What makes Formula 1 drivers so fast?
Formula 1 drew unprecedented interest a bit more than a week ago, with a controversial final Grand Prix in Abu Dhabi to top off the 2021 season. I was watching the race myself with a newfound interest — in no small part thanks to Netflix’s Drive to Survive series. As I was watching the series and subsequently F1 GPs, the aspiring sport psychologist in me got interested. I did think about resilience — but I just recently wrote about that, and there’s not much literature that I could find anyway. I still wanted to write about F1 drivers, though, and as it turns out, a fair amount of research exists on the cognitive-perceptual side of driving. There are complex neural circuits involved in driving, which comprises multiple levels of thoughts and actions. And, among other things, it is F1 drivers’ expertise in these cognitive and perceptual processes that allows them to drive at terrifying paces on rather curvy racetracks. What are these processes, and how are they represented in the brain? Let’s have a look!
Of course, half of an F1 drivers’ success is the car. There is a reason why the Constructors’ Championships exists; the teams that build the best car will generally be the fastest on the track as well. But there are two drivers on each team, and it’s not uncommon to see substantial differences in ability — and this is where psychology, or in our case, neuroscience, comes in.
To understand why F1 drivers are so fast, we first have to understand a few things about driving itself — stuff involved from the very first driving lesson. Importantly, driving is not just one behaviour; it’s a whole bunch of behaviours working in tandem that somehow culminates in us being able to commandeer a vehicle considerably larger than ourselves. According to Michon (1985), driving happens on three cognitive levels: the strategical, the tactical, and the operational.
The strategical level includes all the ‘high-level’ thought organising that goes on behind a car journey. This includes route planning, the topographical maps in our long-term memory (I.e., how well we remember the general area we plan on driving around), and changes to routine routes — all the stuff we can take our sweet time to plan. In F1, this would mostly mean drivers’ memory of the official circuits, pre-race tire strategies, and stored knowledge about track conditions.
The tactical level includes everything we see and think about as we drive. This includes decisions to overtake, changing gear, adjusting speed, and avoiding obstacles. A great example of the tactical level in F1 is using DRS, and deciding on the speed at which to approach specific turns on a circuit, when and how much to decelerate, and the changes in these decisions that depend on other cars.
Finally, the operational level is all the little behaviours that constitute driving, like braking and steering. These behaviours are often automatic, especially among experienced drivers — once you’ve driven for long enough, you don’t consciously think about what direction to steer, or how to use a brake when you slow down; it becomes instinct after a while.
According to Navarro and colleagues (2018), all three of these levels have their own dedicated brain networks. Most of them are in the frontal and parietal areas — that is, the bit of our brain that’s closest to our forehead, and the bit directly behind it. Unsurprisingly, these brain areas are suggested to play a role in thoughts and actions that constitute the processes of driving:
- The brain areas involved in the strategical level are associated with action planning and long-term memory.
- Those on the tactical level correspond to selective attention, working memory, object identification and tracking — that is, how we see and interact with stuff in our immediate environment, what we pay attention to, and how we respond to unexpected occurrences.
- Those on the operational level are linked with the execution of motor skills, multisensory integration, and procedural memory — basically, the brain circuits that tell our limbs how to move and compile what we see, hear, and feel into something coherent.
What makes F1 drivers special is their ability to execute these processes extremely efficiently. According to Lappi (2018), the physical and mental preparation of F1 drivers is geared towards sharpening these specific functions. That is, thanks to their training, F1 drivers can use their environment more effectively than a run-off-the-mill driver like my Dad, or that one colleague of yours who dreams of one day investing in a Tesla. Here’s a few things that, according to Lappi, F1 drivers can do extremely well, roughly in the order of operational to tactical to strategical:
- Stabilising motor routines: F1 drivers practice a lot. This means that over time, they become more consistent in the execution of certain driving actions, and will execute them more smoothly. It probably helps that most GPs are held on familiar circuits, and a race consists of up to ~60 laps around the same track.
- Multisensory integration: Basically, F1 drivers are pretty efficient at putting together the environment they are in and understanding the implications it has for their car.
- Visuospatial attention: F1 drivers are really good at paying attention to the right objects. If you sit in an F1 car, you’ll have a whole load of screens staring back at you, as well as the 19 other cars out on the track — and the track itself too, I suppose. In such an environment, what makes F1 drivers excel is that they know where to look and what screens are important at any one time.
- Peripheral vision: According to Lappi, a lot of F1 drivers’ training focuses on ‘widening what they see’ — that is, deliberately paying attention to their peripheral vision, since that’s usually where the other cars are (usually, if an F1 driver has another car in their focal vision, it’s either because they’re behind, or something has gone really wrong). This is pretty difficult to do, much less master. Try it yourself! Try to disregard what’s right in front of your eye and focus on objects in your peripheral vision without moving your eyes there.
- Tracking and predicting objects: Not only can F1 drivers pay attention to objects in their peripheral vision, they are also really good at keeping track of them, and mostly have a good idea of where they will go. If you think about it, once you’ve seen a car go around a corner a few times, you can guess fairly reliably how it will turn that same corner the next time.
- Internal models: Have you ever heard the saying, ‘feel the car?’ Well, this is basically that. According to Lappi, F1 drivers have a reliable representation of what their body looks like, what the car looks like, how the two interact, how the car responds to the environment, and what these responses feel like. Having nuanced internal models of themselves and their cars is what allows F1 drivers to ‘feel’ when a tire is starting degrade, for example.
- Path planning: There’s a lot of advance planning going into F1 races. Each corner has its own significance, so knowing where the turns are, what speed they should be taken at, and the optimal axes are all key in getting the fastest lap possible. Knowing exactly what’s coming up is half the battle.
- Localisation: Similar to path planning, having a good spatial awareness — knowing where you are and where everyone else is compared to you is another thing that may separate the best of the best from the rest of the field. This is more than just being focused, though: localisation is about having an exact 3D representation of what’s happening on the track.
Now, Lappi talked about these in the context of the training F1 drivers receive. Fortunately for us, a few neuroscientists have found evidence suggesting that professional car racers are significantly better at these skills than ‘novice’ drivers. For example, Bernardi and colleagues (2013) found that professional drivers’ brain showed more connectivity and smaller volume recruitment in a simple driving task than their novice counterparts. This basically means that professional drivers were more efficient at processing visual information and could relay information quicker to the parts of their brain that prepared movement.
A year later, the same research group published another study, where drivers watched videos of official F1 circuits while they imagined driving on them (and they did all this while laying completely still in an MRI tube). Throughout the task, the professional drivers showed higher activation in brain regions related to observer-independent maps, spatial navigation, and motor control — that is, areas corresponding to the strategical, tactical, and operational levels of driving.
Finally, and perhaps most convincingly, a systematic review by Lappi (2015) found that expert drivers’ brains showed higher activation in areas associated with hand-eye coordination, attention, motor control, action and route planning, memory, and pattern recognition when faced with driving tasks or scenarios involving official F1 circuits.
So, what exactly makes F1 drivers so fast? For the most part, their expertise and familiarity with the official circuits, but also their exceptional perceptual and cognitive abilities when it comes to sensing the environment and planning ahead before and during races. That said, there aren’t a whole lot of studies comparing professional drivers with ‘novices’ on the behavioural level — instead, most studies examine the brain and driving-related areas. There is nothing wrong with this, of course, but our understanding would certainly be more holistic if we had the same quality of behavioural evidence as we do from cognitive neuroscience.
In the meantime, at least we can all get excited for the 2022 season.
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References:
Bernardi, G., Cecchetti, L., Handjaras, G., Sani, L., Gaglianese, A., Ceccarelli, R., et al. (2014). It’s not all in your car: functional and structural correlates of exceptional driving skills in professional racers. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 8:888.
Bernardi, G., Ricciardi, E., Sani, L., Gaglianese, A., Papasogli, A., Ceccarelli, R., et al. (2013). How skill expertise shapes the brain functional architecture: an fMRI study of visuo-spatial and motor processing in professional racing-car and naïve drivers. PLoS ONE 8:e77764.
Lappi, O. (2015). The racer’s brain–how domain expertise is reflected in the neural substrates of driving. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 9:635.
Lappi, O. (2018). The Racer’s Mind — How Core Perceptual-Cognitive Expertise Is Reflected in Deliberate Practice Procedures in Professional Motorsport. Frontiers in psychology, 9, 1294.
Michon, J. A. (1985). A critical view of driver behavior models: what do we know, what should we do?. In Human behavior and traffic safety (pp. 485–524). Springer, Boston, MA.
Navarro, J., Reynaud, E., & Osiurak, F. (2018). Neuroergonomics of car driving: A critical meta-analysis of neuroimaging data on the human brain behind the wheel. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 95, 464–479.
