How Early Can You Spot a Formula 1 Driver?

Toto Wolff says a kid's karting shows pretty early whether that kid can become a professional racing driver. Even the tiny ones stand out against their peers. An eight-year-old who beats the ten-year-olds in the group is an early sign. A kid going 100 kilometers an hour in the rain, sideways across a corner on a first lap, already has the ingredients for being good.

Racing has no single number that separates one driver from another. John Collison points to cycling, where Tadej Pogacar is the best in the world on threshold power, the power a rider produces for body weight. Threshold watts per kilogram and VO2 max are measurable in cycling. Pogacar's metrics at 12 are unknown, and whether the advantage was best in class then or came later stays unresolved. Personality, resilience under pressure, and playing the team game cannot be measured. In the same car the stopwatch never lies, but a driver still needs the technical ability to set the car up, to work with the engineers, and the social competence to have sponsors and treat them well. Extremely talented kids have gone nowhere because they were bad people or not intelligent enough.

What overwhelms the rest is speed. Speed comes from cognitive abilities and the billions of senses that let a driver feel what the car does underneath. Extraordinary drivers feel much more, and feel more connected to the car and the road than anybody else.