Exercises and Fitness

As  a part of life of any race car driver, we must live a healthy and active lifestyle with a great deal of exercises and fitness to keep up with the strength, concentration, body weight and specially the force and needs to stay strong during the entire race weekend.

Most people have the idea that a race car driver just steer and step on the throttle and brakes. Its quite not that simple! The "endurance" of a race weekend is extremely in need of my fitness. Not only with the amount of driving time on practices on Fridays, practice and qualifying on Saturdays and stay up and prepared for the race on Sundays. 

We have no space inside a race car, there is no power steering so making turns requires a great deal of force. Not only that we change gears around 50 times per lap as fast as possible. "The amount of times and force we use on our legs and arms during one singe lap is so requiring of our bodies that if we don't exercise and keep up with our fitness high levels, we can't be competitive for 2 laps. We begin to make slower movements and by the end of the race we would be barely making turns fast" "I am not even considering times and our cars oversteer or understeer making us work harder on the steering wheel to fix it and maintain the car on the track" continues Deni Sandor "Now, imagine your self competing with another car regardless of the position your fighting for, no one wants to loose that position, so you have to go a little over the limit, control your car and scape from the others mistakes" 

In my race car, I have to maintain 70 kilos (154 pounds) maximum weight or I will be in disadvantage compared to the other drivers and 1 kilo already makes a difference in time at the end of the lap. 

As Simon Reynolds, driver performance manager at McLaren Applied Technologies, tells the Telegraph: "An F1 driver is a complete athlete. ... They are probably some of the fittest athletes around. Marathon runners and sprinters may work on specific skills but F1 drivers have to be good at everything."

We as race car drivers have to give our workout program more variety than ever with our accessories, from warmup to cooldown during fitness process since we have to Increase our body’s capacities every day, from stability to mobility, from power to speed dealing with heat, movements and G-force.

 Whether it’s a turbocharged V6 engine or the latest carbon-fiber chassis, Formula 1 is a sport where innovation and technological advances are king.

But while the power, muscle and endurance of F1 cars is renowned, the power, muscle and endurance of the men behind the wheel is often overlooked – certainly in comparison to other elite athletes.

If you were to list the top five fittest athletes in the world, names such as Mo Farah, Rafael Nadal, Cristiano Ronaldo, Chris Froome and LeBron James would more than likely be on it.

The reality is very different.

“Formula 1 drivers are extremely fit athletes,” says Eliot Challifour, a performance coach who has worked with former McLaren driver Stoffel Vandoorne and others over the course of his 15 years in motorsport. 

So think about our fitness and eating habits levels since every time we are in a race car it’s 80 per cent or more of our maximum heart rate we having to maintain for a couple of hours during 6 sections between practices, qualifying and racing.

Although we not running or moving, we've got a lot of forces that are being applied to our bodies. We are dealing  with five or even six times their body weight. 

Braking and turning: The G force requires a lot from our bodies as well. Imagine coming on a straight part of the track at about 250 km/h and brake in 2 seconds slowing down to 30 or 40 km/h. The downforce generated by an race car which allows them to high speed corner at speeds of up to 180 miles per hour  exposes drivers to G-force up to 6.5G, meaning they need a strong neck  strong enough to hold five to six times the weight of their head  to withstand the stress on their upper body.

The set of exercises on a daily workout program of a race car driver that involves some specific exercises training, diet and fitness that you aren’t likely to see at your local gym.

Take a look a some of my exercises below: