Every picture tells a story. The shot of newly crowned world champion James Hunt sitting on his car next to a pretty girl, beer in one hand, fag in the other, captured the essence of Formula One man in the Seventies. Drivers did not openly discuss the possibility of losing their lives, but they felt it. Hunt’s view, that life was to be enjoyed now while he was able, was shared by many. When asked in the Istanbul paddock in 2006 how he had prepared for grand prix races, the 1982 world champion Keke Rosberg replied: “Lots of smoking, lots of drinking and lots of sex.”

Yet, just as all new epochs have their roots in the old, so this era in motor racing history was characterised by the early stirrings of political and economic change. The slow corporatisation of F1 brought about by the advent of television and sponsorship would have far-reaching consequences for the way the sport was run and the way the drivers went about their business. But the contrast between the Hunts of this parish and the experience of the modern F1 driver, with his portable gym and electrolyte drinks, could not be greater.

Drivers who embraced rudimentary fitness regimes as the Eighties’ fascination with body culture started to take hold tended to be self-starters. All this changed towards the end of the decade under the influence of an Austrian clinic 60 miles north of Vienna run by a professor called Willy Dungl, who built his reputation working with Austrian sporting giants such as the skier Franz Klammer and the tennis player Thomas Muster.

Niki Lauda was the clinic’s first F1 customer after his accident in 1976, and he also used it to help his preparations for a return to the sport in 1982 following his three-year hiatus and “retirement” from Brabham. It was during Lauda’s four-year association with McLaren that team principal Ron Dennis became convinced of the value of the clinic’s contribution to the improved performance of his drivers. When Ayrton Senna joined McLaren in 1988, Dennis appointed the clinic’s Josef Leberer to work exclusively with the Brazilian and his teammate Alain Prost.

The Brazilian’s belief in himself and his superiority as a driver was absolute. In 1988, however, his physique was not yet as impressive as his psyche. It was Leberer’s job to build Senna into F1’s first fit-for-pur-pose driver. “We recognised immediately that he could improve,” Leberer said. “With Prost it was different. He was quite fit already. When he came to the clinic in 1987 we would go mountain biking together. I was fit, too, in those days. Prost understood that to drive for 1½ hours you needed to be fit for 1½ hours. Senna was so strong mentally, but you could see when he got out of the car he was struggling. He drove through the fatigue, but it was necessary to do a lot of work with him.

“As a young man Senna was very slim. He was not a sportsman in the same way as Prost, who did lots of things. Genetically, Senna was not a physically strong man. We had to build his strength and stamina, to lower the heart rate a little so he could handle the intensity better. He was a dedicated learner, which was perfect for somebody like me. We worked through a programme, lots of swimming, running and biking. When he was in Sao Paulo I gave him a regime to follow there.”

Juan Pablo Montoya once memorably said that the uninitiated would “get out of the car feeling like their heads had been stuck up their backsides”. This observer can vouch for that. A day spent in the company of Champ Car driver Justin Wilson at Jonathan Palmer’s Bedford Autodrome left me in need of the sick bag. The experience of riding as a passenger in a specially adapted two-seater that approached corners at 140mph was unlike any other. Think of the most frightening theme park ride you can imagine, multiply it by 10, and you get some idea of the mind-bending terror generated over a dozen laps sitting beside Wilson. I would opt for 10 minutes in the spin cycle of a washing machine any day rather than endure that again. I was in the car for 15 minutes maximum. F1 drivers spend seven times longer behind the wheel in a race, and are subject to five times the loadings.

Because the loadings in the car are not easily simulated by conventional gym equipment, drivers use specially designed “rigs” to work the shoulder, neck, chest and core muscles that take the brunt of the cornering forces. The neck is particularly important as it supports the weight of the driver’s helmet as well as his head. The specific anatomical demands coupled with extreme heat generated in an F1 cockpit at circuits such as Bahrain and Malaysia, where temperatures routinely top 50C in the cockpit, place a massive physiological strain on the driver. He can sweat off anything up to 6.5lb during a race. As a consequence, the potential for error through lapses in concentration is greater than ever.

