From Baku to Abu Dhabi, the travelling crew will cross more time zones in under three months than most people do in a decade. Fans watching from Europe will feel a version of it too. HMN24 founder Phil Learney on what the season finale does to the body clock, how the team manages it, and what you can borrow.

There is a moment every European fan of this team knows. It is the small hours of a Sunday morning, the lights are on in Las Vegas, and you have a decision to make about whether you are going to bed at all. A few weeks earlier it was a Sunday morning in Sepang, then a Sunday lunchtime under the floodlights in Singapore. A few weeks later it will be a late Sunday night in Austin, then Mexico City, then São Paulo. By the time the crew reach Qatar and Abu Dhabi, most of the audience has been living on a shifted schedule for the best part of two months.

The crew are living the same problem in a far more extreme form. What follows is not a story about a supplement. It is a story about a clock.

The clock that does not care about the calendar

Deep in the brain, in a region called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, sits a master clock. It runs on a cycle of roughly 24 hours, and it sets the timing for almost everything the body does: when core temperature rises and falls, when hormones such as cortisol and melatonin are released, when you feel sharp and when you feel slow, and when the processes that consolidate memory and repair tissue are most active.

That clock does not read the race calendar. It reads light. Morning light is the single most powerful signal that tells it a new day has started, and evening light tells it the day has not finished yet. Behind light sit a set of secondary cues: when you eat, when you move, when you drink caffeine, and when you finally lie down. When all of those cues agree with each other, the body runs in alignment, and everything feels easier. When they disagree, the body is being asked to run on two timetables at once.

That disagreement has a name. When it comes from crossing time zones, it is travel-induced jet lag. When it comes from your own schedule, a late race, a shift pattern, a weekend that runs three hours behind the working week, it is called social jet lag. The mechanism is the same in both cases. The clock is being asked to follow a schedule it has not yet caught up with.

What the finale asks of the crew

Look at the run the team faces after the European season closes. Baku sits three hours ahead of the UK. Sepang and Singapore are both seven hours ahead. Austin is five hours behind, Mexico City six, São Paulo three, Las Vegas eight. Then the calendar swings back east to Qatar and Abu Dhabi, three and four hours ahead. That is not one shift; it is a sequence of nine shifts in opposite directions, with a race weekend at the end of each one.

The practical effect is that late afternoon in the Americas is bedtime for a body that still thinks it is in Enstone, and the Sunday race in Las Vegas starts at what the body reads as the small hours of Monday. Pit-stop practice, garage build, debriefs and the race itself all land in windows the crew's biology would rather spend asleep. Add cabin air, disrupted meals and hotel beds and you have an environment that quietly erodes reaction time, mood and decision-making unless it is actively managed.

Actively managed is the point. The team's human performance staff do not treat the finale as something to be endured. They treat it as a set of timing problems to be solved, and the solutions are less exotic than people expect.

How the crew manage it

The first decision is the anchor. Before the crew fly, they know which sleep window they are protecting at the destination and they start moving towards it a few days early, shifting meals and bedtime by an hour or so at a time rather than trying to jump the whole gap on landing.

The second is light. On arrival, the crew get outside in daylight at the times that push the clock in the right direction: morning light after flying east, later light after flying west. Sunglasses and drawn curtains do as much work as anything in a bottle when the clock needs to be held back.

The third is hydration and timing of everything else. Long-haul cabins run at very low humidity and fluid loss over a twelve-hour flight is real. Caffeine is used early in the destination day and cut off in the afternoon, because it stays active in the body for hours and taken late it delays the clock further. The evening is treated as an evening: lower light, a proper wind-down, and a bedtime that matches the destination rather than the departure.

The HMN24 system is the nutritional layer that sits around those habits, and it is organised the same way the day is. HYDRATE goes in before boarding, every few hours in flight and on landing, to replace the sodium, potassium and magnesium lost during travel. RISE is taken on the arrival morning at destination wake time, so that the caffeine, which contributes to alertness and concentration, and the B vitamins, which contribute to normal energy-yielding metabolism and the reduction of tiredness and fatigue, arrive when the new day is meant to start. FLOW covers the daytime hours without caffeine, so nothing taken in the afternoon works against the evening. PRE-SLEEP is taken at destination bedtime as the last cue of the day, with magnesium contributing to normal psychological and nervous system function as the body makes its evening shift.

None of this is a shortcut. It is a set of signals, delivered at the right times, that all say the same thing to the clock: this is when the day starts, this is when it ends, and this is where you are now.

The fan version

You are not flying to Austin. But if you are getting up at four in the morning for the lights in Las Vegas, or staying up past midnight for São Paulo, you are asking your clock to do a smaller version of what the crew's clocks are doing. The same principles scale down.

Decide your anchor before the weekend. If the race is at 5am, the question is whether you are going to bed early and getting up for it, or staying up and sleeping after. Pick one. The worst outcome is trying to do both and getting a fragmented three hours either side.

Use light on purpose. If you have been up through the night, get outside in daylight as soon as it is reasonable on the Sunday and keep to a normal Sunday evening. If you have to sleep after the race, make the room properly dark and keep screens out of it.

Keep caffeine on the destination clock, not the race clock. A coffee at 4am to get through the race is a caffeine dose at 4am, and it will still be in your system when you try to sleep afterwards. If you are staying up, keep it as early in the evening as possible and stop well before you plan to sleep.

Do not try to repay the debt with a long lie-in. An hour or so extra is fine; a five-hour lie-in on Sunday is what turns a late race into a rough Tuesday. A short nap early in the afternoon does more good than a long one later.

Hydrate through the night, not just at the end of it, and eat a normal breakfast at a normal time even if you have been awake since three. Meal timing is one of the cues the body's clocks use, and a breakfast at the right time reinforces the signal that the day has started even when the rest of you is not convinced.

Where the crew go next

By the time the lights go out in Abu Dhabi, the travelling team will have cycled through most of the world's time zones and back, and they will have done it while building, running and rebuilding two race cars. The next time you are watching a late-night finish, spare a thought for the mechanics who crossed eight time zones to be there, and for the clock in your own head that is quietly doing the same maths.

If you want the system the crew travel with, it is packed for travel and available from HMN24.

References

Burke, T.M. et al. (2015) Effects of caffeine on the human circadian clock in vivo and in vitro. Science Translational Medicine, 7(305), 305ra146.

Eastman, C.I. and Burgess, H.J. (2009) How to travel the world without jet lag. Sleep Medicine Clinics, 4(2), pp. 241-255.

Roenneberg, T., Allebrandt, K.V., Merrow, M. and Vetter, C. (2012) Social jetlag and obesity. Current Biology, 22(10), pp. 939-943.

Wehrens, S.M.T. et al. (2017) Meal timing regulates the human circadian system. Current Biology, 27(12), pp. 1768-1775.

Wittmann, M., Dinich, J., Merrow, M. and Roenneberg, T. (2006) Social jetlag: misalignment of biological and social time. Chronobiology International, 23(1-2), pp. 497-50