to die prematurely in retirement But the list of people that most people wouldn't remember like the Peter Revsons of the world and I mean everybody remembers Jill Villeneuve who never won a title but would still be considered one of the greats of all time But there's this belief that Formula One today is so insanely safe time, but there's this belief that Formula One today is so insanely safe to is not be interesting, but one, do you think that that's true and two, can we learn anything about the recent fatality and Formula Two that can give us a sense that no, actually, it's still a very dangerous sport? It's a really delicate argument because I think if we're honest with ourselves that danger,

there has to be a small element of danger at least to provide that depth of interest in what the drivers are doing. It has to be hard, it has to be something that has to be something that we can't do. Yeah, exactly. So Formula One is extremely safe and we referenced all of the terrible things

that happened in the 70s and early 80s. But there's a number of strands that track design is getting much better than the car design has come on in leaps and bounds and the track sight intervention, the medical and rescue services are also light years ahead of what they used to be. But we have had three or four notable fatalities over the last two decades. And so there is always some part of the Swiss cheese that lines up some unaccounted for possibility that can still result in a death and one of the big vulnerabilities is a side-on impact with a stationary vehicle and unfortunately we had a terrible accident about six or eight weeks ago at the Belgian Grand Prix in Formula 2 where a car who'd had a

relatively innocuous spin Antoine Hubert, was stranded side on station in the middle of the track and was just hit at well over 200 kilometers an hour, 170 miles per hour by one of his fellow competitors who was just unsighted. Although we had this nose to side impact, which as good as the F2 and the F1 cars are

and believe me, they're very, very good. The intrusion properties of the chassis, the tubber, exceptional, but there are some forces that you just can't account for in every situation. Yeah, I'll never forget the press conference a couple days after Senna died when Max Mosley then very knew in his post as president said, and I thought he was so spot on by the way. He said, the question isn't, why did Santa crash? Because that's all anybody wanted to talk about.

To this day, there's still great debate about why he crashed. So the question is, why did he die? And he said something I'm paraphrasing, and he said it much more eloquently, you are at the highest level of the sport at the absolute limit of mechanical and human capability. There are going to be crashes all the time, but nobody should die in one of these crashes. I don't know if the statistics bear this out, but it certainly seems like they do just watching races. It doesn't seem like there are any fewer crashes today, but there's no denying that the fatalities are an epsilon fraction of what they used to be. And let's be honest, the crashes are a massive part of the appeal of motorsport

especially to the more casual fan. It's spectacular in vehicle crashes and there's parts flying everywhere and it adds to the drama and the human tension as well. So that will always be part of the sport, but as your reference, it needs to be drama and the human tension as well. So that will always be part of the sport but as your reference it needs to be made as safe as possible and you talked about the center footage driving around Monaco and one of the remarkable insights there is how high the drivers are sitting up out of the car and after out and died that was one of the big innovations. So the head and the shoulders of the driver were much better protected. There's a shroud around the head and helmet, which limits any sort of intrusion and the cockpit sides are much higher nowadays. Senna's death probably had a greater impact on the safety of F1 than any single tragedy in the history of this sport. When Jim Clark died, it's not like the sport

changed that much. And Jim Clark was to Formula One in the 60s, almost. I mean, no one was quite to F1, what Santa was, but comparable, certainly. There was an enormous amount of low-hanging fruit in terms of safety during that time. So a lot of the simple things would do. Yeah, I mean, but they still drove un-martial. They still did, I mean, I guess to this day, I don't think anybody knows what actually happened to Clark's car. Yeah. Santa's death was the first in a generation really. They had not been a death apart from

Roland Ratzenberg the previous day. They had not been a death for 14 years. And so it was a bit of a shock. And so there was another step change in safety for sure. The wheel tethers, all sorts of things. You recall, it wasn't even 10 years ago when Mark Weber had that unbelievable crash, you know the one I'm talking about. And to see the wheels not coming off was sort of unbelievable. Yeah, and he walked away. Went back into his TV interviews. Yeah. It's very hard to injure yourself in a Formula One car. I had a look at this in a couple of years ago now, but just the accident patterns in Formula One. And it was interesting. I defined a medical incident as any time a driver was reviewed and assessed at the

track medical center either because they had an injury or because they had a mandatory attendance. And what forces a mandatory attendance? It's come down a little bit every year, but it's 15G on the car now. So there's an impact light which comes on on the car, so the trackside marshals or the medical crew can tell if the impact has exceeded this amount then they automatically are assessed at the trackside medical center. It was actually quite revealing to look at these incidents over a couple of years because it was a little bit counterinsured to be honest, so more than two thirds of the incidents happened on the Sunday, on the race day, and 90% were in dry weather, so this is medical incidents. What fraction of those were in the first lab?

