Why switching off has become Formula 1's most underrated skill

Being a Formula 1 driver demands near-superhuman dedication. Only 22 drivers hold a full-time seat, and the pursuit of that honour can consume a person entirely. But as several current and former drivers explain, knowing when to zone out may be just as important as knowing when to push.

Bottas' wake-up call

Cadillac's Valtteri Bottas laid bare his own struggles in an unusually candid piece for The Players' Tribune earlier this year. Reflecting on his early career, the Finn admitted that from 2014 his "entire identity was racing" and that he "started starving" himself in the quest to lose weight and chase lap time.

The turning point came with Jules Bianchi's tragic crash at Suzuka in October 2014, with the French driver passing away nine months later. That moment forced Bottas to confront how little he cared about his own wellbeing, and he sought help.

After seeing a psychologist, the verdict was stark: Bottas didn't seem to have "any interests outside of racing" and "nothing else" brought him joy. "He was right," the former Mercedes man wrote. "My whole identity was the car."

The cost of burnout

Mark Arnall, who served as World Champion Kimi Raikkonen's performance coach for 20 years and also worked with Mika Hakkinen and Sebastian Vettel, says the dangers are real. "[Burnout] can obviously affect every part of your life," the Briton warns. "Performance drops, and you can get into that habit of almost over-analysing what you're doing and trying to figure out why it's not potentially going well. Obviously, it can affect sleep, which affects everything else too."

He adds that recognition is half the battle: "There are lots of different ways to combat it, and I think some of it is actually recognising when it's happening because it can creep up and people don't necessarily know what it is until it gets diagnosed as burnout."

Learning the hard way

Bottas, speaking at Spa, says every driver has to find what works for them. "With this sport, you learn so much about yourself," he said. "I've kind of had to learn it the hard way. It was all about F1 24/7 and burning the candle from both ends. Then, okay, I learned my limits."

"You learn that to arrive at a race weekend every time with a full battery, you need to do other stuff. You need to think about other stuff that is giving you energy instead of just wasting your energy all the time. This I've definitely learned. The beauty of life is you keep learning every day more and more. I've definitely found my balance to perform but also to have a sustainable and long career. That's what I've figured out."

Racing Bulls' Liam Lawson agrees on the necessity. "It's very important," Lawson says. "We spend so much time thinking about, obviously, the same sort of thing. I think Formula 1 weekends and weeks are very, very long as well. We arrive in some situations on a Tuesday or a Wednesday before a race, and you're in discussions and just focused on the same thing for a lot of days, so finding time to switch off is very important."

"I think the nights, just back at the hotel, for me personally it's making the most of those hours away from the track, trying not to think too much about F1, and coming back the next day fully refreshed is very important."

Individual methods

"It can be so many things," Bottas says. "Everyone is individual. For me, for example, small things like escaping in nature by myself. That's one thing I can [do to] recharge or do some other hobbies. For example, cycling is a big passion for me. That's one that is also good for the fitness, but it also clears my head. I love travelling, seeing new places and stuff like that, or it can be cooking up a meal for yourself or your family. Or a sauna session, that's a good one!"

Lawson has his own ritual: "I bring a guitar with me every weekend now to each race. That's been something that's been great to mentally switch off, and among other things as well. The more experience you have, you find things that work for you."

For some, the calm extends to the final minutes before the lights go out. Haas reserve and former Alpine driver Jack Doohan explains: "[I found it] after a while – I didn't find it initially – and for me it was really being as chill as I possibly could be. I didn't need to be pumped up, I was already raring to go. I needed the opposite, I needed chill music, I needed chess games before, I needed to be – almost in the last minutes leading up to being in the car – speaking about anything but the race as I was already thinking about it for the last 24 hours."

"I really wanted to be disconnected because there's not much that is in your control that can change the outcome of the other drivers when you [go into] Turn 1 in the last 30 minutes, right? You have a plan of your ideal scenario and so does everyone else."

The master: Kimi Raikkonen

If there were a title for switching off, Arnall suggests the Iceman would hold it. "With Kimi, I was quite lucky because he was just very good naturally at doing that. I think most people know Kimi just didn't give a crap about what people thought of him. He would just get on with his own life and if someone said something, he would be like, 'I don't care, you can think what you think'. It came across quite cold, but I think it was genius."

"Number one, you always knew where you stood with him as he was very black and white. If he was in a grumpy mood, he was in a grumpy mood with everyone, and if he was in good mood, then he was in a good mood. But on that front, it was just super easy because he literally parked it – gone – and he moved on to the future. In that respect he was quite easy to work with."

Sleep and the social media trap

Arnall stresses that sleep is now better understood but harder to protect. "Sleep is now recognised way more in terms of how beneficial it is and how much focus should be put on it. I don't speak to many people that don't struggle with sleep, and I don't know whether it's a social media thing – in terms of we've got access to so much information whenever we want, scrolling through Instagram or whatever it might be. From that perspective, there's a lot that can disrupt sleep."

Doohan is proactive about it: "If I want to switch off, I delete the apps. If I don't want to read anything, I turn off my notifications and I put on do not disturb. It's a peaceful place."

Arnall points to George Russell crediting a 45-minute nap for helping him seal pole position in Las Vegas in 2024, and notes the brutal reality of the schedule: "One of the biggest problems in Formula 1 is, if you look at one of the best ways to address sleep, it's just to create a regular habit of going to bed at the same time every night and getting up at the same time every morning. For us in Formula 1 that's impossible, because that hardly ever happens when you've got [all these] races a year."

A cultural shift

Attitudes have changed dramatically. "When I first came into Formula 1, if a driver was using some sort of coach from that mental side, it was almost viewed as a weakness," Arnall recalls. "It was almost ridiculed, 'ah, so-and-so's using a sports psychologist, he can't get his head right'. That whole thing shifted 180 degrees to the point where a driver is saying, 'hey, he's using the sports psychologist and maybe that's going to give him an advantage. Maybe I should be doing the same'."

Bottas' advice to younger drivers is simple: "Everyone will learn it eventually. It's hard when you're young, when you enter the sport. You want to prove yourself, you want to do well. You haven't found your limits yet or what your mental capacity is. Eventually you learn that you've got to switch off, you've got to disconnect."

Arnall sums up the wider lesson: "Once it comes out, you can start dealing with it and find ways forward. [Sometimes we] get stuck in there and there's no outlet – that is difficult. But people just need to find what works for them and, if there's a big problem in that area, try and make some definitive changes."