Triple-header part two: São Paulo

We’re now well into this flyaway triple and that means a lot of travelling. So far, we’ve been from the UK to Mexico City, down to Sao Paulo, and next week we’ll be in Qatar. That will be almost 48 hours in the air! Travelling is probably the least favourite part of the job for me.

A lot of consideration goes into sleeping patterns on long haul flights because they’re likely to be the ones where everyone suffers from jet lag. The science says the ideal way to limit jet lag is to shift your sleep routine about an hour per day when you move to a new time zone – but sometimes that’s just not possible.

I normally don’t have problems with sleep so I’m lucky in that regard. But if I must stay awake, it’s important to keep myself busy. I’ll maybe watch movies, or sometimes I’ll save some work for the plane. That might involve reading the notes from the engineers or sometimes filing reports after a race.

Making sure you eat healthily is also crucial when travelling. Sometimes we ask the team chef to prepare us something to go if we can bring our own food onto the plane.

The flight from Mexico City to Sao Paulo earlier this week was quite cool. We flew overnight Tuesday into Wednesday and it was about a 9 to 10-hour journey. Unusually, we took a charter flight, which felt like the type of plane a professional sports team from the US would travel on.

The plane maybe seated just 80 or 90 people, and there was a bar area at the front, along with some big tables with card games and poker seats. Me, George, our trainers and our mechanics were all playing in what must have looked like a mini casino.

Unfortunately, we had to be responsible and cut things short to get some sleep. After all, we were going forward three time zones!

The next leg after this weekend is going to be around 15 hours from Sao Paulo to Doha. I think I’ll have to raid Netflix and download some movies for that one.

For now though it’s full focus on the Brazilian Grand Prix. As always, keep an eye on my socials for updates during the weekend. Bye for now.