Power, speed and the right refuelling strategy are crucial to Formula 1 success — and that’s just for the drivers. MF meets two world champions —Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton — to find out just how fit you need to be to hit pole position.

Words Joel Snape

Lewis Hamilton has a monster of a handshake. He isn’t a big man — even by F1 standards , where every kilo counts, he’s slim at 66kg — but when he introduces himself, it’s with a grip like a powerlifter’s. Later I’ll find out that his personal best on the hand-dynamometer McLaren drivers use to monitor their strength through the season is a top-of-the-charts 78kg.  The minimum McLaren standard for junior drivers is 60. Mine is 52.

This won’t be a surprise to F1 fans. Steering a car at speeds upwards of 300km/h, even with power-assistance, would be a brutal forearm workout for 10 minutes. Hamilton routinely does it for more than an hour. Staying upright while taking corners at up to 6.0G takes the neck strength of a small elephant and every F1 driver does that throughout training, qualifying and racing. But there’s much more to F1 fitness than that, which is why MF is discussing training with the drivers.

Hamilton, 27, and his McLaren team-mate Jenson Button, 32, both winners of the F1 world championship, have dedicated personal trainers who live with them almost all year round. Off-season, they’ll spend hours every day conditioning themselves to withstand the rigours of the racing circuit. When the season starts, they’ll account for everything they put in their mouths, while there’s a small fleet of scientists dedicated to making sure their hydration strategy is ultra-effective. “Next year, I’m planning to be on the cover of your magazine,” Hamilton says. It’s difficult to tell whether he’s joking.

WINNING FORMULA

I’ve already had a taste — a horrible, lactic-acid-flavoured taste — of the level of fitness that’s required of an F1 driver. Ahead of meeting Button and Hamilton at the 2011 Brazilian GP, I went to McLaren’s Bond-villain-style headquarters in Surrey, England, to be put through the battery of tests that every driver goes through at least once a year. Apart from having a gorilla-like grip, they’re expected to have the shoulder musculature to support their neck when cornering at speed and the isometric endurance to perform rapid steering movements for an extended period. They need a solid lower back to stay stable in the unnatural semi-lying posture they’re forced into by an F1 car and the lower-body strength to work the brakes flawlessly throughout a race. Perhaps most surprisingly, they’re expected to have a VO2 max comparable to a rower’s — that’s even better than a sprinter’s — to cope with the endurance demands of spending up to two hours on the track.

None of these is easy. As a regular gym-goer, I did OK on the shoulder endurance tests, but my lower back would be weak if I drove an F1 car and I came four short of the minimum McLaren standard of 20 pull-ups.

The VO2 max test was the toughest. Rigged up with a heart-rate monitor, strapped into a mask that measured my oxygen intake, plastered with patches that gauged hydration levels through sweat and accompanied by a man in a lab coat pricking my finger every two minutes to check my blood lactate levels, I was put on an exercise bike and told to keep a 70W power output for as long as possible. I lasted 20 minutes before collapsing in the saddle, hitting a very average level of 46ml/kg/min. Button and Hamilton are expected to stay well above 60.

Most of this is irrelevant anyway since, with a body fat percentage of 11.6, I’m too big to fit in an F1 car. Hamilton and Button might creep this high in the off-season, but when they’re racing, they’ll drop down to around eight percent, trying to pack all that fitness into a frame that’s as light as possible without sacrificing human performance.

THE WEIGH-IN GAME

Throughout the year, McLaren engineers will make, on average, one change to their cars every 20 minutes of every day, focusing largely on shedding weight. They’ve had arguments with sponsors over extra uniform labels weighing as little as 37 grams. “If you could work out a way to take a few kilos off the weight of an F1 car, you’d pay millions of pounds for it,” says Button’s personal trainer Mike Collier. So it’s not surprising that Button and Hamilton have to be ultra-careful about everything that goes into their mouths.

Staying upright while taking corners at 6.0G takes all the neck strength of a small elephant“Over the winter, my diet’s like punishment,” says Hamilton, who eats meals with his family when he can. “Everyone else is sitting at the same table, eating bacon, eggs and pancakes, and I’m just dying because I’ve got a protein shake, five dates or a handful of raisins, and that’ll be my breakfast. Last year, I was so strict with myself that I did that on Christmas Day. I’ve asked them to make it more interesting this year. In the evenings I’m sometimes allowed meat, which makes it easier if everyone else is having roast dinner. But I have a chef, so the food’s perfect.”

If he could eat one thing without putting on weight, I ask, what would it be? “Bacon sandwiches,” says Hamilton, wistfully.

Button is less strict in the off-season — “I love sweet stuff, sticky toffee pudding, banoffee pie, and I’ll have a beer occasionally,” he says — but when it’s time to get back on the grid, he’s equally disciplined, though his diet sounds like slightly more fun.

“I talked to a specialist in Monaco at the start of 2011,” he says. “He put me on this diet that was basically eggs and steak every morning, and carbs in one meal a day from brown rice or sweet potato. I lost four percent of my body fat in three weeks and I haven’t put it back on. Now I have eggs for breakfast pretty much every morning — normally an omelette — and salad or sushi for lunch. If I’m training hard I’ll have more carbs. I eat until I’m full, but I do watch what I eat.” Personal chef aside, I’m rapidly going off the idea of being an F1 driver.

TRI HARDS

Then there’s the training. Both drivers work with their own personal trainers — Button with Collier and Hamilton with former Finnish athlete Antti Vierula, who coached three track and field athletes to the Beijing Olympics. Both trainers are in the enviable position of working with drivers who enjoy exercise, though both keep their endurance high in different ways.

