Fitness training has come a long way in the over 100 years that men have been driving racing cars. Each team now has a personal trainer assigned to one or both drivers.

Alexander Leibinger, a physiotherapist and osteopath said that being in good physical condition also helps to quickly eliminate the physiological byproducts of mental stress, like the acids the body produces. ''If you have a better basic fitness level then your body can handle it and eliminate all of the stress products,'' Leibinger said. ''That is why we do a lot of basic training, say 20 hours a week of endurance training and muscle training. To have a good basis so that during a race weekend, when the stress is very high, the body can handle it.''

To state that athletes are different from you and I is to state the obvious but a strong case can be made for the concept that some emotions and character traits normally regarded as antisocial – rage, hate, greed, lust, revenge, ruthlessness, and so on – may be necessary to fuel competitive fires to the levels necessary to excel in Formula One racing, hence the old adage ‘nice guys finish last’. It may also pay off for a driver to be paranoid, feeling that the whole world is against him, which, in fact, all his rivals are. Nigel Mansell was just one example of a driver who seemed to parlay paranoia into success on the track. “We’ve always had bad losers – Nigel Mansell is a bad winner,” is how Keke Rosberg, the 1982 champion with Williams, characterized the Englishman.

Ayrton Senna was an innovator in using a sport psychologist (or physical/mental coach as Nuno Cobra called himself) before anyone else in F1. Senna would also meditate prior to every race, visualizing what would happen during the race and between his car and that perfect lap.

Denis Jenkinson always believed that winning races was more important than driver's titles so it's not surprising that one of his favorite drivers, Stirling Moss, never won a title. It should be noted however that during a career that comprised 375 competitive races, Moss won an astonishing 212 of them.

When asked Stirling Moss, British sporting hero stated that today F1, with it's multinational sponsor is more of a business than a sport. He explained that although he had a great rivalry with Mike Hawthorn in 1958, when both were racing to be the country’s first world champion, the two got on very well. Moss even stood up for Hawthorn when he was disqualified from one race in 1958. If he hadn’t, Hawthorn would have lost the precious extra points he needed to win the championship. Ironically two of the greatest champions in the history of racing, Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher bare a strong responsibility for the winning at all costs atmosphere that pervades Formula 1.

Yet perhaps Moss is more the exception than the rule. Phil Hill, a man know for his integrity remarked: