In one regard at least, Formula 1 is a strange anomaly in the world of professional sport: very few people truly excel in any other sporting arena without years of constant coaching. Yet this hasn’t been used with any great regularity or intensity within F1 teams over the years. It’s strange because, ultimately, no athlete is perfect and in every sport ‘the game’ is constantly evolving, requiring you to have people to help you keep you on top of that.
With team sports such as football or cricket, it’s obvious that the main role of coaches or the manager is to get the group of players to work together as a team. But in cricket, you find coaches for the specialist areas of batting, bowling and fielding. If I think of boxing, tennis or golf, the individual top athletes have all got to a point in their careers where they know themselves and their own performance metrics very well, yet even Novak Djokovic or Anthony Joshua will still rely on coaches to look for more performance.
Historically, there’s been a macho male mindset that if a driver has made it to F1, he shouldn’t need his hand held any longer. I can’t imagine a driver striding up to Frank Williams or Ron Dennis admitting they needed a coach!
