You may have heard Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton recently expressing concern for the measures Formula 1 drivers are expected to take in order to keep their body weight to a minimum. According to the two drivers some of their colleagues are deliberately dehydrating themselves, among other things, in order to drop weight.
It’s prompted former F1 doctor Gary Hartstein to blog about the issue:
Obviously the implications of an unwell driver at the helm of a terrestrial cruise missile are huge—for themselves, for their fellow drivers, and for others. And the message this sends to the public, and to every young driver from go karts to GP2 is obvious—train for the week after a race, then totally fuck yourselves up for a week before the next one. Yeah, that’s the message you should be sending. Brilliant.
Now Adrian Sutil has backed up the comments made by Jenson and Lewis when he revealed his plans to race at Bahrain this weekend without a drink bottle.
“No drinks bottle in the car is one thing,” he said. “For Bahrain, it’s one-and-a-half hours and you have to drive with no drink.
“Normally you have one litre, or even one-and-a-half litres in Malaysia to drink, but in the situation [I am in] you are talking about 300–400g. And that’s already a lot. You also have to count the bottle which has an empty weight of half a kilo.”
Sutil is 183cm tall and reportedly weighs 75kg, which is 16kg more than Felipe Massa, understood to be the lightest driver on the grid at 59kg. Couple that with the fact the Sauber C33 is already over the minimum weight limit and you can see why Sutil feels under pressure to take extreme measures.
The current minimum weight limit for a car and drivers is 692kg. That’s a 50kg increase on last year, although most of that was to allow for the added bulk of the energy recovery systems used by the new V6 power units.
The weight of drivers has been a recurring theme in recent months and now Sutil, who has pushed for an increase in minimum weight during driver briefings, is claiming that some drivers are showing no sympathy for their heavier counterparts.
“The lightest drivers have a problem with it, they block it [increase in minimum weight],” Sutil explained. “I think it’s unfair. I wouldn’t like to win against a driver who is 20kg heavier and if I win by a tenth in qualifying, this is not the truth.”
[Source: Autosport | Pic: Sauber Motorsport AG]
One reply on “Adrian Sutil is no lightweight”
When I saw the title of this post I assumed that he had been punching people again!
As for saying he wouldn’t want to race against a 20kg heavier driver, is he really just saying he’s afraid of Tony Stewart’s skills behind the wheel of just about every type of car on the planet?