I'd say most were in the early labs, but you do definitely get mid to late race safety cars as well, where a car can go off at high speed by itself. So the bigger impacts were on Sunday in the race, they were in the dry when drivers have perhaps self-evidently pushing and they're doing their highest speeds in close quarters without the cars. But there were five roll over accidents, I think during the time that I looked at,

and they're one of which resulted in injury. That was Fernando's massive crash in Melbourne a couple of years ago. The impacts that happened in the wet, they're often very spectacular. There's lots of parts flying off the car, but they tended to be sort of low to medium impact. And the real high risk for injury was a 40G plus impact in dry weather. Can you even put that in context for me for what a normal person would experience on a freeway? We don't have the sensors I know, but can we even estimate the impact on a car?

It's a very crude measurement actually because it's measured sort of on the chassis it doesn't really correlate that much with what the forces are on the driver and of course the direction of the impact influences the vector and where is it picked up on the chassis because if it's before the chassis collapses then obviously a much lesser fraction of that would hit the driver hopefully. That's a very good question to which I do not know the answer. So the drivers also have this in ear accelerometer. They have three axis accelerometer in their earpiece and that's interrogated later. So there's a much more accurate data analysis which comes after an accident by the FIA, but usually that

information it comes not going to benefit the treatment or the management of the driver on any given day. That's going to be a lesson for the future. And that reflects, of course, the forces on the skull much more closely because it's actually sitting in the middle of the year. The driver can sustain very, very high peak G-forces if they're instantaneous or very rapid in terms of a spike of force, the lower forces, if they're sustained over a longer period. And we're talking sort of tenths of seconds rather than thousandths of seconds. Those are the impacts that can do a little bit more damage. That's interesting. And of course,

if you come down to seconds holding 5G for two seconds on part of an arc is... Yeah, that's not going to injure you, but it's going to injure you. It's going to injure you, but boy, that's not gonna injure you, but it's gonna injure you. It's not gonna injure you, but boy, that's next level. People don't get, I suppose, how tired drivers are after the race. I mean, I've got to see some drivers after races, and they look as exhausted as someone who's, as you said, done two hours of a brutal cross-fit workout,

and even walking up a flight of stairs looks like it's asking them a lot. The cars took a step change in speed and power and grip. It was the beginning of 2017 so they became much more physical to drive at that point. By a large and experienced F1 driver will cope with most scenarios, they'll be tired but they're well within their physical capabilities. How much weight will a driver lose during one of the hotter races? I guess Singapore is the archetypal physical race. It's a race which always goes for the full two hours. It's a city, street race. It's got more corners than any other circuit, 24, 25 corners, and it's all 90 degree turns

at moderate speed. So in tropical heat and humidity, the drivers there will often lose three or four kilos in weight. They have in the car a drinks bottle. If their engineer is being very kind to them, that might be 1.2 to 1.5 litres for a race like Singapore. Usually it's about half a litre, but it's hot. It's like drinking tea after a few minutes in the car. So the driver area at the end of the Singapore Grand Prix is quite something to be told. It's a driver coming in flushed and exhausted and a far away looking their eyes and that's a race where recovery is particularly important. Now there was a rule change a few years ago with respect to drivers' wheat.

What was that? Yeah, the drivers have always had a pressure on them from the engineering teams to maintain their weight at the minimum possible. And I guess you're trying hard and spending millions of dollars in some cases to shave hundreds of grams off the car. So losing a killer off the driver is a relatively easy thing for the team to ask with a favorable cost benefit analysis. My favorite example of this was back when I used to be a sort of pathetic cyclist. I remember once going into the bike shop to get some new bottle cages and they had like the regular cages where this much and then the super duper fancy carbon fiber cages that were 19 grams lighter were 10 times more.

