Tell us a little about yourself and What was the career path that you took to get here and also? What skills do you need to do your job?
My own sporting background is in football. I represented Finland in the junior National teams and played in the Finnish Men’s top league for a club called TPS. I was one of those athletes who really worked hard and tried to turn every stone to make football my career, but probably lacked some raw talent to properly breakthrough. I also went through several tough injuries and then decided that it is perhaps better if I try to make a career outside the playing field and turned my focus to studying. I did first a BSc in Sport Science and an MSc in Sport Management at Loughborough University and then later another MSc in Strength and Conditioning at St Mary’s University in London while already working in F1. My time in Formula 1 started through Dr Aki Hintsa. He had heard of me through a mutual friend and called me in the end of 2010 and asked me if I was available to fly to Switzerland to meet a young Formula 1 driver who would need a coach. I said yes and soon found myself on a dinner table with Sebastien Buemi. After Buemi I worked two years for Jean-Eric Vergne and since 2014 I have worked for Sebastian Vettel. The most important skill needed in this job is that you can communicate effectively with the athlete you are working with. Secondly, you must have a very good knowledge about the science and best practice at each performance area. You must be able to grasp what is important at any given moment to reach the wanted result and communicate it effectively. The doing itself is much easier than figuring out the problem, establishing the best action points to solve it and the best communication means to achieve buy-in.
What’s your job responsibility?
A Hintsa Performance coach working in F1 is responsible for managing all the different performance elements to support the driver as well as possible. The way we work with individual athletes is that the closest person to the athlete is the performance coach. He runs all the daily work and is the first point of contact in all matters around performance. The coach then consults different world class specialists in the Hintsa network and together with them makes a comprehensive annual plan where all different areas complement each other.
Why did you choose to work as a Performance coach and in Hintsa?
I’m very passionate about helping people reach their potential. I find one of the unique characteristics of Hintsa as a company is how it combines science and practical evidence in its core coaching philosophy. Science must be the foundation of knowledge but without listening and learning what is happening right now, one simply cannot develop fast enough in the modern performance world. I am grateful to work for a company that shares this philosophy with me.
Describe a typical day in your job?
The work of a performance coach in F1 varies a lot between home and the track. At the track the main task is to help create and maintain an environment for the athlete to have the chance to express their skill at 100%. One aspect of this is physical readiness. This means organising warm-ups, hydration, nutrition and recovery for instance. Another aspect is the mental state of the athlete. The coach as part of the performance team of the athlete alongside his closest engineers, a manager for some drivers and the PR person must encourage and at times challenge the athlete to make sure he or she keeps his focus on the things that matter the most and fuel his performance. At home, you are then in charge of the planning and execution of the performance plan. This means daily work training and looking after the other performance elements.
What was the biggest challenge for you as a Performance Coach in Formula1?
To get to understand the skill side of the sport as someone who doesn’t have a background as a racing driver. As a training scientist you may look at a braking demand for instance and say that ok, a driver needs to be able to exert around 80kg of force on the pedal through the ball of his foot at certain joint angles and he is typically expected to reach peak pressures in 0.2 seconds.
This gives you the rate of force development needed, and you can calculate how many times and at what intervals the driver needs to perform this requirement in a race. As much as this is useful and the correct direction to take training towards, braking is still a skill and what we are training with the above example is the capacity to produce the force needed, not the skill of exerting the right amount of force in the right time period to get you fastest through the corner.
As a coach, you want to be able to plan and execute a performance plan that ideally has direct transfer to performance. Before you understand the skill properly, it is difficult to know how best to organise training to maximize the chance to achieve this.
What is the most memorable moment in your job so far And also the worst and best part of your job is…?
I’ve had a lot of great moments with Hintsa and also within motorsport. One of the best ones was perhaps our first win with Ferrari. Looking at the whole team sing the national anthem from the bottom of their hearts after a fantastic race was quite a special view and a special feeling.
I don’t really feel that any moment has been so bad that I would call it “the worst”. There have been days that results wise haven’t been as good as they could have been but you always learn from these days so it would be wrong to call them bad.
Traveling a lot, Jet Lag and all kind of things happened in between, you have to take care of the Seb and yourself and make sure that everything goes ahead in the best possible way, how do you take care of that and how do you make sure that everything is ready and steady?
Traveling and managing with jet lag overall is all about planning. This starts with knowing which flight timings to choose to minimize jet lag. The second step is creating a plan to adjust to the new time zone already some days before the flight. The body clock is most sensitive to light so there are times when you want to start giving the body light already earlier in the morning to start shifting in that direction.
Other triggers are for example exercise and nutrition. You can also play around with them to help the body adjust to the new time zone. With good planning, an F1 driver or worker really should not struggle too much with jet lag in my opinion. Another thing to remember is that it’s not only the jet lag that causes stress and fatigue, but often it is the lifestyle associated to leading this life. A flight to Australia is like a huge training session and you must consider carefully what training, nutrition and other life stressors fit around it to stay fit both physically and cognitively.
In races with different characteristics like high humidity, High G-force, night races what are the procedure that you need to go through to make sure that Seb is in the best shape possible?
The foundation for coping with different track demands comes from a good general fitness and a well thought through annual plan. It takes weeks to achieve muscular adaptations in the body, so you simply do not have time to prepare for each race separately.
The only exception is heat. It has been shown in science and practice that heat acclimatising at home already can help the athlete. This might mean creating a hotter environment to train in or using the sauna for example. Both aim to increase the sweat rate of the athlete. This is most important in the first hot races of the year after a winter in cold Europe. The body is not acclimatised at all and without specific heat work the athlete might struggle.
How did you cope with quarantine and how did you prepare Seb at that time to be ready for the delayed season?
COVID has obviously been a horrible thing worldwide. I’ve fortunately managed to stay safe and healthy. When it became clear that we are going to be in a lock-down for quite some time, I tried to look at the positives and think about what can be achieved with all this extra time.
From a work point of view, we quickly drafted a 6-week training plan firstly to prepare for a potential race in Holland and then extended this further once it became clear that the season most likely starts in July. It was fantastic to get an extended period as such without external commitments and build fitness in an organised way.
Can you give some tip for people and athletes about mental health, there are a lot of people in mental pain and darkness now because of all the thing going on(corona, losing jobs and etc), it’s greatly appreciated if you can give some insight about how to improve and come of out this darkness
I find that one of the most important things to keep in mind when things get difficult is to realize what you can and cannot control. There is no point in losing too much energy with the things you cannot control. If you are struggling, you should establish a few key action points on the things you can control and keep pushing on that direction day after day. Hopefully, soon things ease off and you find yourself in a better place.
Do you have any tips/advice for those wanting to work in the industry?
Coaching in F1 has got more and more professional every year and now almost all coaches have MSc degrees in applicable fields. A degree is nowadays a must. I would also suggest taking every opportunity to coach in different sports to get experience working with athletes and strengthening your own tool kit on how to tackle different problems an athlete may be facing. On top of this I would show a specific interest in this sport by researching what it is like to be a driver. Build your philosophy on what you think is best practice in this sport and present it to our directors at Hintsa Performance and maybe you find yourself working with a driver.
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