Stop Debating: Race Car Drivers Are Unquestionably Athletes. Period.

In Driver's Eye with James Hinchcliffe, the six-time INDYCAR winner will bring you inside the mind of a racer while breaking down the nuts and bolts of the sport for fans.

As INDYCAR drivers, we fight this battle all the time with people less familiar with motorsports: Are drivers athletes?

The common argument is, "All you do is sit down and turn a wheel." And I get it. Racing is hard to relate to, but drivers are, unquestionably, athletes.

Almost everyone has swung a golf club and shanked a ball into the woods, so they can tell that what Scottie Scheffler does is really hard. Almost everyone has tried draining a 3-pointer and air-balled it, so they can appreciate Steph Curry’s talent.

But very few people have ever had the chance to try driving a race car on the limit, allowing them to understand how tough it is — mentally and physically.

Most people equate driving a race car to driving a road car, which is, objectively, a pretty easy and not a particularly physically taxing activity. But what you do on the road is not what we do on a track.

Let me explain.

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THE PHYSICALITY BEHIND PILOTING A RACE CAR

What makes racing physical is simply the speed.

When you go fast, you experience G-forces, or gravitational forces, and that's a crazy thing. It is essentially a measurement of the force someone feels against their body in relation to the force of gravity.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, your head weighs 10 pounds. If you go through a corner at 3G — something an Indy car can do with ease, yet no passenger car in the world could achieve — that means your head now weighs 30 pounds. Or feels like it, anyway.

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Imagine holding up 30 pounds with your neck. And that’s one corner of one lap. Now imagine doing that at a track like Barber Motorsports Park, where there are 17 corners, and we race for 90 laps!

If you pay attention, you’ll notice that drivers have unusually large necks because it’s a pretty unique force they experience. It’s also a hard thing to train for! Some of the apparatuses that have been invented to help drivers with that element of training look like medieval torture devices! And that’s just the neck.

Let’s talk about upper-body strength.

Indy cars — unlike NASCAR's stock cars or Formula 1's open-wheelers — don’t have power steering. So as you go through a corner at 3G, the 2,000-pound race car you're driving now weighs 6,000 pounds.

The force required to turn the wheel without power steering goes up significantly as that number grows. Along with your neck, you need to have a ton of strength in your arms and shoulders to wrestle a car around the track.

Your core needs to be able to control your legs, which are floating around in the cockpit as those G-forces are applied. So core strength is key. (To prove the point, one of the current drivers, Marcus Armstrong, is trying to break the world record for planking! Totally true and completely nuts.)

Speaking of legs, you need to be able to put hundreds of pounds of pressure onto the brake pedal with your left leg in order to slow down these fighter jets on wheels. Meanwhile, your right leg needs to have super refined and precise motor skills to control the throttle inputs.

All that to say: You are working extremely hard in the car. And when you’re working that hard, your heart rate goes up!

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And unlike football, which is explosive for a few seconds and then resets, or hockey, where a shift is super intense but lasts one to two minutes before a change, drivers are pushing their bodies that hard for up to four hours straight — often with little or no rest at all.

That’s all happening while having to be perfect down to the millimeter, or else you could end up in the wall and out of the race… or worse.

Oh yeah, let’s not forget how hot it can get in the car. Temperatures in the car can easily reach 120 degrees while racing, adding another level of required physical endurance. Drivers staying hydrated is absolutely crucial, because sometimes you can lose up to 10 pounds in a single race, mostly from sweating out water weight.

So, let’s recap.

You need crazy strength in areas like your neck, your upper body, your core and your lower body. You need to have the cardio capabilities to do high-intensity exercise for the same amount of time it takes to run a marathon, and you have to be able to execute and sustain in an environment about as hot as the hottest place on Earth.

And your concentration can’t lapse for even a fraction of a second, or you might end up in the wall.

But sure, we aren’t athletes…

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TRAINING LIKE AN INDYCAR DRIVER

Because the demands on a driver’s body are unique, so is the training.

Over the years, drivers and teams have engaged more and more athletic trainers and companies to build very specific programs for racing of all types. Regimens incorporate all the aforementioned areas, but they also involve quite a bit of cognitive training mixed in with the physical training.

It's all in an effort to keep your mind sharp when your body starts to fatigue.

In the offseason, you train a ton. It’s so hard being out of the race car for months at a time, but that’s the reality of this sport.

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Once you are in season, your training drastically changes. You’re on the road so much that it’s tough to be as consistent and build up like you might in the offseason. Plus, you pull back in certain areas because you don’t want to risk injury in the gym.

It all balances out in season, though, because the absolute best training on Earth for driving race cars is… driving race cars!

So while you might not have as much time to train during the season, you’re in the car three days a week, and that’s better than any time in the gym.

1 FOR THE ROAD

After this latest INDYCAR off-weekend, we have Road America coming up next, and that place has a ton of long, fast corners, as well as some of the biggest brake zones of the year. So in this week off, drivers will be making sure they are tuned up and ready to go for that one.

(Aaron Skillman/Penske Entertainment)

Having a quick look back at Gateway, I just have to say that there are few things I enjoy more in this sport than an INDYCAR race at night.

There is just something beautifully raw and cinematic about seeing these open-wheel monsters, sparking, racing wheel-to-wheel at 200 miles an hour under the lights. It was always something I loved as a driver, as it gave you the feeling of being on a stage or in an arena in a way that normal races don’t give you.

And as a fan? There is nothing cooler to see. Let’s hope we find a way to add more of these to the calendar in the future.

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