SEPANG, Malaysia – I can see the Petronas Twin Towers from my hotel window in Kuala Lumpur. This morning rather than taking three different public transportation lines – a monorail, a train and a metro – to get to the train that takes me to the airport where the race track is located, I decided I would simply walk towards the Twin Towers, where I knew there would be a direct line to the train to the airport.
This turned out to be a HUGE mistake. The towers looked so close from my window. But as I walked through the deserted streets under the burning sun and through the heavy humidity, carrying my computer bag on my back, I thought the walk would take forever and that my judgment of distance was very bad. I decided to take the first method of transportation I could find, and as it turned out, it was a monorail not far from the Twin Towers.
It also turned out that the walk was NOT that far. This took me 20 minutes. But with the heat and humidity being so strong – 90 degrees Fahrenheit and 62 percent humidity – I was soaked by the time I got to the monorail and my eyes were stinging from absorbing the sweat from my forehead. I exercise every day, and I am at the lower end of body mass for my age and height. In other words, I’m in good condition.
But these conditions are absolutely extreme for a country to have a Formula One race, and today’s weather was not the extreme of what we often have here. At one point in the press room of the paddock, I looked out into the pitlane as I tried to let the sweat dry from my latest foray into the paddock, and I saw beneath me Nico Rosberg, the driver for the Mercedes team, out for an afternoon jog around the track.
“Yeah, well, he can take a shower,” I said to myself, trying to justify behavior that Nico could do and I thought somewhere inside myself that I would not be able to do.
In fact, although we have heard a lot today about tires and engines and energy saving devices on the cars, I think we have been hearing an equal amount of talk about energy saving on the human body in these conditions. All the drivers exercise here. A local paper, The Sun, reported Bruno Senna, the back up driver of the Lotus Renault team, played some tennis yesterday with Vitaly Petrov, the regular driver for the team. Jarno Trulli said he went cycling in the mountains. Rosberg went jogging, and others did other things.
“You need to train very hard for this race because it is very humid and you lose a lot of liquid,” said Felipe Massa in the press conference.
Indeed. But personally, I will be doing as little walking as I possibly can in the next few days. But I will not have to face the more than 100 degree temperatures in the cockpit of the racing car, so I think I can take a little break from the usual outdoors activities for the moment. Good luck to these drivers for the race on Sunday, when, as it turns out, it will probably rain….