Drivers live in a nocturnal bubble where everyone pretends they're still in Europe
By Stu Woo
SINGAPORE -- Every autumn, an elite group of 3,000 business travelers flies halfway around the world for a high-stakes event with millions of dollars on the line. To stay sharp, they've cracked the secret to beating jet lag.
They don't even try.
The group: the drivers, mechanics and entire entourage of auto racing's Formula One. For one week at the Singapore Grand Prix, they simply stay on Europe time. They wake up at 2 p.m. local time -- which is morning back home -- eat afternoon omelets and have dinner well after midnight.
The upside-down life ensures peak performance at 200 miles an hour during the race, which takes place Sunday night, and zero adjustment when they return to Europe.
"It's quite pleasant," said Nico Hülkenberg, a driver for Audi. "You don't have that much jet lag."
Humans have conquered long-distance aviation, but not the bodily shock of crossing time zones. The resulting brain fog has been blamed for diplomatic mishaps, Olympic disappointments and the recent downfall of the chief executive behind Jim Beam.
Since Singapore joined F1's schedule in 2008, the brains behind the finely tuned machines at the likes of Ferrari and McLaren have brought that same optimization to jet lag. Exploiting a scheduling quirk -- Singapore's 8 p.m. race typically follows a slate of afternoon starts in Europe -- the entire paddock just lives in an alternate, nocturnal universe.
It's an extreme strategy, but one that everyday business travelers can steal. "It's absolutely doable," said Jamie Zeitzer, co-director of Stanford University's Center for Sleep and Circadian Sciences.
There are just two hurdles: social acceptability and sunlight.
Say you fly from Los Angeles to London. California's 8 a.m. is England's 4 p.m. Can you really schedule all your big meetings after teatime?
F1 pulls it off by constructing a bubble where almost everyone observes the fiction that they are still in Europe.
F1 picks up the paddock -- the behind-the-scenes village of garages and other infrastructure -- and plops it in Singapore without changing the clocks. The vampire schedule applies not just to drivers but all 3,000 team members, organizers and support crew traveling with them.
Part of the bubble is mandated. To prevent overworking, F1 rules dictate that teams can't work on the cars until the afternoon in the days before the race, said Rebecca Lee, head of single-seater operations at the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile, which governs F1. The sport also schedules track sessions later in the day to hit European television audiences.
That leaves bosses such as Audi racing director Allan McNish working the night shift. He wakes up around 3:30 p.m., grabs a snack and heads to the track to strategize with engineers on site and back in Germany and Switzerland -- who are working in daylight six hours behind.
After monitoring practice, debriefing his team and entertaining sponsors under the floodlights, he winds down for bed around 3:30 a.m., which is 9:30 p.m. back in central Europe.
"Your mind is still European," McNish said, "but your body's Singaporean."
Controlling the social setting is only half the battle. The second challenge is the biological clock.
When at home, your body learns to adapt to your daily routine. If you have a regular 2 p.m. workout or meeting, the heart prepares to pump. Focus sharpens. "Any system that can be optimized will be optimized," said Zeitzer, the Stanford sleep scientist.
Jet lag breaks this circadian rhythm. Your internal machinery fires when you want to sleep and idles when you need to be sharp. Adjusting generally takes one day per time zone crossed, a process sped by maximizing sunlight exposure.
But in Singapore, adjusting to local time is the last thing F1 teams want. So they do whatever they can to dodge the sun.
"Light is by far the biggest issue," Zeitzer said. "Light is the way the internal clock knows what time it is."
At the Singapore Grand Prix, people generally sleep from 5 a.m. to 2 p.m. The Audi team relies on hotel-provided black curtains, which McNish said are good but imperfect. He makes sure they're set up to block out as much sunlight as possible before he goes to bed.
F1 teams have lived by this strategy for years. But a scheduling curveball this year is shaking up the routine.
Because of the Middle East conflict, a race normally in Bahrain earlier in the year was held last weekend near Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia -- just a five-hour drive from Singapore and in the same time zone. The catch: The Malaysian race was in the afternoon.
F1 teams flew from Azerbaijan, acclimated to a daytime schedule in Malaysia and then immediately pivoted to the night shift in Singapore this week. In other words, they induced jet lag despite basically going nowhere.
F1's greatest minds have no scientific workarounds for this year's unusual circumstance.
"You just have to suck it up and be a man about it," said Hülkenberg, the Audi driver.