“I finished ninth and then I think we got two track-limit penalties,” Stroll said. “But I was passing out in the car, and they painted the kerbs and made the track narrower so you can’t even feel the kerbs. You’re just trying to see it. But the problem is, you can’t see where you’re going because you’re passing out. I was fully fading out.”
Why was it so bad in Qatar?
F1 has held races in the Middle East since the first Bahrain Grand Prix in 2004. Other rounds in the region currently on the calendar include Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi. Like Qatar, they are all night races.
Those other races, however, tend to be held either in the early spring or towards the end of the year. No F1 race in the Middle East has been held so close to the summer as yesterday’s Qatar Grand Prix.
The inaugural Qatar Grand Prix was held at the same location in 2021, albeit six weeks later in the year than this year’s edition. Next year’s race at the Losail International Circuit will be even later than that, running from November 29 until December 1.
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The climatic conditions yesterday perhaps do not seem too extreme on paper. At the start of the race, the air temperature was 32C with humidity at 73 per cent. Yet there were complicating factors, the nature of the track being one of them.
The Losail International Circuit has few slow-speed corners and slings drivers from one medium or high-speed turn into another in quick succession. There is little respite from huge G-forces between turns five and 15.
Another complication was that there was little tyre management in the race due to a maximum stint of 18 laps being imposed. That meant every race lap was more like a flat-out qualifying lap, pushing the cars and the drivers closer to their limit.
The worrying aspect of what happened at the weekend is the sheer number of drivers who were affected. Traditionally, the Singapore Grand Prix has been the toughest race for drivers. That, too, is generally run in extremes of heat and humidity on a demanding street circuit with 19 corners. It also has the added complication of being the longest Grand Prix on the calendar by time, often taking the full two hours to complete.
What is happening to the drivers’ bodies and how can they cope?
“Drivers are always quite warm because they are sitting on an engine in fire-retardant suits and overalls. Most races, even if it’s not super-hot outside, it is warm,” Dr Chris Tyler, a Reader in Environmental Physiology at the University of Roehampton, explains.
“On Sunday [Monday NZT] it was exacerbated by the fact that not only were they on a hot track, in a hot car, wearing the overalls... but they were also surrounded by the humid air - so they were essentially driving in an oven.”
“There would be nowhere for the heat to go. The suit traps the heat but then any heat that does leave the suit also gets trapped by the oven-like effect around it. In the hot environment, that trapping becomes a problem and then you cannot do anything about it.”
We witnessed many drivers opening their visors to cool themselves down but that, explains Tyler, is only moving hot air back into their helmet. The cooling vests they wear and the ice baths they take before hot and demanding physical races are only “kicking the can down the road”, he says.
Although some drivers are fitter than others and will cope better - perhaps due to genetics or conditioning - it is likely the effects are going to be felt at some point over a Grand Prix distance. The blacking out and vomiting are likely to be related to the “heart-rate response and an associated redirection of blood flow,” Tyler explains.
“If you do anything in the heat, your heart rate will be higher. You’re sending more blood to the skin to try and lose that heat. The associated problem with that is that the heart rate has to go up to compensate.”
This then puts an added strain on the cardiovascular system, taking blood away from the core, which can then lead to a loss in blood pressure and potentially fainting or blacking out, as experienced by Stroll.
In the cases of those drivers who were physically sick, it comes through the blood being moved to the skin, away from the gut and intestines, which can lead to toxins being released into the bloodstream. That comes with symptoms of dizziness, light-headedness and nausea.
How can they cope and adapt?
The heat will affect everybody but heat acclimation and heat exposure is a process that drivers can go through to lessen the effects in conditions as we saw yesterday.
“Drivers then get various physiological adaptations that protect them against the heat,” Tyler says. “This is repeated exposure to temperatures like those drivers will face. You would get the driver hot in a controlled manner, through exercise in an environmental chamber.
“Then you hold them at elevated body temperature and then a number of adaptations occur, the main one being an increase in plasma volume.
“If you do that, you have an increase in blood volume which means those heart rate-related issues are less prominent because you have more blood and you can send more to the skin. You also get better at fluid retention and dehydration becomes less of an issue.”
