Imagine zooming around the .875-mile track of Iowa Speedway.
Now imagine doing it with the force of 800 pounds pushing you sideways nearly the entire way for 250 laps.
That’s what it will be like for IndyCar drivers during the sixth running of the Iowa Corn Indy 250 on Saturday night.
Unseen to the casual race viewer is just how tough it is to drive an open-wheel machine at speeds between 110 and 140 miles per hour. While drivers are in a seated position for the race’s two-hour duration, they’re doing an immense amount of work. If it’s a hot day on the track, the toll it takes on the body and the mind is amplified.
“At the start of the race, your heart rate is up and a lot of it is nerves. Even on the road courses,” said 25-year-old Marco Andretti, winner of last year’s Iowa Corn Indy 250. “After the first four laps, you’re like, ‘There’s no way I’m making it to the end.”
“A lot of it is mental. You’re driving up on the wheel. You’re close to the people. Once the race strings out, you calm down and don’t hold as much on the wheel. It’s unbelievable how much further you can exert yourself.”
A big part of what makes an IndyCar race so physically demanding is the G-force exerted on each driver. G-force, a term familiar to military jet pilots, is a measure of stress on a body during rapid acceleration. It’s the same force one feels while spinning on a tilt-o-whirl. One G is the force of gravity, the weight you feel standing around. During the turns of an IndyCar race, that force is significantly multiplied.
At the Indianapolis 500, the average winning speeds are around 180 mph. In pole qualifying, speeds are in excess of 220. Andretti won last year’s race at Iowa Speedway with an average speed of 118.671 mph, while pole qualifying speeds are often in excess of 180.
It’s in the turns that G-force comes into play. On a straightaway, drivers are at 1 G. They can relax a bit, check gauges and take time to breathe. Indianapolis Motor Speedway — a 2.5-mile rectangular oval — features long straightaways with seven to eight seconds between turns. Drivers feel forces greater than 1 G for 50 percent of the lap, and peak at 4 Gs.
But at Iowa Speedway, the only straight part of the track is a short portion of the 869-foot backstretch. Other than that, drivers are in a near-constant turn. Drivers feel more than 1 G of force for only 25 percent of the lap, but will consistently hit G-forces over 5. At 5 G, a 200-pound person is being pushed sideways at 1,000 pounds.
“Obviously, different tracks have different challenges,” said Ryan Briscoe, currently ninth in the points standings. “A lot of the street courses we drive on are extremely physical and it takes a lot of physical strength to drive the car. And then you go to tracks like Texas where physically it’s not that bad, but mentally it’s completely draining.”
The physical and mental strain cause drivers to lose considerable sweat during a race. Usually not as much as those in a closed car like NASCAR, but enough to cause those in IndyCar to take precautions.
“A lot of it’s water weight. You sweat an awful lot,” Andretti said. “This race in particular, it’s very heavily G-loaded. The steering loads up a lot. If the car’s ill-handling, you’re going to come in wringing wet because you’ve been driving so much harder. If you’re just working, you’ll come in and say it was easy.
“It varies for the temperature,” he added about hydrating. “If I know I’m expecting a hot race, I’ll start the night before or a couple nights before. If it’s going to be a normal race, I’ll have just a few bottles of water before it and go drive.”
To combat the physical and mental strains that being an IndyCar driver involves, fitness and diet are key. One would be hard-pressed to find a driver who isn’t in top physical condition during the season.
They are athletes in every sense of the word.
Cardio is the most popular method of fitness among the drivers, while some keep busy in the offseason with other ventures. Thirty-seven-year-old Tony Kanaan, who won the Iowa Corn Indy 250 in 2010, is a triathlon fanatic. Last fall, he did the Hawaii Ironman — a 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike ride and 26-mile run — completing it in less than 13 hours.
Prior to a practice session at Iowa Speedway on June 12, Andretti mentioned how his fitness routine tapers off as a race weekend gets closer.
“This is unique. Yesterday I ran 10 miles because this is just testing and I knew I could knock that out,” he said. “Going into a whole race weekend, I’ll trail off two days before. I do a lot of cardio and stuff like that.”
It’s essentially the same for Briscoe.
“Certainly with the high G-forces, it’s taxing on your body. Fitness is a huge part of it for dealing with that,” he said. “I stay pretty quiet right before the race. I’ll train hard at the beginning of the week. As the weekend gets closer, I might do something light, but usually nothing the day before.”
In 1997, IndyCar team Penske Racing developed PitFit Training, a highly-successful motorsports training program that emphasizes upper body endurance. It is headquartered in a 100,000-square foot complex in Indianapolis. PitFit trains racers in more than a dozen racing series from all over the globe.
The roster of champions that have become part of the PitFit family is a who's who of auto racing. Drivers such as Scott Dixon, Dario Franchitti, Will Power, Kasey Kahne, Sam Hornish Jr., Larry Dixon, Morgan Lucas, Levi Jones and Justin Allgaier are just a few of the many drivers who have trained with PitFit.
Along with fitness, drivers' diet goes hand-in-hand.
“I’m pretty lucky in that I don’t get fat or anything,” Briscoe said. “I don’t have to watch what I eat too closely. But I still like to eat healthy. On a race weekend I’m very strict with what I eat, especially on race day. Getting the right stuff into the system before the race and none of the wrong stuff is important.”
“The offseason is when I diet like crazy and train even harder,” Andretti added. “But when I’m on a race weekend, I don’t really watch what I eat. You burn so much anyway. You gotta have the fuel, so you gotta eat.”
As far as diet after the race, both drivers said they like to let go.
" I always have salt cravings after a big sweat," Briscoe said. "I love to get myself some chips."
When Andretti was asked what he likes to refuel with after a race, he was true to his sponsor.
"RC Cola," he said.