LUKE BENNETT PROFILE

Dr Luke Bennett accompanies Mercedes to every GP and his group of Hintsa personal trainers work with ten drivers on the current F1 grid. He explains how the Hintsa philosophy maximises performance in every aspect of life

A catch-up with the Mercedes doc

It’s perhaps apt that the doctor who flies to every grand prix with the Mercedes F1 team was once an actual flying doctor. Australian Luke Bennett, 45, studied medicine and surgery in Queensland before qualifying for the Royal Flying Doctor Service in the state of Western Australia. “Like the soap opera from the 1980s,” he jokes. “But with far less romance…”

Western Australia is huge, and as Bennett explains: “It was equivalent to being based in Paris, getting called to an emergency in Berlin and having to take a patient to a hospital in Madrid. That pre-hospital approach to medicine ties in to motorsport because it’s similar at a track when someone is critically injured. You’re dealing with diagnosis, extraction, limited resources and logistics for getting the patient into specialist care.”

Bennett has been a lifelong fan of motorsport, dovetailing his role as a medical invention doctor with various Australian motorsport events, including rallying and the Australian Grand Prix itself. It was at the latter that he met Mclaren’s former doctor, the late Aki Hintsa – a Finnish trauma surgeon and founder of the eponymous human performance company. Today Bennett is the medical and sports performance director at Hintsa, as well as ‘family doctor’ to Mercedes – on hand to help engineers, mechanics and catering staff with anything from a nose bleed to a broken ankle.

Aki joined F1 in the 1990s as Mclaren’s team doctor, spotted a gap in the market, and put together a team of physios and sports scientists to expand his work. When he died in late 2016, he left behind a thriving business. Today ten of the 20 drivers on the grid, including Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel, employ a Hintsa trainer.

They work through a framework of physical preparation, nutrition, weight management, sleep programmes, general health and physical therapy. But the most important aspect of all the above is managing sleep – one of Hintsa’s key areas of research. Bennett says that fatigue, illness and diminishing morale are interconnected and particularly acute during the flyaway races. Hintsa create hour-by-hour charts to help drivers and crew deal with their circadian rhythms and defeat jet lag to help improve performance.

“This is really powerful and I think we are only in the early stages of understanding the science of sleep,” says Bennett. “Sleep is connected to metabolism and lots of other physiology. For an athlete, the order of priority is sleep first, nutrition second, and training third – and always try to get seven to eight hours of sleep a night.”

There is another aspect to Hintsa’s philosophy. In the early 1990s Aki Hintsa was engaged in humanitarian work in war-torn Ethiopia when he befriended the successful long-distance runner Haile Gebrselassie. He noted a deep happiness in the athlete, despite his relatively impoverished lifestyle, and from that Hintsa began to develop a philosophy known as ‘The Core’.

“The thing that motivates any human to get out of bed, go training, or skip that piece of dessert, has to be motivated by something bigger,” explains Bennett. “Any athlete has to think about their goals and their purpose and this mental strength can be 80 per cent of the battle. We define the Hintsa Core with three questions. Do you know who you are? Do you know what your purpose is? Are you in control of your life?

“They are three simple concepts, but when you really think about them, they can go a long way. By managing a driver’s frame of mind and key relationships, we’re trying to develop a well-rounded functional human being with a great perspective on life that lets them make good decisions at critical times – and get the best out of the people around them.”

It would be too simplistic to describe The Core, the book that Aki Hintsa wrote, as a ‘self-help title’, but the values it espouses do affect performance. And when athletes look for marginal gains against rivals, small decisions can have big effects. “Aki’s insights were never meant just for F1, and our long-term goal is to go back to Africa,” says Bennett. “But if we can remind people of their health and instil in them processes that can improve the quality and add years to their lives, that’s what it’s all about. Doing it in F1 is a bonus.”