In with driver’s eye james hinchcliffesix times indycar Winner will put you inside the mind of a racer while breaking down the nuts and bolts of the sport for fans.
As INDYCAR drivers, we fight this battle all the time with those less familiar with motorsports: Are drivers athletes?
The common argument is, “You just sit and spin the wheel.” And I got it. It’s hard to connect with racing, but drivers are, undoubtedly, athletes.
Almost everyone has swung a golf club and thrown a ball into the woods so they can tell that what Scotty Scheffler does is really hard. Almost everyone has tried to drain and air-ball a 3-pointer so they can appreciate the genius of Steph Curry.
But very few people have ever had the chance to drive a race car at the limit, which helps them understand how tough it is – mentally and physically.
Most people consider driving a race car to be similar to driving a road car, which is, objectively, very easy and not a particularly physically demanding activity. But what you do on the road is not what we do on the track.
Let me explain.
The physics behind driving a race car
What makes racing physical is simply the speed.
When you go fast, you experience G-forces, or gravitational forces, and it’s a crazy thing. It is essentially a measure of the force a person feels against his or her body in relation to the force of gravity.
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, your head weighs 10 pounds. If you go through a corner on 3G – something an Indy car can do with ease, yet no passenger car in the world can achieve – that means your head now weighs 30 pounds. Or it feels that way, anyway.
Imagine lifting a 30 pound weight by your neck. And that’s one corner of a lap. Now imagine doing that at a track like Barber Motorsports Park, where there are 17 corners, and we race up to 90 laps!
If you pay attention, you’ll notice that drivers have unusually large necks because of this very unique force they experience. It’s a tough thing to even train for! Some of the devices that have been invented to help drivers with that element of training look like medieval torture devices! And that’s just the neck.
Let’s talk about upper body strength.
Indy cars – unlike NASCAR’s stock cars or Formula 1’s open-wheelers – do not have power steering. So as you go through a corner on 3G, the 2,000-pound race car you’re driving weighs 6,000 pounds.
As this number increases, the force required to turn the wheel increases significantly without power steering. Along with your neck, you also need to have a lot of strength in your arms and shoulders to wrestle the car on the track.
Your core needs to be able to control your legs, which are floating around in the cockpit when g-force is applied. Therefore core strength is important. (To prove the point, one of the current drivers, Marcus Armstrong, is trying to break the world record for planking! totally true And completely crazy.)
Speaking of feet, you need to be able to put hundreds of pounds of pressure on the brake pedal with your left foot to slow these fighters on wheels. Meanwhile, controlling throttle input requires super sophisticated and precise motor skills in your right foot.
Let’s just say: you’re working very hard on the car. And when you’re working that hard, your heart rate goes up!
And unlike football, which is explosive for a few seconds and then resets, or hockey, where a shift is very intense but lasts one to two minutes before a change, drivers push their bodies so hard for four hours straight – often with little or no rest.
All this while you have to be perfect down to the millimeter, otherwise you could get stuck in the wall and out of the race… or worse.
Oh yes, let’s not forget how hot it can get in a car. Temperatures in the car can easily reach 120 degrees during racing, adding another level of physical endurance required. It is absolutely important for drivers to stay hydrated, because sometimes you can lose up to 10 pounds In the same race, mostly by sweating from water weight.
So, let’s recap.
You need tremendous strength in areas like your neck, your upper body, your core and your lower body. You must have the cardio capabilities to perform high-intensity exercise for the same amount of time it takes to run a marathon, and you must be able to perform and sustain it in a hot environment similar to the hottest place on Earth.
And your concentration cannot be lost even for a fraction of a second, otherwise you may end up in the wall.
But of course, we are not athletes…
training like an indycar driver
Because the demands on a driver’s body are unique, so is the training.
Over the past few years, drivers and teams have involved more and more athletic trainers and companies to create very specific programs for all types of racing. The regimen covers all of the above areas, but they also include physical training as well as cognitive training to a great extent.
All this in an effort to keep your mind sharp when your body starts to get tired.
You do a lot of training in the offseason. It’s very difficult to be out of a race car for several months, but that’s the reality of this sport.
Once you’re in season, your training changes drastically. You’re so busy on the road that it’s hard to stay consistent and grow like you do in the off-season. Plus, you hold back in certain areas because you don’t want to risk injury in the gym.
However, it all balances out over the course of the season, because the best training on earth for driving race cars is… driving race cars!
So while you may not have as much time to train during the season, you’re in the car three days a week, and it’s better than any time in the gym.
1 for the road
After this latest INDYCAR off-weekend, we have Road America coming up next, and there are plenty of long, fast corners at that venue, as well as some of the biggest brake zones of the year. So heading into this weekend, drivers will be making sure they are prepared and ready to go at it.
(Aaron Skillman/Penske Entertainment)
Taking a look at Gateway, let me just say that there are few things in this sport I enjoy more than INDYCAR races at night.
There’s something beautifully raw and cinematic about seeing these open-wheel monsters racing at 200 mph under the lights, gleaming. As a driver it was always something that I loved, because it gave you that feeling of being on a stage or in an arena that normal racing doesn’t give you.
And as a fan? Nothing good to look at. Hopefully we’ll find a way to add more of these to the calendar in the future.
More Driver’s Eye:
