How IndyCar Drivers Are Trained | What It Takes

this indycar driver is withstanding an intense acceleration that feels like 50 pounds of weight on his head when you have three to five g's pushing on you so three to five times your body weight you can't actually breathe that's why some drivers train with this contraption before a race it's called the iron neck and it helps indycar drivers work out a part of the body most athletes overlook so we all have the same car we all have the same tire so you're only really competing against the people that have the same equipment as you so really it's the driver that makes the biggest difference since 1909 a small number of highly skilled drivers have raced these single-seat open cockpit vehicles costing around 1 million dollars today and the premier race is the indianapolis 500 where 33 drivers push their limit for 500 miles in under three hours so in 2016 i won the indianapolis 500. rossi won a prize of 2.5 million dollars i was a rookie which was a surprise to everyone including myself but it took a lot of training strategy and racing to get there it's just a whole lot that goes into to racing than just driving days before the race drivers hit the gym for their final workouts this isn't just any gym either this is pitfit which specializes in training for motorsports you know we're one of the few sports that has to deal with with g-force drivers have to withstand an intense acceleration on their body that can feel like a 50 pound weight on their head this means working out a very specific body part you have to train your neck and that's probably the weirdest thing about being an indycar driver is you have to kind of have like a weird shaped neck the biggest machine is called the iron neck it is made for wrestlers but indy cars adopted it so it has a kind of like a bungee cord that comes up and it connects to a disc around your head and you can kind of somebody can be pulling the bungee cord you could be pulling the bungee cord drivers also have to operate under extreme temperatures you know the cockpit on a on a summer day when we have a summer race can get to 135 140 degrees we lose up to six to eight pounds in the race just from dehydration and lack of water and so we spend a lot of time in the sauna you'll do a two minute sprint on a treadmill you'll get off you'll go straight into asana and you'll do a five minute reaction drill on an ipad and drivers train to endure all the intense heat g-force and other factors for two and a half hours straight when a lot of lactic acid builds up and weight that you can usually move with your eyes closed you struggle to move even once to prepare his body for this sustained work rossi focuses on exercises that contract muscles but don't have a lot of movement for example if you if you take a bench press you'd put an amount of weight on that you can do 15 to 20 times what you actually do is you'll you'll move the weight up and then halfway down you'll hold it for eight seconds that is is really one of the big things that we do is indycar drivers to to make sure that you have the muscular endurance to compete for two and a half hours so i was introduced to racing by my father for my 10th birthday he took me to a go-kart school in las vegas and it was supposed to be a once in a lifetime opportunity really from that point forward you know i had the the passion and desire to become a professional race car driver [Music] the mental game is a huge part of racing it's a sport where you lose way more than you win you have to get in the car with a very good understanding of what you're going to do how you're going to do it and what your objectives are endurance isn't just a physical test it's a mental one too this is where strategy comes into play for us the strategy really is to move forward pretty aggressively in the first in the first stint the first opening laps just to give yourself that buffer you don't ever want to fall outside the top ten you know that's that's really hard to recover from you so you want to kind of be in the top five at 100 laps in and then really in the final stint you want to be in the top three and just at that point it becomes a chess match when i won the indianapolis 500 my strategist came up with a strategy that was pretty crazy and pretty aggressive that was basically having us skip the final pit stop and so we had to conserve a crazy amount of fuel we ran out of fuel in turn four coming to the finish and we were able to win a lot of times indianapolis becomes a fuel race if you're out front leading pushing pushing through clean air you get worse fuel mileage than if you're following behind the car obviously the less fuel you burn the less horsepower you have the slower you go so there are trade-offs so you're always trying to manage the best balance between saving fuel and going as quick as possible [Music] once a driver decides on a strategy the next step is making it second nature when you're when you're operating 230 miles an hour you can't be thinking of things on a conscious level so you can't say okay i'm going to turn in here i'm going to break here i'm going to do this and this everything has to come kind of from a from a subconscious level on carb day we found the drivers down on the track working with their teams with 36 hours left before the race this is their last chance to work out any final kinks we have a two hour practice session just to double check if we need any slight adjustments to the car and i guess how to save fuel the most efficient way so you can do some practice with that on the track before we get out there for the race what's pretty cool about indy car is is you can also make quite a few adjustments in the cockpits can you can change wing settings and that's you can change tire pressures all of that has an effect on the balance of the car we weren't allowed to film under the body work of an indy car but andretti autosport gave us a tour of one of their vehicles so the the steering wheel of an indy car sets you back the price of uh of a nice family sedan about 35 000 so the neutral button is the button that the driver pushes to get the car into neutral out of first gear when he comes into the pit lane plc is pit lane speed control there's a speed limit in pit lane h2o is what you might think it's water and that's the basically the driver drink bottle so these two top paddles are shift up and shift down that's how we go up and down through the gears in the gearbox there's no gear lever or anything inside the car drivers only get a couple hours of practice before any race but every drive even a practice one comes at a cost to go practice in a race car is thirty to fifty thousand dollars every single time you do it carb day while expensive is crucial to get the right conditions for race day how it was started was the teams after qualifying back in in the 70s and 80s needed to tune in the carburetors for the conditions that were going to be on the weekend obviously motor technology and engine technology has advanced since then and everything is fuel injected now so it doesn't really matter this is also the last chance the driver gets to practice with their pit crew you know races can be won or lost on pit lane you know if you have a problem in a pit stop and you lose three to four seconds that can be five or six positions on track [Music] it can cost an average of one million dollars to race a car at the indy 500 and up to 10 million dollars for an entire season to pay for fuel tires parts and the team itself and all this team's training strategizing and practicing leads up to one day the 105th running of the indianapolis 500. it all disappears as soon as the green flag wave you don't really feel anything at that point it's just going out there and and trying to beat everyone around you race day morning is like five hours because you wake up and immediately you feel the energy of this place come alive obviously i'm starting second in the race my plan i think initially would probably be to sit and see what other guys are doing in the 105th running of the indianapolis 500 colton herta placed 16th and alexander rossi placed 29th they are ranked 7th and 12th overall in the ntt indycar series it's amazing to be an indycar driver it's everything i would have hoped for you get to drive really fast race cars all across the u.s there's not a day that that goes by they don't take it for granted and really enjoy my job [Music] you actually feel everything through your butt all of us have little butts so we can feel a little bit more so if the car slaps the ground what we call bottoming or if the rear slides or the front slides you all feel it through your butt first

Channel: Business Insider

Views: 256,730

Rating: 4.925138 out of 5

Keywords: Business Insider, Business News, IndyCars, Car Racing, Training, Race Track, What It Takes

Id: Z6VLR01C1tE

Length: 9min 14sec (554 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 31 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/racefann]

YouTube comments are as always full of so called F1 fans with elitist attitude comparing F1 budget with Indy. Stay classy F1 fans. 😄