Dr. Ceccarelli on the demands of F1

We're used to hearing from the drivers and team bosses, but rarely do we hear from other key members of the teams. Ricardo Ceccarelli is the Team Doctor for Toyota and his role is very much like a family doctor who travels with the team around the globe.

"I deal with every problem that comes up," Ceccarelli begins. "I have a small pharmacy with me and I treat team members so they can recover as soon as possible and work at their best. If the condition is more serious I decide whether it is necessary to visit the medical centre or even a hospital, where I stay with them to make sure they receive the proper care."

Driving a modern day Formula One car is no longer simply about bravado, it requires supreme fitness to cope with the heat and the physical pounding the body endures in a typical Grand Prix.

"There is no other sport in the world which compares to the demands Formula One puts on the heart," Ceccarelli continues. "The heat rate of a top driver can average over 180bpm for a race distance of 90 minutes or more. This is huge and no other sport keeps a heart rate so high for such a long time. On top of that there is a lot of muscle work for the whole body - heavy work for neck muscles to cope with the g-forces, high loads on legs and arms and good lumbar strength to stabilise the body. A normal person could do two or three laps in a Formula One car under those stresses before physically they couldn't continue."

What about the mental aspect of driving? "The demand on the muscles is important but the load on the brain is amazing. Formula One is a sport where the brain has to be working hard for the whole race.

In tennis you have a break every few seconds, in boxing you break every three minutes, in shooting you break all the time. This means a Formula One driver's brain is working in a different way. When you compare a Formula One driver's brain to an average person, the way it works is completely different."

Drivers can lose up to 3kg in a race and if you lose four percent of your bodyweight you lose around 40percent of your psycho-physical capacity. So it is normal in hot conditions that a driver would lose a bit of performance if nothing is done to combat the effect of heat.

“The small things, if you put them all together, can be quite effective,” Ceccarelli said when asked how to combat the fluid loss. “First of all drink a lot and always have a bottle of fluid available; mainly this is water but also you can add some minerals. The second thing is to be very careful with nutrition. It is best to eat simple food which is easy to digest; fruit and vegetables are the best things to eat. Finally, for a driver, you try to get him as cool as possible before the race, which means putting ice in his helmet, his shoes in the fridge, that kind of thing, so when he first steps into the car he is not already overheating.”

It’s all worth a thought when we see Jarno Trulli, Timo Glock and the others lining up on the grid this Sunday in Bahrain.