Full Throttle

Make of this what you will.

Rome - A former Ferrari team doctor, Benigno Bartoletti, has said that close to one third of Grand Prix drivers takes cocaine.

“At races, there is a lot of cocaine and in Formula One, it could be as many as one third of all drivers who take cocaine,” the 68-year-old doctor told the Italian motorsport magazine “Quattroruote”.

He said that cocaine gave the drivers the belief that they are invincible.

He added that the effect of cocaine lasted around 90 minutes and during this time the driver had a faster reaction time. “However, if a race takes longer, then it could become dangerous for drivers as the drug loses its effect.”

Doping tests amongst Formula One drivers in the past season however did not return a single positive test.

This story is so incredulous, at first I checked to see if it had been posted as an April Fool’s joke. Operating under that premise I went Googling in search of Dr. Bartoletti to verify his existence. Or her exsistence, as this resume shows, (translated from Italian via Babel Fish). A certain Dr. Bartoletti, identified as female, from “1972 to 1992 have been responsible sanitary of the square run Ferrari and from 1987 to 1989 Official Doctor CSAI, for the Italian pilots participants to the Championship of Formula 1. This would seem to indicate they are one and the same “doctor,” although there is an age discrepancy, she was born in Genoa Italy in 1935. But how many females don’t lie about their age? It also calls into question the South Afican source of this story (free reg. req’d). It takes very little journalist integrity to publish these allegations of cocaine use based on someone’s word that has had no connection to Formula One since 1992.

For a moment let us leave aside whether my “Google search” turned up the correct doctor in question and look at the basic science involved. Based on this study by the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine cocaine introduced into a baboons system “produced an average reaction-time decrease of 10 to 12%.” Not the type of thing you would want braking at the end of a long straight at 200 plus mph. What, you say baboons don’t drive F1 machines? ( except for this one of course) Well fine, have a peek at what the NHTSA has to say about cocaine use and the effects on humans.

Effects:
Early phase

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 30th, 2004 at 9:16 am and is filed under Commentary, Formula One. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.