Name: Why The Average Human Couldn't Drive An F1 Car | WIRED
Uploaded: 2024-10-12T21:01:30.000Z
Duration: 7 min 46 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

So, in order to be a great Formula One driver,

you need to have the cognitive capabilities of a chess grandmaster,

the strength, stamina and reactions of a fighter,

and then you also have to have the endurance of a marathon runner.

It's these unique set of skills that would make it

pretty much impossible for an average human to drive an F1 car.

My name is Clayton Green and I used to be F1 performance coach to

Sir Lewis Hamilton back in the 2010 season.

Here's a sketch of the Silverstone circuit that I put together.

Silverstone is a particularly unique Formula One Grand Prix.

It's one that the drivers find distinctly challenging.

It's a wonderful blend of high-speed corners and heavy braking zones

and it thoroughly entertains both the crowd and the drivers when they're racing.

So, Formula One drivers looking to get the quickest

and best launch that they possibly can at the start of the race.

The average reaction time for an F1 driver is normally around 200 milliseconds.

Sprinters like Usain Bolt are only a fraction quicker,

launching into a sprint roughly 160 milliseconds after the starting pistol.

But your typical human being like you and me,

we tend to be more around 500 to 600 milliseconds.

F1 cars are so fast that just a 200-millisecond head start gives a driver a 10-metre lead.

Mental composure and quick references are essential for avoiding horrific crashes,

which are all too easy in Silverstone's Hamilton Strait

where drivers go full pelt before the first turn.

This is the point one driver was hurled upside down over the safety barriers last year

when another car swerved towards him from the left.

These are the kind of collisions you're constantly exposed to throughout Silverstone.

And to avoid this, F1 drivers train up their reflexes by exercises like this,

where they tap off as many lights as possible in 30 seconds.

And F1 drivers are the best in the world at this exercise.

The current world record is held by British driver Jenson Button,

who was going so fast he was averaging two lights per second.

Now, as our lap progresses, one of the bits that drivers most enjoy are the high-speed corners.

And around Silverstone, we're looking at areas such as Maggots and Becketts,

where you're carrying immense speed, probably going at the full speed of the car,

but doing still some small but dramatic changes in direction.

Traditionally, most of the Formula 1 circuits tend to go around in a clockwise direction.

If you're turning to the right, it means that the G-force is going to want to take your head off to the left.

You have a force of the equivalent of, like, 40 kilos hitting you in the back of the head

that literally wants to take your head clean off your shoulders.

This kind of force would make it impossible for the average person to support their own head,

causing them to lose sight of the track ahead and inevitably crash.

Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso both have neck sizes of 18 inches.

That's compared to 15 inches for the average man.

And this kind of neck strength prevents serious injury.

The pair had a near-fatal crash last year in the first lap of the Belgian Grand Prix,

with Lewis Hamilton's car experiencing an immense 45g of force.

Hamilton's neck would have been hurled in several unpredictable directions as his car flipped.

This is the kind of collision that would give the average person at best severe whiplash and at worst a fatal break.

And it's comparable really only to things like fighter jets and fighter pilots,

and the kind of extreme manoeuvres that they would have to pull in their planes.

Now, this is an example of a neck harness.

You would have someone literally pulling a force against the driver's head,

and they have to tense up to stop their head from being moved.

So the neck musculature that the neck training is going to work on for the F1 driver,

which are going to stop the head from being pulled forwards or sideways,

and they're going to really have to be very strong

and very adaptive to generate these forces quickly and change.

Braking a normal car requires an easy right or left tap of the car,

Stopping a Formula 1 car requires you to stamp really hard on

the brake pedal and then just bleed the pressure off gradually.

you're essentially pushing against 100kg or 220lb again and again.

the weight of a baby elephant hundreds of times over the course of 90 minutes.

You'd be using all the muscles in your quadriceps,

in your hamstrings at the back of the thigh, your glutes, and also your calf muscles as well.

Without leg strength, you'd simply be unable to brake the car,

flying off the track and over the safety barriers at the first sharp turn on the Silverstone circuit.

There'll come a point, at least once in the race, possibly twice, when we need to change the tyres.

And how do drivers pick up the fact they need to change tyres?

They use their inner ear balance, or vestibular function, to sense when their tyres have lost grip.

You might rely on your inner ear balance to sense when you're going up or down on a lift, for example.

Younger drivers, like Lando Norris, who practices on eSports steering wheels,

aren't as in tune with this as older drivers like Lewis Hamilton.

Drivers such as Lewis Hamilton are particularly good at being able to pick up on those cues.

And they'll be able to take you around that in-lap as quickly as possible

and get you into your pit stop, even with pretty much zero grip left on those tyres.

Without being able to sense the loss of your tyre grip,

each lap becomes increasingly uncontrolled and dangerous.

So the chances of your car swerving out of control and crashing

before you even got to the pit stop are probably very high.

As we get into the last quarter of the race, what starts to get you will be the temperature

as it builds up in the body and the muscular and mental fatigue.

Formula One cockpit is quite a unique environment.

Track temperature could easily be 50 degrees Celsius.

The tyres, they tend to run at 100 degrees Celsius.

The front brakes are running at 1,000 degrees Celsius.

You've sweated so much at this point in time.

You could easily have lost 3% to 5% of your body weight.

Any losses of even 2% will start to have an impact on reaction times, decision making.

Even those slight differences will make a big difference to

your overall lap time and how you finish the race.

This is an example of one overall that a driver might wear.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Why The Average Human Couldn't Drive An F1 Car | WIRED

literally

ultimately

essentially

essential