And the guy at the bike shop was trying to talk me into getting them and I was like, look dude, before I go and drop an extra couple hundred bucks to save 19 grams, I've got about two kilos I could afford to shed. I think I'll save my money for now. Yeah, very cool. So we were at the point where we had these younger drivers,

these teenage drivers coming in, a number of whom were quite tall. We had some of the older drivers like Mark Weber who were in a continuous battle to save weight and honestly we were starting to see some unhealthy what was the minimum weight set out. So minimum weight was car and driver combined. So at that time there was no reference to the driver's weight. It was just lose as much as possible. We had people running into problems with overtraining under nutrition. We had some eating behaviors coming out, which I was not comfortable with.

And we had Charlie Whiting, who unfortunately passed away earlier this year, was the great technical leader of the sport for the last few decades. And to Charlie's credit and to the FAA's credit, I raised this issue with them. And they acted very quickly. So we have a new regulation this year where 80 kilos is the mark. That's the driver plus their helmet, their racet and their seat,

and any driver who's below that level is ballasted up to 80 kilos. So it basically takes the driver weight out of the equation to a large degree. And I must say the drivers are absolutely delighted with this. They've just got the luxury of being a killer or a killer on a half heavier. They can put on a little bit more muscle. Then, nutrition's just not quite the chore, the daily misery that it used to be. And I think we're in a much better place for that regulation.

Now, we've had women get very close to F1. I think there's even been women that have competed in races, but not for a complete season, is that correct? Yeah, there've been two or three women who competed and one scored half a point, I think, in the 1970s when half points were awarded from time to time. So it's been a pretty rare thing. We've had Suzy Wolf drive in free practice on a Formula One recandes recently, as a couple of years ago, but it's been a long time since a female driver has raced in a Sunday race.

Are there any females in the F2, F3, pay-point? Not obviously at the moment, no, but we have this year seen the advent of an all women's racing series in Europe called W series, and we've been closely involved in that, and I must say it's been really a huge success on many levels and a wonderful experiment. And I look forward to seeing that develop over the next decade or so because it's a really vexed question, gender and motorsport. I think there's a perception that driving F1 cars like being a fighter pilot, for example, where I think intuitively men and women should be relatively equal.

It's a fine motor and a cognitive skill. But the truth is that as we've discussed, Formula One is an extremely physical activity, and it's not so much F1. I think F1 maybe does play to the strengths of women in some ways, some of the social complexity, some of the spatial stuff, the power steering. I think a woman absolutely can succeed in F1, but the problem comes at the grassroots levels in motorsport where we A have a very small pipeline of competitors coming through and B, the environment in F3, for example, is pretty hostile. The cars are more physical to drive and they're up against, frankly, teenage males with differences in risk-taking behavior, test-Australian levels.

There's both physical and... Right, so the lack of prefrontal cortex in these male drivers is actually a competitive advantage to them at that stage in driving probably. Again, I mean, there is academic literature of this kind of stuff in Olympic sports, for example. There is some evidence for the physical and cognitive differences between male and female athletes, but I think basically to find a woman who can succeed in F1, they are absolutely out there, but they'll probably be an outlier. And by definition, then you have to be bringing

more women through the pipeline to find those outliers. And W series is a great first step in my opinion towards just providing other avenue for women to get to the top levels of motorsport. And certainly there are cultural things that need to change as well. I mean, fathers who are funding motorsport careers and undoubtedly favour sons at the moment, but hopefully that will change as well. WCRES has proven to be a great TV success and the TV ratings have been great. The depth of the driving talent has been, I think it's exceeded all expectations. The racing has been really good to watch and they'll go to an expanded calendar next year and probably in the future

more powerful cars as the series becomes established. For perspective, what are the, if you go through the W series, the Formula 3, 2 and 1, what are the relative horsepower of each of those cars? Oh, I don't know. That's something I had. Well, a Formula One car today is less than a 1000 horsepower, correct? Yeah. The electrical power makes them very talky as well. So it's not just a top line power acceleration is staggering. Yeah.

It's kind of amazing in the 80s. You look at the MP44, which is 1988. I mean, that was a 1200 horsepower car. Yeah. A beast. Absolute beast with was a 1200 horsepower car. Yeah. A beast. Absolute beast with no downforce and a manual gearbox. Yeah. Yeah. And back then, they had much more power available to them at qualifying. They would detune the car for the race.

And that would use the engine once for an hour and then throw it away, right? So the engine was there to be blown up essentially at the maximum speed possible. It is crazy. This is the other, I guess, environmental dimension to be comfortable with the one. The reliability of these engines is unbelievable. They have three engines to do the entire season. Yeah, I explained to people what a team has at their disposal. How many tires, how many gearboxes,

how many engines, what are they trying to manage over the course of these 21 races? This is all part of the chess game, part of the really interesting strategy. So you have, as our reference, three engines across, and the engine comes in different parts. There's the heat recovery system, the kinetic recovery system, the battery. So you can replace some of those parts individually without some penalty. But basically, you've got to do your Friday practices, you've got to do your Saturday qualifying and a third of the races on one engine.

I mean, that again is an extraordinary step forward from where we were even 2010, 2011. So principally a cost-cutting measure, but something that absolutely will flow through to the reliability of road cars. Tires, there's 12 sets of tires for the weekend, and again, you have to select well in advance, eight or 12 weeks ahead of the race. What tires are you gonna take to that event? There's three compounds to choose from, so the different compounds are either faster,

don't last very long or a little bit slower in terms of lap time, but they'll get you through a much bigger chunk of the race. And the engineers and the strategists need to work out what tyres they're going to bring to a race weekend and then how they deploy them in each session, which ones are going to use to practice, which ones you're going to qualify on, and then leave yourself with enough options for the race. Let's talk about the 2021 rule changes.

How many of those have been solidified? I think they're getting closer to the final document. There were some meetings, I think, last week in Geneva between the regulators and the various team bosses and other stakeholders. I think we have a bit of an understanding of the fact that the car is going to have some simplified aerodynamic characteristics. The engines probably will stick to something very similar to the current formula, and then the budget cap will probably more apply to the teams and the operations, and what they

can do in terms of the number of upgrades, the number of different parts, the level of activity that they can bring to upgrading the car through the season. What kind of changes will take place with the tires? The tires there's going to be quite a big change, so we're going from 13 inch wheels to 18 inch wheels, so the tyre will be a lot smaller in profile, which is it may not sound very significant, but actually the tyre currently is relatively old school, big balloony piece of rubber that is a big part of the car's suspension at the moment and bringing in an 18 inch wheel with a very much narrower tyre sidewall is going to change everything in terms of suspension and braking and aerodynamics over the cars so that's a huge challenge for the engineers who are working on even as we speak. What kind of interest in motorsport in the first place? In 1985 the Australian Grand Prix returned to the International Formula One Calendar and so

for whatever random reason I happened to watch the Australian Grand Prix returned to the International Formula One calendar. And so for whatever random reason I happened to watch the Australian Grand Prix this weekend in October and 1985 and the TV coverage was done with a huge amount of enthusiasm. This was a big international event coming to Australia and I just caught the bug. I haven't missed a race in the 34 years since, so it's been an incredible ride. You were triathlete, right? Did a little triathlon have to say not a lot of training in the current schedule, but did my first race in 1988 and struggled through a couple of iron mans, yes. Learned a lot about being an athlete, actually, even by being a hopeless weekend warrior.

Yeah, what did you learn from that that translated to what you're doing today? I think you have a basic understanding of what it's like to train. I think what it's like to get up in the morning and have to do a training session that might be a bit of a chore on that particular day. I think you have a fundamental understanding of the difference between aerobic and aerobic training, some of those really simple things. I mean, as we reference, I come from an intensive care, critical care background, so I rely very heavily on my coaches and my coaching director,

Pete McNight, to implement the technicalities of coaching for our drivers. This is not my strength or forte, but I think just having been an amateur athlete gives you a little bit of appreciation for what it's like to have to stick to a training program and then compete even on whatever level. Race day is a race day, right? No matter what the stakes are. Yeah, it's interesting, right? I mean, it's sort of like you can take your own race as seriously as it's been taken on the world's biggest stage. Yeah, and I look back now and I am in particular so badly.

