Brain Science & Rocket Surgery

We had a 'good2great' conference in Christchurch this week. One of the main speakers was a kiwi who works with McLaren F1 drivers, Dr Kerry Spackman. He's a neuroscientist and was fascinating.

If you drive your car down the road at, say, 100kph then floor the brake pedal in the biggest emergency stop you've ever done you'll pull around 0.7-0.8g. If you're crusing along in an F1 car at, say, 300kph then simply take your foot off the accelerator you'll pull around 1.5g in deceleration. At this stage you haven't even touched the brake. If you floor the brake you can hit 7-8g!!! Think about Top Gun - you'd blackout around 4g or 5g. These guys hit their brakes big time around 20 times per lap and do 100 laps; they're special.

'Nother thing - remember when F1 cars had 'skirts' to trap the airflow for a Bernoulli effect? Well they didn't have suspension then and the drivers' eyeballs would bleed and they'd pee blood at the end of the race because of the vibration.

'Nother thing; if you ran the cars upside down on the ceiling they'd stay there because of the 'down'forces - pretty common knowledge, but he said they'd do this at, maybe, 140 kph and if they hit a large bump they still stay up there!

'Nother thing - McLaren's budget is US$750,000,000 per year 'but if we need to spend more we can do'. Each practice lap costs around US$10,000.

They produce 100 newly designed or revised parts every week!

They have 5 PhD's working on the grease for the wheel bearings!

The speed limit in the McLaren car park is 10 kph and Sir Ron Denis sometimes hires police to radar check the employees! Weird.

Employees are allowed one photo on their desk - kids, wife, girlfriend, favourite dog etc, but only one. It is not allowed to be there after 8pm at night; it has to go into the desk drawer. Weirder.

Kerry was excellent - he's working on a 'Winner's Bible' due to be published in April 2008. Sounds well worth checking out. When I get the Conference notes on the Winner's Bible I'll send then through because the concept sounds useful for swimmers.

Good article here.