F1’s Logan Sargeant and the trainer saving him from a DNF

It was the low point of Logan Sargeant’s rookie season in Formula 1: a DNF at the Qatar Grand Prix in October after the American driver nearly passed out from heat exhaustion. In his defense, the race was run under brutal conditions: 90-degree-Fahrenheit (32-degree Celsius) temps and high humidity led to unbearable cockpit heat. Sargeant wasn’t the only one who suffered—Alpine’s Esteban Ocon later claimed he had vomited in his helmet. The Williams newcomer had no way of knowing how his body would react to those extremes, but the DNF stung regardless.

“Before you drive in Formula 1, you don’t really know the areas you need to focus on,” says Sargeant. “After you go through that first season, you can really identify what to target. And on the back end of last year, I was far too light, a bit unhealthy—I think that unfortunately comes with the travel, fatigue, and length of the season.”

Heading into his sophomore campaign, Williams and Sargeant knew they had to prioritize fitness. Enter Elias Huhtinen, an affable, hulking Finnish fitness trainer with more than a decade of experience building the bodies (and minds) of Finnish soccer stars, future NHL players, and MMA fighters. Though Sargeant was his first F1 client—and a surprise one at that. Huhtinen applied for an anonymous motorsports job listing last year, only to discover he’d be working with the Williams driver. Working in Formula 1 had been a dream of Huhtinen’s. “How I ended up here, there’s a lot of luck involved, a lot of opportunities that have somehow folded the right way,” he says. 

“I’ve coached more than 13 sports—a combination of strength and conditioning and mental coaching,” Huhtinen says from his home in Jyväskylä, Finland, where he’s preparing to jet off to Miami to reconnect with Sargeant ahead of this weekend’s race. “Funny enough, every time I go into a new sport, I face this thinking [from the athlete]: ‘Well, if you haven’t done our sport, how do you know what we need?’ But for every athlete, in the center of everything is being a human.”

Huhtinen takes a holistic approach, focusing as much on routine, health, and wellness as on the nuances of each workout. In particular, he trains athletes not just for always-on performance, but for handling the extremes of their jobs.

Logan Sargeant…