Age shall not weary the fast and the fit
The two wildcard entries for the Bathurst 1000 in October are a combination of young and old.
The pairing of Kiwis Richie Stanaway and Greg Murphy are 29 and 48 years old respectively, while the age difference between Aussies Broc Feeney and Russell Ingall is even bigger at 18 and 57.
After a racing hiatus, the brain is willing but the body can lag behind. Getting back to full race fitness is hard without seat time.
Alastair Wootten knows a thing or two about racing and getting race fit. He’s a former driver, having come up through Formula First, Formula Ford and three years in the Toyota Racing Series, and has worked in the fitness industry since 2007 and owns Formula Fit.
“It’s not only the aspects of the physical nature of being out of a competitive car that they have to overcome,” Wootten said.
“It’s all well and good being fit in the gym and throwing weights around and riding your pushbike, but you can’t beat seat time.
“Given Bathurst is an event that’s only run once a year, there’s no real training for them. They can drive a kart, sit in a simulator and do as much as they can, but nothing is going to prepare them they way a fulltime racer will be prepared,” Wootten said.
“They’re going to have to have everything going for them as far as their offtrack training is concerned — almost to overprepare themselves, because it’s going to be a vertical learning curve for them come race day.”
However it may look on TV, Supercar drivers are not just sitting in a cage turning a wheel and occasionally pressing a few pedals. The cornering g-forces alone in a car hurtling around a track at more than 200km/h would be enough for many people faint.
Trying to keep your head upright is hard enough, and then there’s the one-leg bench presses of up to 100kg corner after corner when applying the brakes.
“We drivers get so sick of hearing that all we do is sit down and turn a wheel and push pedals. It’s not about that. It’s about all those other elements,” Wootten said.
“Every sensory input into your body is being overloaded and stimulated every second you’re in the car. And then there’s the heat to contend with. It’s not just during the race itself, it’s the whole weekend and it’s exhausting mentally and physically.
“You can only get that from seat time, which these guys are not going to get.”
The problem with being out of a race car for a lengthy time is the loss of fine motor skills and almost instantaneous reflexes and reactions that only come from many kilometres of seat time.
“What we see with a lot of these older guys is that their stamina and endurance doesn’t take too much of a knock. It’s the reaction time, fasttwitch muscle time, and the precision with which they react,” Wootten said.
“They can be a bit rusty and things can get away from them, especially at the speed they race at Bathurst.
“And there’s dealing with the amount of external data they have to remember to feed back to the engineers and mechanics.
“It’s a lot to ask from a full-time driver, let alone someone who hasn’t been in car for a while.”
Supercars resume this weekend at Townsville. Kiwi driver Shane van Gisbergen leads the championship from Jamie Whincup and Chaz Mostert.