Lando Norris has been demonstrating to his friends the excruciating neck training regime that he’s required to go through 3 to 4 times a week. He trains his neck in such a punishing manner just so he can deal with the G-forces generated whilst cornering an F1 car.
F1 car G-Forces
F1 cars have incredible cornering abilities thanks to their hugely grippy tyres and, more importantly, the massive amount of downforce they produce that keeps them glued to the track.
This means that on some of the fastest and highest-load corners on the F1 calendar, Formula 1 cars can generate over 6 Gs of lateral force. One of these corners is Maggots and Becketts at Silverstone, and this video shows the cars reaching 6.5 G here.
The tweet below shows Charles Leclerc maxing out at 5.3 lateral G in his Ferrari on a different occasion.
WOW 😮
— Formula 1 (@F1) August 1, 2020
Feel the Gs with @Charles_Leclerc as he flies through Maggots and Becketts during FP3 🚀#BritishGP 🇬🇧 #F1 pic.twitter.com/drIInd1u2O
So what does that much G force feel like? Well 6.5 G means something has a weight 6.5 times its actual weight acting upon it.
So let’s say you’re an average F1 driver and your head weighs 5.5kg. Plus the helmet weighs around 1.5kg giving a total mass of 7kg for everything above the shoulders.
6.5 lateral G acting on your head and helmet is the equivalent of 45.5kg of force pushing sideways on your neck (6.5 x 7).
Imagine lying on your side on a table with you head hanging over the edge. Now if you attach a 45.5kg weight to the side of your head and try and use your neck muscles to stop it from being pulled towards the floor, you wouldn’t stand a chance.
F1 drivers, however, train for that exact thing.
Lando's neck training
45.5kg pushing on your neck sounds exhausting. Now imagine that happening for sustained periods as you go around multiple corners during a Formula 1 race that could last anywhere from 75 to 120 minutes.
That means F1 drivers have to have incredibly strong necks with serious levels of muscular endurance. And to do that they have to train their necks relentlessly.
In a recent post on Instagram which Lando captioned ‘gotta love neck day’ he shows off some of the training that he has to do to keep his neck strong enough for the demands of Grand Prix racing.
Most of his neck traning comprises the use of a Gatherer Systems neck harnes with elastic pull chords and a built in load analyser so the amount of force being resisted by Lando’s neck can be measured.
The training itself features a number of peak-force and fatigue based exercises, where Lando has to resist the harness’ pulling force from the side, front and back. That helps mimic cornering, accelerating and braking G-forces in an F1 car.
In the video below filmed for Lando’s YouTube channel Quadrant, Lando puts a couple of his mates to the test on his neck training equipment.
His friends, who have never done any sort of neck training before, manage to resist around 5kg of side force before their necks could take no more. Lando then had a go and fitted some firmer bands to the harness that pushed it up to around 25kg of side force.
Lando resisted it with relative ease, even saying “that’s nice” at the lack of stress that it caused him, despite his mate trying as hard as he could to pull him to the side.
In another video for his Quadrant channel, a different friend tackles Lando’s neck training regime. This time his personal trainer puts him through the neck strength test, analysing both peak strength and fatigue strength.
Lando and his mate are sat in a rig that’s a mock-up of the F1 driver’s seating position in his McLaren race car. The harness is attached to his head from different angles and the forces are measured.
Lando’s mate manages to resist with a peak force of 31.4kg when his head’s being pulled forwards from behind. Lando’s trainer says that Lando’s record is 54kg, so almost double.
Check out the video below. As Lando says, there’s nothing he can do to avoid pulling some rediculous faces when training his neck.
