For young drivers aiming to make that final leap from the top feeder categories to Formula 1, there’s a price to be paid – in sweat…
WORDS OLEG KARPOV PICTURES ALPINE
SIX racing drivers are playing beach volleyball – and it’s painful to watch. Gabriele Minì, who will spend the 2024 season racing for Prema in F3, wins six points in a row for his team through only his serve. And it’s not that his serve is that good – it’s because the other team is that bad at intercepting the ball before it hits the sand.
This is one of the activities in the Alpine junior team training camp in Tenerife, ahead of the racing season. Minì is teamed up with fellow F3 driver Nikola Tsolov and F2 driver Kush Maini, while on the other side of the net are Victor Martins, Sophia Flörsch and Olli Caldwell. But even if this volleyball match looks like madness, there’s methodology in it.
The match is the ‘bit of fun’ part of the programme set out by David Thompson, Alpine’s Head of Human Performance. A day mostly made up of physical training within the large Tenerife Top Training facility – where other professional athletes are diligently preparing for the Paris Olympics – is broken up by some ‘games’. This is partly to give the drivers something of a breather – but only partly.
“They might not think we’re watching,” Thompson confides as he watches the volleyball match unfold in the company of GP Racing, “but we’ve put them in different environments, situations where we can see how they react – teamwork, communication – and we can relate some of that to performance on track. So, for instance, if we got one guy who’s quiet in the corner, and doesn’t say a word to anyone, is he going to be a good communicator with his engineer, with his mechanics?”
As the game progresses, it starts to look more like a competition. Some rallies reach as many as 10 attacks back and forth until the ball finally ends up on the sand. The competitive spirit is flaring – there’s now more shouting and arguing, some of it heated enough to prompt the marketing team, also looking over the game, to Google the rules of volleyball to resolve the disputes.
Dave’s report later that evening – usually completed close to midnight – will probably not include the final score of the game itself. That’s irrelevant. Instead, it’ll be filled with his notes about the drivers’ teamwork, how they responded to their
