MIND MATTERS
The mind is an element of sport that has often been overlooked in recent decades – scour the social-media pages of any driver and you will quickly find posts of them training and it is invariably physically orientated: using gym equipment, running, cycling and swimming.
But drivers attending Formula Medicine typically split their time equally, with 90 minutes of mental and physical training repeated before and after lunch. Its founder, Dr Riccardo Ceccarelli, is a strong advocate of the former.
“For me, the percentage of the importance is even more on the mental,” explains Ceccarelli, who has attended over 300 grands prix, the memorabilia in his facility a testament to his work. “For me it should be 70-80 per cent mental and 20-30 per cent physical, because when the driver is physically fit, that is the necessary limit.
“But on the mental side, it is best for the performance of the race, so you can drive to the limit in qualifying without making mistakes and be able to extend the maximum performance for the whole race without dropping, like reapplying qualifying performance 70 times in a row. Both of these aspects are mental, not physical.”
In no way does Ceccarelli believe physical fitness should be ignored, more that the mental elements can enable a driver to flourish as an all-round package. The mind-body relationship must be perfectly harmonised to yield success.
“Drivers have to be fit in endurance, fit mentally, strong, there are so many things all together and that makes them special,” he says. “Plus, the driver has to be clever, he cannot be stupid.
“There are a lot of sports that if you have the talent, you just go and play, and maybe you are not a superbrain, but you can succeed. In Formula 1, in motorsport, you must be able to have a good relationship with the engineers, with the mechanics, all the people who can change your performance.
You have to understand all the data on your car and report to the engineer, so you need to be clever, good in public relations, super-fit, it’s a package which is difficult to find in other sports.”
Formula Medicine’s realisation of the importance of the complete package is why it’s a regular destination for athletes – over 75 F1 drivers have visited in the past three decades.
Currently in his fifth F1 campaign, and creeping towards the 100 grands prix mark, Sauber’s Marcus Ericsson first attended as a 15-year old and has been able to watch his progress since his early days in Formula BMW UK and F3.
“It helped me a lot when I’m driving to be able to focus on important things, to be able to control myself, not get stressed,” he says. “When I do mistakes, if I do a bad corner and a lock-up, I move past that straight away, whereas before, I would think about that for a couple of laps probably and think ‘Ah, shit, I shouldn’t have locked that tyre.’
“Now I learned through Formula Medicine to delete that from my brain as soon as it’s happened, and that’s helped a lot.”
“Drivers have to be fit in endurance, fit mentally, strong, there are so many things all together”