“Over the winter I’ll go up to the French Alps,” says Hamilton. “We’ll do a 4½-hour hike up a mountain, then we’ll run down. That’s in deep snow at points. It’s brilliant, but it’s hard work. We’ll do that or cross-country skiing for a couple of hours. Then we’ll have a good lunch, and maybe do a couple of hours in the gym in the afternoon, focusing on a lot of core-stability stuff, hip flexor stuff. We’ll do a lot of planks, and I’ll do the back-extension test with a 15kg dumbbell on my back.

In the evenings we go to the pool and do some laps, or we’ll do some stretching and some more core stuff. By 8.30pm I might be in bed.”

Button heads in the opposite direction for the off-season. “I’ll normally fly away to somewhere warm like Hawaii,” he says. “I do a lot of cycling, swimming, running, then do strength work, neck work and core stability on top of that.” Button is famously keen on triathlon, to the point where he challenged Hamilton to race him on the Windsor tri course in 2008, when he was still driving for rival team Honda. Hamilton accepted, but was withdrawn from the race by his manager. Button finished in an impressive 2hr 30min (his best for the Olympic distance of 1500m swim, 40km bike, 10km run is 2hr 7min, which he achieved at the 2009 London Triathlon).

You wonder whether the Team McLaren management worries about all these extra-curricular activities, though. Red Bull driver Mark Webber fractured his shoulder during a mountain bike training session in 2010 and hid it from his team. He remains adamant that it didn’t lead to the dip in form that cost him the championship that year, but his paymasters weren’t happy. Do Button’s bosses worry about a similar thing happening to him? “If I injure myself they might stop me doing triathlons,” he admits. “But I’d get pretty angry if they tried.”

Is he the fittest man on the grid? “I don’t know,” he says. “I train a hell of a lot. If someone else trains more, then fair play to them.”

FLUID DYNAMICS

There’s also the issue of staying race-fit on an always hectic schedule of long flights to race venues, practice laps, qualifying and racing, all of which happen within days of each other. Hydration is a huge issue, so McLaren has partnered with Lucozade to create drinks with the right blends of carbohydrates, protein or electrolytes for every stage of the process. Drivers carry a litre of fluid in the car with them, but they can still lose up to 3kg during a race on the hotter courses, purely thanks to dehydration.

Drivers carry a litre of fluid in the car with them, but they can still lose up to 3kg during a race on the hotter courses, purely thanks to dehydration.

The car/driver combination can’t be underweight at the end of the race, so McLaren team doctor Aki Hintsa is expected to predict Jenson and Lewis’s finishing weight with only a 100g margin of error. “You need to ensure that the weight that’s being lost over a race weekend isn’t too much, because it has a huge impact on performance,” says Collier. “You basically overhydrate your driver, so that when they lose some fluid they’re back where they started, not dehydrated. Part of our pre-race routine is to know where the loos are, because they’ll come out of qualifying pretty desperate.”

PIT PERFECT

It isn’t just the drivers that need to be in shape. Almost everyone in the pit lane has the same lean, focused look as Hamilton and Button, and it isn’t coincidence. “The BMI of our race team has changed considerably in the past five years,” says Jonathan Neale, McLaren’s managing director. “It used to be that working in the pit it was fine to be a big, bulky guy and move stuff around but when you’re looking for getting pit-stops below three seconds, as we are now, then flexibility, core stability, fast reactions and concentration are all-important. Then there’s stripping down the cars after qualifying, working all night for the race the next day. We’re demanding a lot from these guys. Because of that stress and the travel, if you don’t take care of yourself your immune system diminishes throughout the season.”

Neale, who worked for military contractor BAE Systems for a decade before joining McLaren, helped implement strategies for getting the crew in nearly the same shape as the drivers. The team as a whole is fitter than it’s ever been. “Most of the team lost around 2kg between June 2011  and the end of the season,” Neale says. “And their VO2 max scores have gone up. We’ve got runners, cyclists, rowers — it’s a very competitive environment.”

I find out just how competitive after Hamilton and Button finish their qualifying laps, putting themselves in the third and fourth slots on the grid for Sunday’s race. Button immediately pulls on his training kit and heads out for a run around the Interlagos track with Collier, before heading back to the hotel to rest for the next day. Shortly afterwards, 300 assorted pit crew, staff and volunteers do the same. I join them for what turns out to be one of the nastiest up-and-downhill 4.3km routes I’ve ever run, finishing in a just-about-respectable 20 minutes. Button does it in 18.

RED DEVILS

On race day, team McLaren start behind Red Bull duo Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber, the latter the only man on the grid who might be fitter than Button. Hamilton looks calm and collected, but his car lets him down and he’s forced to retire with gearbox trouble after 46 laps. Button, meanwhile, has to use all his racing ability. After being overtaken by Ferrari driver Fernando Alonso mid-race, he reels him in and claws back a podium finish. Hamilton’s already fitter than he was when he took the world title in 2008, and he’s getting fitter.

After the race, it’s off to training camps. Button has another goal besides adding to his F1 trophy cabinet. “My aim is to qualify for the Ironman championships in Hawaii,” he says, referring to the infamous Kona race, which includes a 180km cycle leg followed by a full 42.2km marathon. “In my age group [30-34] that’s bloody hard.”

Hamilton is aiming to streamline his training so he can spend more time with his family between sessions. He’s already fitter than he was when he took the world title in 2008, he says, and he’s getting fitter. “Every year you learn something about how you train,” he says. “You reflect on it and you go, ‘OK, I’m going to do it this way now’.” He’s already challenging for the title this year, and he’s in the perfect physical and mental shape to pull it off. And that cover shoot? We’ll talk about that in a few months…