A common trait in all the champions with whom Leberer has worked, including Prost, Senna, Michael Schumacher and Mika Hakkinen, has been an immense mental toughness. They all had willpower to burn, which according to Leberer is the difference between winning and losing. Leberer encountered Schumacher in early 1991, six months before his entry into F1 with Jordan at Spa. Schumacher attended Dungl’s clinic as part of Mercedes’s young driver programme. “You could see straight away that he was strong, organised and determined,” says Leberer. “He wanted to know everything, all the details, the facts. In that regard he was like Senna, though the two were very different people.” Of all the drivers Leberer has worked with, Senna stands out. “He had this unshakable belief, this kind of aura about him,” he says. “Sometimes that could be dangerous. He had no limits. For him, anything was possible. I remember once entering a restaurant with him. Mel Gibson was in there and lots of other famous people. We walked in and people stopped talking to look at Senna. Most would not have known he was a racing driver. He had this intensity about his eyes. People just had to watch him. I have never known anything like it, before or since. Prost, Schumacher, Hakkinen were superb physically and mentally, but Senna had another dimension. Amazing.”

Leberer tells how Senna overcame a crash in Mexico in 1992, and a thumb injury in Monaco in 1993. Senna had inverted his McLaren on the exit to the daunting banked Peraltada corner during practice for the 1992 Mexican Grand Prix, and experienced such pain that he was convinced he had broken both legs. Doctors advised him not to race. He was inclined to agree. But he had faith in Leberer. “The legs weren’t broken, so I said, ‘Let’s try it’, and he agreed. But even I thought there was no way. It was so painful he could hardly walk. He’d really been shaken up. We worked nearly all night. At one o’clock he slept a bit, and at five I came back. We worked so many hours, but he began to think, ‘This guy is working so long, he must believe in it. Maybe there is a chance’. I had the feeling he opened himself up.

“He slept for four or five hours and then I came back and started work on the legs, a different kind of therapy. And he said, ‘What’s going on? I have the feeling I slept 24 hours. It’s unbelievable.

It’s like a miracle’.” That afternoon Senna qualified sixth, and ran as high as third in the race he had been advised to miss, until his transmission failed. At Monaco in 1993 he crashed head-on into a barrier at the Ste Devote corner during Thursday practice, tearing the ligaments in his right thumb. Again, Leberer went to work. “He couldn’t move that thumb,” he recalls. “Everything was blue, with internal bleeding. You know how painful that can be. And in a car with all that vibration, it was impossible. We worked all night again, with muscle herbs on the thumb, a special bandage. Thank God it was Monaco with practice on the Thursday, so we had a day off on Friday. I said to him, ‘We can do it, I tell you’. And he said, ‘Okay, I leave it to you’.

“It was tricky, because he had to be able to move the thumb, so we couldn’t use an injection or a cast, but we tried a lot of things. At the end I made him a special tape bandage, quite a complicated thing, to allow movement but also to give support to the damaged ligaments. He said, ‘It’s fantastic. It works, it works!’ And then he went out and won the race.”

It was Senna’s record-setting sixth, and final, Monte Carlo victory. Leberer had one more special memory of that weekend.

“On the victory rostrum he held up his hand to me and showed it to me like this,” he said, making the thumbs-up gesture. “This was fantastic. Nobody else really knew what he meant . . . ”

Schumacher assumed Senna’s mantle, reshaping the F1 landscape in terms of preparation and results. He raised the bar by, among other things, taking a mobile gym to tests and introducing the personal trainer to the paddock environment. No shared physio for him. Now, no self-respecting driver travels without one. What began with Lauda, Prost and Senna as a novelty was made routine by Schumacher and those who followed.

The nearest Hunt got to an exercise programme was as an investor with a girlfriend in a gym in London. Would Hunt have prospered in the modern age? Maybe not. Would he have wanted to? Certainly not, though to be fair he was a regular, and successful, competitor in impromptu running and cycling races at grands prix, and enjoyed squash. Every major sport has undergone a similar transformation, playing as they do to television audiences for the purposes of advertisers as much as consumers. Participants have never been in better shape. Whether the same can be said of the sporting arenas in which they compete has still to be determined.