'Ban it' - The strange battleground F1 drivers are fighting over

Formula 1 has spent the past couple of years trying to solve a problem that sounds remarkably simple: how to stop its drivers getting too hot. As it turns out, that is more complicated than it sounds, and Isack Hadjar has a rather more radical solution than most.

“I think it should be banned. Because it’s supposed to be tough,” the Red Bull driver said in Singapore, offering the most uncompromising verdict yet on the cooling vests introduced to help drivers cope with extreme heat.

The cooling vest has become one of the strangest points of disagreement in the current F1 paddock.

Some drivers see it as an important piece of safety equipment that can help them perform when the heat becomes extreme. Others dislike the way it feels, question how long it actually works for, or simply believe that coping with the heat is part of the job.

Then there is also the slightly surreal fact that teams have to decide how much of their precious development budget they are prepared to spend making the device work properly, something that hasn’t proved to be as straightforward as expected.

Singapore, one of the hottest and most humid races of the calendar and which has already triggered the FIA’s heat hazard alarm, is an appropriate place for this particular argument to resurface.

Temperatures are expected to exceed 31C, while the combination of humidity, a long race and the heat retained inside an F1 cockpit can make conditions considerably more punishing than the air temperature suggests.

Drivers can lose several kilos of body weight through sweat and dehydration during a race.

Yet even here, with the problem so obvious, there is no consensus about the solution.

A solution that creates its own problems

Red Bull’s Max Verstappen remains firmly in the anti-vest camp.

The four-time world champion’s objection is partly practical. The system requires cables and plumbing to connect the driver to the car, and Verstappen says that restricts his movement.

More fundamentally, he doesn’t believe the technology works well enough to justify putting up with those compromises.

“Even if it would work for one-and-a-half hours, I don’t need it,” Verstappen said in Singapore. “It’s hot, but it’s not a sauna, and with this cooling vest you have these stupid cables in your car, so it’s just limiting your movement as well. It doesn’t work anyway for one-and-a-half hours.”

Charles Leclerc‘s view was more revealing because it gets to the heart of the problem, as he said he would use it if it could provide a meaningful benefit for longer, but claimed that the system becomes much less useful after roughly 15-20 laps, which is precisely when the drivers might start needed it more.

Esteban Ocon, speaking at Thursday’s FIA press conference, believes the system has been a “massive performance gain” physically, because keeping the driver at a better temperature clearly helps an athlete perform.

But his experience is that it lasts for only around 40 minutes before the fluid circulating through the system becomes hot.

That is why the cooling vest has become less of a simple piece of equipment and more of an engineering problem.

The FIA’s regulations now specify what an effective driver-cooling system has to achieve during a race where a heat hazard has been declared. A continuous system must be capable of extracting at least 200 watts of heat from the driver at an ambient temperature of 40C, while a system based on stored thermal energy must have a reserve of at least 1.1 megajoules.

In principle, then, this is not simply a driver wearing a cold jacket.

In practice, teams have to integrate the system into an already extremely complicated racing car, provide the driver with the necessary connections, manage the cooling medium and make sure it continues working when the cockpit itself becomes an oven.

That is where George Russell has become the vest’s most prominent advocate.

Russell’s argument is essentially that this should not be treated as a question of whether a driver is tough enough to cope with the heat.

He has pointed to the experiences of drivers in extreme conditions, including the 2023 Qatar Grand Prix, where the heat became so severe that some drivers suffered significant physical effects.

Alex Albon has described feeling as though he was hallucinating during that race.

Russell also made the point that cockpits are not necessarily as brutally hot as they once were, because teams have changed the packaging of radiators, hydraulic systems and electronic components. But that doesn’t mean heat has ceased to be a problem, particularly at races such as Singapore and Qatar.

“I’d race it every weekend, bar Las Vegas and tracks that are really cold,” Russell said. “I definitely see a benefit in it, I really like it.”

His frustration is that making the system genuinely reliable requires engineering resources. Those cost money, and in modern Formula 1, that is finite resource that needs to be prioritised where it matters the most.

Safety versus performance

A team can spend time and money developing a better cooling system, or it can spend those resources finding another aerodynamic improvement or extracting another fraction of a second from its car.

Russell believes the FIA and teams need to find a way around that problem rather than leaving each team to make the calculation for itself.

Championship leader Kimi Antonelli provides perhaps the strongest argument for why that calculation is not straightforward.

The Mercedes driver has had particularly bad experiences with the system: On one occasion it didn’t last as long as expected, and on another, at Austin, the pump failed and he spent the session with water being circulated at around 50C. He subsequently suffered heat stroke.

It is not difficult to understand why that would colour his view.