Red Bull Motorsports
WRC
3 easy ways to improve your rally driving fitness
The World Rally Championship frontrunners reveal the gym moves that power them to success on the stages.
Every day, the drivers' alarm clocks will have gone off somewhere between 4am and 5am to make sure they were ready to hit the stages – generally held around a 75-mile drive from the Deeside service park – at around 7am or 8am. At the end of each day, their heads would likely have hit the pillow between 11pm and midnight.
1. Rowing
Racing drivers are a sedentary bunch, and rowing on an erg machine – the stationary rowing machines you'll find in your gym – is one way to help balance out the ‘racing driver hunch’ that can afflict them after spending so long sitting in the car.
“Rowing trains your whole body, both your legs and your upper body by working your back,” says Hyundai’s Andreas Mikkelsen. “That’s good for driving, because drivers are always walking a little bit like this [hunches shoulders] because we’re always sitting. It’s good for the proportions of your body.”
2. Neck exercises
“You don’t need to have huge muscles,” says Mikkelsen’s Hyundai team-mate Thierry Neuville. “But you feel [the strain] more with the new generation of cars, especially the neck and especially on tarmac.”
So how should you train the neck?
“Have a weight strapped to your head and then move your head to one side and lift it up again,” says Toyota’s Jari-Matti Latvala. “When you wear a helmet for three days, you really start to feel it on your neck and if you start to get headaches, then you lose the relaxed feeling.”
3. Endurance training
Probably the most crucial part of a WRC driver’s training is working to increase endurance. The cockpit of rally cars can reach up to 70 degrees centigrade, and that’s before you factor in the drivers' fireproof overalls, fireproof underwear, fireproof socks and helmet. Training for endurance helps the drivers to concentrate in those situations, ensuring they stay focused and don’t make costly, and potentially dangerous, errors.
“You have long days in the car where you need to be mentally on it all day long and making those split-second decisions,” says Hyundai’s Hayden Paddon. “We focus a lot on long endurance cardio, which simulates a bit what you do in the car.”
When you get tired, you lose concentration
“For me," says Thierry Neuville, "the most important thing, and what helped me improve a lot, was doing condition training, on the bike or running. [Our heart rates are] at around 150-170bpm in the car, [so we train] to keep this heart rate for one hour or one hour 20 minutes, about twice the time of an average stage. It’s really helpful for the concentration. When you get tired, you lose concentration, but if you are able to stay in good condition for the whole stage, or longer, you keep good concentration, and that’s really helped me a lot.”
