An F1 Driver Has Been Hospitalized After Starving Himself to Get to the Weight Limit

There's a minimum weight limit for car plus driver, and you want to be at that limit.

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In F1 there's a minimum weight limit for the driver plus car. You want to be at that limit, because every pound makes your car a little slower. The problem is that sometimes it's way easier for the driver to lose weight than for the engineering team to take that weight off of the car.

Scuderia Torro Rosso's Jean-Eric Vergne, who is very tall for an F1 driver at six feet, was losing "four tenths" per lap because he was over the weight minimum when compared to his teammate, so he stopped eating until he was light enough, and now he's in the hospital. Lewis Hamilton has said before that drivers often show up to qualifying dangerously dehydrated, but this is a step further.

Given that the rules are encouraging people to starve and dehydrate themselves, we think it's time for the rules to change. We hope Vergne recovers fully, and isn't brought to this again.

 

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[via Jalopnik

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