There are so many things I would do in terms of nutrition, in terms of sleep, in terms of structure of training now. I'm looking forward at some point in the next decade to having a second triathlon career and implementing a lot of things I've learned from my fantastic coaches in recent times. It seems that the drivers today are much more tuned into nutrition and exercise than drivers of 25 years ago. Again, Santa, I keep referencing him, was kind of the outlier. I mean, the seriousness with which he took his fitness, with which he took his training was the stuff of legends. That was not the norm. And when you look back and you watch James Hunt,

amazing driver, not training. It's interesting that you mentioned James. I think probably Nikki Lotto was the first and Nikki in recovering from his horrendous injuries in the Nürburgring in 1976 was maybe the first example of somebody who really implemented a serious physical training regimen, but certainly Santa was a big standout in his time and then Michael Schumacher perhaps built on that into the current era. But yeah, the benchmark keeps rising and most of the drivers are, even if they're not particularly interested in the absolute peak of physical preparation,

they have a pretty reasonable understanding of what a strength workout is and what their aerobic capacity needs to be to get through it to our race. So I didn't know this about you until somewhat recently, but you survived cancer and it was quite advanced. I sort of don't think of that time as any sort of great survival threat. I can have one season, it all happened so far, so it all moved so quickly, but 10 years ago, just last month actually, I was working in the North of Australia

with the flying doctors in a very remote area and I had developed testicular cancer, which I diagnosed by myself on one of the very early portable ultrasound machines we had up there. As you know, it's a cancer, if you had to choose a cancer to have, it's the one with the best survival prospects, you know, in excess of 90%. So whilst it was, you know, it was real chemotherapy and real surgery, you did not have saminomitus cancer, so it was non-seminoma and I actually did have pulmonary metastases as well. And looking back now, it was a relatively rough ride. I had some thrombotic complications as well.

I had a pretty profound perineoplastic thrombophilia. Can you explain to folks what that means? So in some cancers, in some people, you'll develop a clotting tendency. And in retrospect, the first day I went in for a scan, I had an IV drip put in and a sort of a little clot formed all the way up my arm. That should have been a bit of a warning sign, but you then have a permanent catheter implanted

to receive the chemotherapy drugs, a portocath. And that sits in the large vein next to the heart and mind, in fact, clotted up completely. So there's something called superior venocamus syndrome, which every medical student sees in the textbooks. And I had never seen really in real life in my work. At one morning, looked in the mirror and yeah had never seen really in real life. I worked up one morning, looked in the mirror, and yeah, I had basically a complete blockage of blood returned at the heart from the upper part of my body. But it was an interesting lesson in the realities of being a patient. I think I had always been a relatively empathetic doctor,

but just the logistics of having to go to appointments, having to be stabbed with needles multiple times a week, the fatigue of the drugs, having to find a car parking space at the hospital every day. I think it just gives you a great appreciation for the experience of being ill and being a patient. I had access to really good private care. I had access to virtually my hand-picked specialists in the different fields that I utilize. But even then things go wrong. You're still subject to the same vagaries of nursing and nursing shifts and blood collectors and adverse reactions to drugs, no matter who you are, we are all still human, right? Was there any point during your illness when it wasn't a given that you were going to survive, even getting through all the chemo? So not to get too deep into the weeds, but I did have

these lung lesions, which, yeah, I mean, that stage for non-seminomitus, to a particular cancer, is not a walk in the park or a given that you're going to survive. Lance Armstrong also had stage for non-seminomitus, to a particular cancer. His odds were 50-50 at the time of his diagnosis. I mean, mine were a lot better than that. I think closer to 80 or 90 percent, but it's still a non-trivial chance of diagnosis. I mean, mine were a lot better than that. I think closer to 80 or 90%. But it's still a non-significant, non-trivial chance of death, I suppose.

But I'd traveled in Africa a lot. I'd had a couple of screening chest X-rays in the past, an occupational screening X-ray, and then another one when we just part of your TB screening. We'd actually had an intensive care patient who turned out unexpectedly to have a diagnosis of TB, so the staff in the unit had been screened. So I'd had two little lesions on my lungs which were known from previous X-rays, whether it was an old granuloma from somewhere in Africa or whether it was, I think, one of them was probably an intra pulmonary lymph node. So there were these lesions and they were on the scan

and nobody sort of really knew if that was significant, but low and behold, they actually disappeared with the chemotherapy. So it was really only at the end of the process that it was absolutely understood to have been a stage 4 tumor. So I didn't get to necessarily live through all the anxiety of that and it was only in retrospect that the understanding was there. Perhaps the prognosis wasn't as good as we had thought all along. So how much time are you on the road each year now? I had about 40 nights in my own bed in Switzerland last year. You don't live in Australia anymore?

No, I'm a Swiss resident at present. I do get to spend about seven or eight weeks per year at home in Australia. So we have a race in Melbourne, so get a little bit of time before and after that event. And then around some of the Asian races I try to sneak home for a week. It's always very refreshing to see friends and family and have a surf as well. So how do you manage this tool of the schedule on you? I mean, it's your job is to take care of everybody else and manage the tool. But what do you do to manage it in yourself and your team?

I mean, you have a very large team, of course, of people like Pete and Tommy and then, of course, all of these trainers that are working through the divers. I mean, how do you manage yourself and that team? Managing a business, as you probably know, as a clinician, is not necessarily something that comes naturally. So it's pretty demanding. And honestly, if it wasn't a sport that I had a great passion for, I wouldn't do this. If I was invited to a similar job in football or basketball or something else, I probably wouldn't do it. It's passion for the sport and living in the middle of the history that you're making appreciation from of where the sport has come from that makes it work.

I think it's been really difficult to do any sort of structured, formal physical training. I have tried to pay a lot of attention to sleep. It's very difficult at this time of year in terms of the travel schedule, but I really try and prioritize seven or eight hours sleep wherever we do, wherever we go. And nutrition, I suppose, I've used a lot of time

restricted eating in recent years. As you saw last year when you visited us in the paddock where presented with an abundance of really palatable, excellent food and the team buffets and it's remarkable to the extent to which you can eat quite healthy if you choose to but there's certainly some desserts there which I had to pass up and I think time restricted eating and a little bit of fasting not to the extent of long and fast like you've famously experimented with your self-peter, but that stuff can be really powerful and just trying to get outdoors, get in the sunlight, it might be only every three or four weeks that you

get to get outdoors three or four days in a row, but just try and get on the bike, try and paddle, try and do something, and also move throughout the day. I'm lucky that in the F1 paddock we are on our feet and getting our 10,000 steps, almost in the course of a routine workday. So that helps. So basically, you've got to be a little more careful with respect to your sleep and your exercise than your default environment would allow you to be. You could very easily sort of fall off a cliff doing this. Yeah, it could be an extremely unhealthy job. And part of our work is managing the team members through their same experiences.

We have two or three of the teams with an embedded coach or physiotherapist. So we try to pass on this kind of insight, these healthy habits to the teams as well. And many of the traveling team members are very invested in this. Others are less interested, but I think it has an impact for sure. What if you're not yet brought to this sport that you think you're capable of bringing through your team? So, Formula One is perceived as being the pinnacle of excellence in every area, certainly in motorsport. And in terms of the engineering and the development of the car, that's absolutely true,

probably operationally as well. On the human side, honestly, there's still a lot of low-hanging fruit. And we've spent a number of years peating myself, just honestly getting basic systems in place. Our coaches have a fair bit of latitude and freedom to work with them, their individual skills, and very importantly, they work with them, the individual skills and strengths and weaknesses and attention spans of their own driver. So making our system a system though has been priority. So it's just getting everybody doing some basic fundamentals of monitoring,

working to a schedule of assessments across the year. So that job is done now and I think we're looking to start to innovate. And I think again, in any sport, there are literally hundreds of scientifically proven interventions that you can make for an athlete. But the art of what we do is fitting that into the lifestyle and the travel schedule. And again, the attention span and interest level of the athlete that's in front of you. So I think there are things that we can do in terms of cognitive skills, perhaps eye training, perhaps proper reception. I don't know what those things are yet, but I'd like to

study them in a little more detail. There's an incredible lack of physiological monitoring of any driver in the car, even now, and perhaps we can talk about that a little bit in a moment. But the other interface probably is bringing together the way that an engineer manages their driver across the race weekend with the coaching that we are doing, and we've started over the last year to really try to get the engineers to work more closely with the performance coaches,

and likewise to give our performance coaches a bit more engineering knowledge and understanding of what the overlays of a good lap time looks like, what it means to break later to steer differently, and try to get those two streams of information coming to the driver to talk to each other and integrate a lot more. Why is there such a dearth of physiologic information going back to the paddock? I mean when you sit in one of these garages and look at the information that's coming in about the car,

