How to become a Formula 1 driving champion

​“It’s like nothing you’ve ever driven before.”

To be honest, these are not the words you really want to hear as you climb into Double R Racing’s FIA Formula 3 cars Pembrey Circuit in Wales. You’re hoping that your experience behind the wheel of hundreds of road cars and a few competition cars will count for something at least.

Still, the good news is that the chap who is telling us this slightly scary fact is ex-Lotus and HRT F1 driver Karun Chandhok. He’s here to nurse us through a full day on the track and give us the benefit of his knowledge.

“If you’ve never been in one, for the first day you’ll be miles from the limit.” That should sound reassuring, but somehow it isn’t. If what you think is the limit actually isn’t anywhere near the limit, how do you recalibrate your brain to let you push a bit nearer to it? And what’s the physical experience of driving a single-seater like? Everyone knows you need courage, concentration and a specialised kind of fitness – but by all accounts, the amounts that you need are worryingly high.

“Build up slowly, but not so slowly that you lose tyre temperature,” says Karun, again making you wish there was some sort of cockpit automation to help you with that. “Get used to the fast steering [response] before learning about the car’s throttle”, he advises, adding that the throttle is “very responsive, so the car will wheelspin easily”. Ah.

“To master these cars takes time,” chips in Double R Racing team principal Anthony Hieatt, a shade unnecessarily. “When Daniil Kvyat stepped up to F3 he did twenty days of testing, and Daniel Ricciardo would have done 25. Racing drivers aren’t born, they’re made.”

We’ve got 24 laps rather than twenty-odd days, but it’s not all alarming, thankfully. A single-seater does have some useful attributes that, in theory at least, should make life a little easier. Karun says there’s no need to worry about managing weight transfer: with virtually no suspension travel and perfect weight distribution, body roll isn’t an issue. Trouble is, that means unlearning just about everything you’ve picked up from driving a normal car.

We asked Karun for a tiny insight into the pressure-cooker world of top-class racing, into the commitment needed to make it there, and into the five big areas of major difference between racing and, well, reality.

Braking

If you’ve ever rammed your brakes on hard, you’ll know that it feels like you’re putting huge pressure on the pedal. Trying our hardest in the F3 car, and getting a real workout in the process, we registered 63kg of peak brake pedal pressure – a pathetic number compared to the 93kg Chandhok was routinely applying on the approach to Pembrey’s tight first corner. “You use the downforce to help slow you at first, but as speed decreases the air density is less, so you need to bleed off the brakes,” he says. Of course.

Steering

Ever driven a Ferrari 488 GTB? That’s a benchmark of steering response. Compared to a single-seater racing car, though, the 488 feels about as responsive as a 1950s Land Rover. “A novice will normally turn in to a corner too early, so they end up on the wrong line,” says Chandhok. Pro racers have to perfect the art of blending braking and steering, releasing brake pressure while simultaneously cranking in steering lock. Trying to do that at racing speeds while not locking the front wheels is incredibly difficult (we found).

Throttle

You won’t believe how much traction you can get from a racing car on slicks. Booting a rear-wheel drive car hard in the middle of a bend will usually only produce one result, a spin, but it’s something you simply have to do in a racer if you don’t want to watch all the other racers disappearing quickly up the track. Reprogramming your brain to accept the idea of “using first gear in the slowest corners to improve drive on exit”, as Chandhok says, is both a mind-bender and a big test of guts.

Downforce

Another element that’s utterly alien to drivers of all but the most extreme road cars, downforce presses an F3 racer into the ground with more weight than the 565kg the car actually has, so yes, everything else being equal, you really could drive upside down in one. That’s another mind-scrambling mental leap that you need to build up to. “The faster you go, the more aerodynamic force there is, so you have to be committed enough to get it working in the fast corners,” says Chandhok. Brave pills, anyone?

G-force

Putting yourself through the physical effort of driving a single-seater is like doing an hour in the gym with everything cranked up way beyond your normal settings. Summoning every last scrap of courage and every last bit of screaming neck muscle we manage 2.5g on Pembrey’s sphincter-clenchingly fast final corner. Without raising a sweat, Chandhok gets 3.2g. In F1 cars, the lateral loads are up at around 5g. “It’s why you sometimes see F1 drivers resting their heads towards the end of races,” says Karun.