• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Formula for Fitness

Posted on: Sunday, 5 December 2004, 03:00 CST

Formula 1 team Jordan knows that healthier drivers make for faster cars. And now the pit crews too are feeling the benefit of its comprehensive wellbeing policy. Rhymer Rigby reports

Jordan (and I imagine this applies to any Formula 1 outfit) is a slightly schizophrenic company. Head down to the racetrack and it's all signature yellow trailers, the scream of engines, petrol fumes and vaguely famous people striding purposefully around in Technicolor jumpsuits. Five minutes' drive from the gates of Silverstone, however, the corporate HQ could belong to a medium- sized widget manufacturer. Although, to be fair, it does have a very nice racing car parked in the middle of the foyer.

Jordan employs about 200 people. It's one of the smaller F1 teams; the larger outfits (Ferrari et al) have workforces of twice that number. In the past, it prided itself on being lean and mean, though recent years have been more lean, with victories thin on the ground.

As might be expected, its structure is a little odd - for this is a business geared entirely to the trackside success of three people: Nick Heidfeld, Giorgio Pantano and Tomo Glock; the first two are the principal drivers, with Glock, at 22, the youngster.

Perhaps appositely then, Jordan has a split people function, divided along the following lines. The HR department deals with just over 98% of the employees. The rest - the trio of drivers - is managed by Eddie Jordan himself. As HR director Dot Shipperly admits, she won't be giving Heidfeld his annual appraisal - that's Eddie's area. But the industry and the company's singular focus make for an HR role that is far from normal.

The health of the team - and especially its drivers - is of paramount importance. 'Where our workforce is different,' explains Shipperly, 'is that they're all very passionate about what they do. For example, we have no absenteeism problem. Rather the reverse - we have trouble getting people to take time off when they need a rest. We're a small team, so people work very, very hard - they have to as we're competing with teams who have more people. You have to want to do it. The reward is to be involved in Jordan Formula 1. If that's not enough of a reward, you shouldn't be there.'

As might be expected in a company where the challenges differ from the norm (see box, page 19), the employee health policy has a similarly skewed profile. The Jordan team employs a health and fitness consultant, Glenn Lindsay, from corporate health provider Vielife. And, says Shipperly, although his primary focus is the drivers, plenty of what Vielife provides is a service available to all employees.

Unlike many other sports, F1 isn't perhaps as inextricably linked to health in the public consciousness as, say, football or rowing might be. Maybe it's the legacy of James Hunt, or perhaps it's just all that tobacco advertising. Yet Lindsay, an Australian with a hint of Mel Gibson about him, was keen to stress that Fl is like any other sport these days - except perhaps darts.

'My role is basically a travelling health and wellbeing consultant for the drivers,' he says. Most drivers, he explains, have physiotherapists, osteopaths and other professional therapists. His role is to look after the human performance side of Jordan. 'Obviously what I do is heavily weighted towards the drivers', he continues. 'Plus I do a lot of work with the executives. Eddie Jordan and the key personnel have thorough health and medical tests - blood, lung, cardio and so on. But while it's targeted at drivers and senior management, some of what I do, such as fitness and nutrition, is also aimed at the whole team.'

Once the drivers are signed up, Vielife carries out the usual battery of health and fitness tests - not just cardiovascular, but also blood, urine, lungs, and muscular strength: anything that might affect a driver's ability to perform. Vielife, he says, has worked with F1 for many years, with drivers such as Senna and Prost, and has a large database of driver performances. Drivers can test themselves against this, which, says Lindsay, 'is tremendously motivating for them'.

Nor is it just about straight fitness. 'We look at doing specific strength training and tests for higher braking and cornering forces that affect areas such as the neck.' Drivers are routinely exposed to forces of four or five G and, he adds, 'this year, Heidfeld had an accident where he was exposed to 31G'. Indeed, although racing drivers need to be, and generally are, very fit, there are specific fitness requirements for each circuit, 'especially Barcelona and Brazil, where there are some very long first corners'.

To keep the drivers on peak form, Lindsay devises all sorts of training regimens. These range from going to the gym and wearing weighted helmets (which simulate the neck stresses of cornering) to running wilderness training camps in northern Canada. And of course there's a lot of training time actually spent in the cars as well.

