A children’s hospital cut surgical handover errors by more than 40% after its doctors studied a Ferrari pit crew, new research has found that the cooling shirt Formula One has just made mandatory for hot races actually raises a driver’s physiological strain rather than lowering it, and an analysis of seventy-three years of Formula One crashes has quantified exactly how much safer the sport has become since the Halo device arrived. None of these findings came from a hospital ward built for the purpose. They came from studying, and sometimes correcting, the world of motor racing.

Formula One is an unusually productive place to study human performance under stress, because it combines extreme physical loads, split-second teamwork and meticulous data collection in a way few other environments can replicate outside a laboratory. Three pieces of research and practice from recent years show what happens when life sciences takes that environment seriously, whether by copying it, testing it, or measuring what it actually costs the human body.

The Pit Stop That Rewired a Children’s Hospital

In the early 2000s, staff at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London were struggling with a specific, dangerous problem: patient handovers from the operating theatre to intensive care were error-prone, with one internal study finding that roughly 70% of avoidable mistakes at the hospital happened during precisely this handover. Surgeon Martin Elliott and colleague Allan Goldman, struck by the speed and precision of a Formula One pit stop they watched on television, contacted McLaren and travelled to Ferrari’s headquarters in Maranello to study how pit crews worked. When they showed Ferrari’s technical director footage of their own patient handovers, the verdict was blunt: no defined hierarchy, no order to how equipment was connected and disconnected, several important conversations happening at once, exactly the chaos a well-drilled pit crew is trained to eliminate. Ferrari’s pit stops, by contrast, ran on defined roles, a designated team leader, and repetitive rehearsal. Elliott and Goldman built a four-phase handover protocol around those principles, covering preparation, patient transfer, structured information handover and forward planning for complications. Published in Paediatric Anaesthesia, the results were substantial: handover errors fell from 5.4 to 3.1 per case, and information omissions fell from 2.1 to 1.1, with the protocol simple enough to teach in a 15 to 30 minute training session. The approach has since been adapted well beyond one paediatric ICU, and it remains one of the clearest examples of a medical safety process built by directly copying a pit lane rather than reinventing one from scratch.

The Cooling Shirt That Doesn’t Cool

The second story is a genuinely current piece of exercise physiology, and it complicates rather than confirms what motorsport assumed it already knew. As Formula One has confronted a run of high-heat races, cockpit air temperatures have been recorded as high as the mid-60s Celsius, the FIA has made cooling vests mandatory for the 2026 season at high-heat events, unless a team accepts a five-kilogram weight penalty instead. Research led by Associate Professor David Ferguson at Michigan State University, published in the March 2026 issue of Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, tested exactly how well the standard equipment works. Fourteen elite-level racing drivers completed six separate one-hour cycling trials at 65 to 75% of maximum heart rate in a hot, humid environment while wearing FIA-approved racing suits, each trial testing a different cooling method. The result for the industry-standard Cool Shirt, a water-circulating garment worn under the fire suit, was counterintuitive: after 30 minutes it produced the highest physiological strain index of any condition tested, including no cooling at all, and while it did lower skin temperature, it failed to reduce core body temperature by the end of the trial. The methods that actually worked, cold air blown into the suit or helmet, kept both skin and core temperature lowest of all six conditions. It is exactly the kind of finding that only emerges when a piece of safety equipment already in wide use gets tested properly rather than assumed to work, and it has direct relevance well beyond racing, for anyone managing heat stress in protective clothing, from industrial workers to military personnel.

Seventy-Three Years of Crashes, Measured

The third piece of research turns the sport’s own history into a long-running clinical dataset. Published in JAAOS Global Research & Reviews in May 2025, a team led by researchers at Northwell Health reviewed public records for 865 Formula One drivers across the sport’s full history, from 1950 to 2023, cataloguing 264 injuries and 43 deaths. The trend was a steady decline in total injuries, deaths and fractures over that period, tracking closely against a sequence of specific safety interventions: mandatory helmets from 1952, carbon-fibre helmets from 2001, head-and-neck support devices, known as HANS, from 2003, and the Halo cockpit protection device from 2018. Head and neck injuries had been the leading cause of death in the sport before 2001, and the study found drivers who suffered head or neck injuries were less likely to return to racing at all afterwards, underlining how much of the sport’s safety history is really a history of protecting the skull and cervical spine specifically. Separate FIA simulations of 40 historical accidents, run to assess the Halo’s introduction, estimated it improved survival odds by 17% in scenarios where it was tested. The Halo is now mandatory not just in Formula One but in Formula 2, Formula 3, Formula 4 and Formula E, and it directly influenced IndyCar’s development of its own Aeroscreen, a rare case of one motorsport series’ injury-prevention engineering propagating almost unchanged into a rival series and into the broader biomechanics of head and neck trauma research.

A Sport That Measures Everything

What connects a children’s hospital ward, a cycling ergometer in a Michigan lab, and seventy-three years of crash records is Formula One’s obsession with measurement, of time, of temperature, of exactly what happens to a human body under load. That obsession has produced a sport safe enough that a device improving survival by 17% in a crash is treated as an incremental gain rather than a breakthrough, and disciplined enough that a hospital could copy its pit lane and cut surgical errors by nearly half. It has also, this year, produced a study willing to embarrass a piece of equipment the sport had already made mandatory. That last part matters as much as the successes: a field this closely measured cannot hide from its own data, and life sciences is one of the beneficiaries of that discipline every time it borrows from the paddock.

Sources include Paediatric Anaesthesia, JAAOS Global Research & Reviews, Michigan State University, Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, and the FIA.