Behind the helmet and the milliseconds, there's a world of quirks, silences and automatic gestures. We found out what drivers do when no one is watching, before the lights go out.
Have you ever wondered what goes on behind closed doors minutes before the start of a Grand Prix? What happens in the minutes leading up to it, behind the garage doors or on the starting grid, is something incredible where logic embraces rituals that border on the sacred.
For Formula 1 drivers, every gesture counts, and there are certain quirks that if they don't happen, for them the race can't start. Obviously it's not something they all admit, but they know that sticking to certain "habits" is key to being able to start a race calmly.
The most emblematic case is Fernando Alonso's. His ritual starts in the hospitality area, where he completely shuts out any outside noise. An hour before getting in the car, he sits on the floor, leans his back against the wall, closes his eyes and visualizes everything. Lap by lap, corner by corner, he mentally goes through the track, feeling every braking point, every turn in point. "When I put my helmet on, I've already run the race twenty times in my head," he confessed in an interview.
In Ferrari's garage, Charles Leclerc also has his own routine. He performs an exact choreography. The Monegasque driver makes an almost mechanical gesture. Before getting into the cockpit, he gives three firm taps with his right hand on the halo, right at the junction where the central pillar meets the chassis. They're not lucky taps, he explains, but a way of "greeting" the machine, of establishing a tactile dialogue that confirms everything is in order. But wait, that's not all because if he wins a race with a specific chassis number, Leclerc demands to keep using it until the streak is broken and won't change it for anything.
Hamilton, while the mechanics finalize the details and the stewards clear the grid, the seven-time champion keeps his headphones on right up to the regulatory limit. He carefully chooses the playlist that will accompany him in that pre race trance.
Songs with messages of overcoming, beats that raise his heart rate to just the right point, all to be able to vibe with his car. After getting out of the car following the installation lap, he does a circular walk around the car, brushing the front wing with his fingertips as if he needs to hear what the car has to tell him.
The most extreme and painful ritual belongs to Kimi Räikkönen. He was famous for disappearing in the minutes leading up to the start. While his rivals did activation exercises, the Finn would take refuge in his private driver room, ask for coffee, sit on a folding chair and fall asleep. A twenty minute nap that allowed him to get to the car in a state of absolute calm. "I don't understand why people get nervous. It's just sitting down and driving," he used to say.
Bottas revolutionized everything to do with rituals. The Finn combines his physical preparation with mountain bike sessions on the circuits themselves hours before the Grand Prix. According to him, this reminds him there's life beyond F1.
These gestures, small to the spectator, are for the drivers the last step before the trenches. In a sport where tenths separate glory from oblivion, clinging to a ritual isn't a quirk. It's a mechanism of control over the uncontrollable.