look at the information that's coming in about the car, it makes the information that the mission control was getting from the moon landing. There is more information coming in about tire pressure than the entire Apollo 11 rocket going to the moon. And yet you don't know their heart rate, you don't know their heart rate variability, you don't know their electrolytes, you don't know fluid status, there are so many things about the actual driver you don't know. In fact, do you know anything about the driver in real time? In the car, very little, and there's a few historical reasons for that. One is a simple matter of the regulations, so there's race suits and the fireproof underwear that the drivers are wearing are heavily, heavily regulated. So right down to the stitching on the sponsor labels, there's actual standards for that kind of stuff

and it has to be tested and homologated. So there's a safety issue there. Yeah, there's been a real limitation of what you can attach to a driver in terms of physiological monitoring. On top of that, the teams will not add any weight to the car. So even a hundred grams of some kind of measuring or monitoring device in the vehicle would not be acceptable. And then whilst what we do is absolutely incredibly

valued in terms of promoting human performance, it's often a bit of a low priority compared to the time pressure that's involved in just getting a car out on the track and getting it developed. The bandwidth for any sort of human innovation has traditionally been relatively narrow. The FIA also mandate that any sort of monitoring on the driver has to be purely for a safety purpose. So at present, there's not a lot of interest from the governing body in terms of performance or physiological measurement for understandable reasons. But wouldn't those translate to safety? For example, we don't really have a sense of how often accidents are taking place because of fatigue that is physiologically predictable. Yeah, indeed. I think we're a long way from measuring that probably, but this last two

years we've had a biometric sensor glove introduced for the drivers. So they have essentially heart rate and oxygen saturation is measured in the driving glove. And the defined purpose of that is so that the trackside intervention services can see what the driver's physiologically doing after an impact whilst they are on their way to the scene. So that's a first step.

And I suspect we'll be a little more liberal in the future. There's going to be some pressure from television and digital streaming as well to measure physiological parameters of the driver in the car as well, which I must say is not an idea that has received such a warm reception from the drivers themselves. It's a potential competitive advantage and information advantage that they're giving away to the competitors, but I think we'll see more of this. We're looking at a couple of devices now, which will probably be compatible with the regulations and we'll have a couple of projects potentially next year where we're measuring in the car a lot more.

How long does it take a driver to learn a new circuit? So this race in Vietnam next year. How long does a driver have to prepare to learn that in a simulator? It's probably less than you think. The good drivers will get out there within half a dozen laps and they should be pretty close to on the pace. You know, they'll take another 10th or two off across a race weekend as they get better, but the Sim is a very important part. They'll prepare for each circuit specifically with a simulator session, but it's not the same as being out there sitting in the seat and feeling the forces.

So as they go from this weekend, let's just say when we're done with this race on Sunday night, two weeks from now, they'll be in Brazil, so that's a long enough stretch that many of them might seem will go home. Oh, everyone will go home for sure, yeah. When do they start getting in the simulator and driving in our Lagos before they get down there? So, simulators are a limited resource, and depending on the infrastructure of the team, there will be junior drivers, there will be test drivers, there will be others who need to use the sim. So, probably somewhere next Wednesday or Thursday, most of the race drivers will have their day or their half day in the simulator. They are learning the circuit for sure, but actually a big part of their job on that day is evaluating other aeroparts and other upgrades to the car. So it's not just

there for the luxury of the driver learning the circuit. Is it expected that the driver learns the circuit in the off season and the European circuits, they will have driven most of the circuits many times in the junior categories. It's in these long haul fly-away races where a rookie driver will be encountering the circuits for the first time and honestly they'll have a lot of engineering briefings across a weekend to help familiarization but they'll get into the swing of the circuit within a handful of laps and then build on that across the race weekend. By Sunday they should have a very limited disadvantage to people who've been there before. It's still amazing to me when I

think about how long it takes me to learn circuits. You've got to remember I guess each circuit is different from year to year. The adjustments that are being made to the car from corner to corner will change with the characteristics of the car from year to year. So even people who've been there before are kind of relearning how to drive the circuit in this year's car to achieve the optimal lap time. It's unbelievable. I don't know that I'll ever be able to successfully communicate to my friends, to my family, to listeners

of this podcast, who if anyone's not a fan of Formula One and they're still listening at this point, that would be kind of a minor miracle, I guess. But this has been a great discussion because I think it has probably been the most complete discussion I've brought to the podcast of this sport. Why I think it's so special the most complete discussion I've brought to the podcast of this sport, why I think it's so special, and what's involved in it. I think that this sort of physical, emotional, and cognitive piece, I don't think we've talked much about the emotional. I think we've talked about the physical, for sure.

