With temperatures stretching well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit on the race surface and humidity upwards of 80 percent, the environs of the Formula 1 circuit in Singapore are among the most punishing on the calendar.
F1 teams not only have to change their cars to accommodate the conditions, their drivers must switch up their training as well, Henry Howe, osteopath for Aston Martin Aramco Formula One Team driver Lance Stroll, told Newsweek.
For starters, drivers and their teams must manage jet lag and travel fatigue. Aston Martin’s team does this by “getting the sleep schedule correct using what supplements we can and that are legal to help us with attention, focus, concentration, as well as sleep and quality of sleep, etc.,” Howe said.
It takes about three weeks for a human to get adjusted to a new sleep schedule halfway across the world, he explained. “But we were in Baku less than three weeks ago, but we were only really leaving Monza then, so it’s not possible for us [to adjust naturally].”
Howe and the team also get help from apps, the same ones that frequent business travelers rely on. “There’s one called Timeshifter, there’s one called Phaze, and what they’ll do is they’ll give you a sleep schedule and sleep plan. You can put your flight number into it, and it’ll tell you when to sleep, when to have caffeine, when to have melatonin,” he explained.
No matter how much help the team receives from supplements and apps, “there’s no substitute for arriving early, at least two days early,” Howe said.
Aside from the time shift, drivers must cope with the extreme weather conditions Singapore throws at them, internally and with their vehicles. Both of the team’s drivers, Stroll and Fernando Alonso, will be wearing FIA-approved cooling vests to regulate their internal temperature during the race weekend, Aston Martin Aramco’s Chief Technical Officer Enrico Cardile confirmed this week.
That will help, but Howe monitors driver fuel intake as closely as the team’s technical staff monitor vehicle fuel intake. “When you’re hotter, everything is harder, and as intensity increases or difficulty increases, then you can your body relies on way more fuel than it would at any other time,” Howe said.
The body uses carbohydrates, electrolytes and proteins as it’s pushed to the limit, which impacts recovery time. This leaves the team always seeking homeostasis throughout a race weekend, balancing food inputs with exertion.
“Calorie consumption is pretty underrated, because the brain is completely dependent on glucose, and when you’re in hot conditions… your appetite is suppressed, and it’s really hard to eat,” Howe said.
In those moments, Howe relies on finding “little hacks” to make calorie consumption happen, including shakes, smoothies and carbohydrate drinks.
Drivers and their support staff have to determine how they address the heat in their own ways as well. “You have to make a decision around the heat. You can either sit inside all day and never get used to heat and get some respite from it so you’re fresh for going in, or you can just embrace it and be as accommodated to it as you possibly can,” Howe explained.
Drivers soak in ice baths before hitting the track. “There’s some evidence that helps you [achieve a] cool temperature later in the day,” Howe said. “The difficulty with humidity over dry heat [is that with dry heat] sweat rolls off your skin. When you’re in the humidity, there’s so much moisture in the air, you can’t sweat as you normally would. You feel really, really moist, but a lot of it’s just the moisture in the air.”
The company also pre-acclimates for hot weather throughout the year, starting with sauna sessions. But, they’re not taking their high-intensity training or other physio into the sauna.
“I’m highly dubious that anyone is training in the sauna regardless of what goes on social media,” Howe said. “You can use the sauna as like a day-to-day well-being recovery thing, where you sit in it maybe early in the morning or later at night, and it has all kinds of benefits around cardiovascular health, immune health.
“What you can also do, and this is particularly popular in endurance sport at the moment, is because heat training has similar physiological outcomes to altitude training, what you can do is do a really hard training session and then go and sit in the sauna afterwards, and then there are all kinds of responses from the body there surrounding blood constituents that will give you training benefits. A lot of the time with the sauna, it’s just getting used to the heat and reminding yourself what it’s about.”
While the typical sauna session is 20 minutes total, some members of the Aston Martin Aramco team do up to 50 minutes per session, with small breaks throughout, in the ramp-up to hotter weather racing.
Sunday’s Singapore Grand Prix has been declared a “heat hazard” by the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), a designation that occurs when ambient temperatures during a race are expected to soar past 31 degrees Celsius (87.8°F).
When high ambient temperatures are combined with the heat from the racing surface and vehicle engines, drivers can face cockpit temperatures of 50 to 60°C (122-140°F).
The FIA is the governor of F1. This weekend is the first time the designation has been used since it was developed in 2023.