Former Indian F1 driver Karun Chandhok on what an average race weekend looks like

Chandhok shares an insider’s account of the behind-the-scenes action with ‘The Hindu Magazine’

The 2022 Formula One World Championship will be the most intense season in the history of the sport. With 22 race weekends packed into an eight-month schedule that criss-crosses the globe, the drivers, team members, media and everybody else in the motorsport fraternity will be working extra hard this year.

There’s a fascinating battle unfolding on track. Coming off the back of a dramatic 2021 when Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton waged a year-long battle that was settled in the final lap of the final race, we’ve got a whole new season of competition this year.

Young stars like George Russell, Charles Leclerc and Lando Norris are doing an outstanding job of taking the fight to established world champions such as Hamilton, Verstappen, Fernando Alonso and others. F1’s popularity around the globe has exploded, thanks in no small measure to the Netflix series Formula 1: Drive to Survive, with record spectators at pretty much every race we’ve been to this year, and a television audience that’s back on the rise after a few years when people got bored of the predictability of Hamilton’s wins.

ALSO READ: How Netflix’s ‘Formula 1: Drive to Survive’ drove the sport’s ratings

For those watching at home, it may seem like the drivers and teams are hard at work for just those 44 racing days in a year, but the reality is that the world of F1 never stops. In between races, drivers do a tremendous amount of work with their engineers to analyse and prepare themselves for the races.

F1 cars are complex machines and the teams can change a lot of settings in terms of the engines, suspensions, aerodynamics and tyres to try and unlock maximum speed and performance on track. All teams now use state-of-the-art simulators and sophisticated weather radars. Prior to every race, drivers and engineers spend a couple of days working together on a host of changes to ensure that they arrive at the track with a “set up” that is the most optimised for the weekend. Simulators, which have laser-scanned 3D circuits, are particularly useful for rookie drivers to get a hang of the track before the race weekend.

The big names, Hamilton and Verstappen or the Ferrari duo of Leclerc and Carlos Sainz, are in high demand with sponsors and the media throughout the season. It’s not uncommon to see someone like a Hamilton jet off in between races to ring the bell at NASDAQ on Wall Street, for instance, or for Verstappen to do demo runs with his Red Bull car on the streets of Istanbul.