On the nutritional side of things, the team employs caterers who cook deliciously healthy food. But that won't always be available and, says Lindsay, a big worry is the excess of food available on tour. 'They stay in nice hotels and rich food is always available: it's not a Spartan lifestyle.' So he has to advise on how drivers can keep themselves in check: 'There are obvious advantages to being small and lightweight with low body fat. Plus it helps with heat dissipation.' Perhaps disappointingly, the darker side of excess seems no longer to be an issue: 'There are no real problems with pubs and parties. It's such a highly competitive business that you can't be a James Hunt any more.'

Anyone in the Jordan team can log on to its site, do a self- assessment and ask general questions about fitness. The company has also implemented an across-the-board stress policy. It's doing some more curious stuff, too. It's been carrying out research with electronics giant Philips on blue light, which simulates daylight. Initially this was to ameliorate the effects of jetlag on drivers, but it's also being used in component areas and offices where people may be working for long periods without natural light.

And it seems to be going down well, with both the drivers and the rest of the company. As Lindsay says: 'For so long Jordan has focused so tightly on engineering performance that it couldn't allocate much time to human performance. Now it's achieving a balance.'

Almost everyone seem to think the demanding lifestyle is worth it. 'I get astounded at the stamina of some people,' says Shipperly. 'When we're racing, it can be every other weekend. There are long hours and a lot of weekend working. People just throw themselves into it. I've never seen that anywhere else I've worked.' It's perhaps worth noting, however, that Shipperly used to work in the rail industry.

This passion, she adds, does have another side: passionate disagreements of the kind one might expect of a more obviously creative industry such as the theatre. But designing and building a new car part from scratch is creative. 'You get huge clashes of wills,' she says. 'It is all resolved amicably, but when you've spent months designing something entirely new you're going to stand up and fight for it.'

Certainly none of this is on display in the Jordan garages. People working on the cars move past each other like ballet dancers, each knowing exactly what they're doing. Verbal communication is almost superfluous. A mechanic wants a screwdriver or a piece of electronic equipment; they turn round and an assistant already has it ready for them. And it's often done in front of an inquisitive audience of F1 fans, even on quiet test days. It is the kind of teamwork that most shop floors can only dream of. And at least some of it is down to the fitness of body and mind.

LIFE IN THE FAST LANE TWISTS AND TURNS OF HR AT FORMULA 1

With so many keen to work in Formula 1, one of Dot Shipperly's (pictured) duties is made particularly easy. As HR director at Jordan she finds that filling vacancies isn't a problem, even for roles that are only tangentially connected to racing. 'We advertise in Computer Weekly for an IT position,' she says, 'and we get 300 people - and that's just for a tech job.'

But while there's no end of inexperienced people queuing up to join Jordan, higher up the ranks it gets a bit more difficult - because of the company's relatively poor recent race results. In addition, says Shipperly, retention can be a problem. Because Jordan is small it tends to develop good all-rounders who, once they've got a few years under their belts, can, and do, go anywhere. For the same reasons, she adds, there can be difficulties attracting more senior people. 'Getting good engineers was fairly easy a few years ago when we were winning,' she explains, 'but with recent press speculation about funding it can be rather difficult.'

Another vagary of working in the world's most popular spectator sport is the effect on morale. 'What we do is very public and the results are on show,' she explains. If you win, everyone's elated. Lose and everyone's down. 'It's quite difficult,' she continues. 'People work very hard and then friends and relatives phone up and say: "You didn't do very well, did you?" You are accountable to everyone you know.'

Once of the biggest challenges for Shipperly is scheduling the little things that HR directors like to do -training, appraisals and so on. 'It's a nightmare,' she says. 'There are three cycles. One is the race seaso\n; trying to organise anything with staff during this is practically impossible.' At any given time during this period, about 60 people are out of the office for weeks at a time-and could conceivably be anywhere in the world that happens to have a racetrack. 'Then there's the design season, which runs from the end of the race season to Christmas, so the design guys are out until the end of December. Then there's the manufacturing season, which starts in November.'

The upshot of all this is that 'there's never a time that everyone's around - which is fun if you ever want to do full company training'. Moreover, she adds, in the unlikely event you actually do find a day when most people are around, they'll be working flat out. And, in the even more unlikely event that they're not, something always comes up. Then in the extraordinarily unlikely event there is a bit of genuine slack, that's when the knackered race team needs to take a holiday.

Copyright Haymarket Business Publications Ltd. Nov 2004

Source: Human Resources

More News in this Category