The cognitive overload is staggering. I don't consider myself one who lacks in cognition, but I could never manage the cognitive load that these guys manage. But then there's this other piece, which is the emotional piece, which is, it's not a sport where getting pissed off does you much good. Emotional control in the car is incredibly important.

And it's in the car. It's in front of the media, because you can easily with an errant comment create an enormous amount of stress next week at the next race Let alone contract renegotiations and fighting for one of those precious 20 seats Yeah, and as we reference we're dealing now with teenagers in many cases and teenage drivers are just like other teenagers We may have an enormous amount of wisdom to impart, but there's a point where a young person perhaps doesn't even have enough life experience to understand the lesson that they're being given, and it's gratifying obviously to see a driver develop

through the junior categories, and then some point in their early 20s, the pennies start to drop and the pieces start to come together together and they just have gathered enough experience to understand how all the strands of their behavior and their approaches to things and the motives and the layers of social complexity around them all come together and can be coordinated in a way that's to their advantage. And they have relationships, they have family relationships. They may gel well with their race engineer, they may be other team members that they have to manage more judiciously, so all of this stuff is going on all the time. And to privilege to be there, sort of helping and guiding in some way, making a small contribution to not only growing competitive race drivers, but good human beings

in this crazy sport that we live in. Do you think 2021 will sort of reshuffle the order of the teams a bit? There's reason to think that the midfield teams might have their day more often. We may get more variability occasionally in the results, but whenever there's a large regulation change, the teams with the most resources are the ones who will exploit that to the best of their abilities and you do risk the top teams getting further ahead for a period of time. Other with the last rag change, we did see a big swap between Red Bull and Mercedes.

Indeed, so Mercedes to their credit were well ahead of their competitors on the engine development. Red Bull and Ferrari were busy fighting for championships through 2013, 2014 and Mercedes had put a lot more resource into the new engine regulations and probably stole the march on everybody by a year or more. And that's taken five or six years for that convergence to happen. You add aerodynamic changes on top of that and I think it's going to be a fascinating year. What's been the biggest surprise for you this year performance wise has it been the sort of mini sort of performance comeback of McLaren what has surprised you. We've got a long history with McLaren that worked closely with McLaren for a number of years and

it's a team that's had a massive cultural transformation in the last 18 months and I think you're right it has been a surprise to see how quickly they've started to turn things around. They're the solid number four team and they've had some really bad luck and they're still right there in number four. They really are the best of the rest. Yeah, absolutely. And you can make a case that the traditional private team that's not a manufacturer, own team, could be a truly endangered species in Formula One now.

So it's to the credit of everyone at McLaren who's been able to turn that project around, bringing a lot of fresh momentum, fresh blood, and I think they're going back to Mercedes engines in a couple of years. I think their future is looking pretty good at the moment. Luke, this has been awesome. It's so late here in Austin tonight. I'm just glad we got to record this. I knew that it was going to be really hard for us to find a window to talk, so I'm grateful that we've been able to find this one, and I'm grateful for all the insight you've shared with us. And I never get tired of talking about Formula One with you. So thank you for humoring me, continuing the discussion and doing so in front of a few other people. Yeah. Well, we've got a couple more days to dissect a little more detail about this point. Can't wait to

do so at the track. I appreciate the opportunity, Peter, particularly to talk to an North American audience about this sport because it is traditionally very European, centric, and I think anyone who watches the sport for a couple of months or watches the Netflix documentary gets into a little bit of the soap opera understands a few of the personalities there. There's a richness there, which is pretty difficult to stop watching once you're into it.

I agree. I actually just had this discussion with my wife yesterday, is tell me another professional sport where you can name every athlete. Indeed. There's only 20 of them. I know every one of them by name. I'd recognize any one of them if I bumped into them in a grocery store or an airport. And as you said, the Netflix special gives you a layer of nuance in the tension that you don't even catch off TV.

And it shows you the drama that exists up and down the field, even when it's not about winning the championship. Yeah, very special. Thanks for the opportunity. All right, Luke, I'll see you tomorrow. Indeed, looking forward to it. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of The Drive. If you're interested in diving deeper into any topics we discuss, we've created a membership program that allows us to bring you more in-depth, exclusive content without relying on paid ads.

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