The longest hour.

Time is actually a relatively exact science, and nowhere is that more keenly felt than on a race track. Fractions of seconds, discernible only with the help of high-tech gadgetry, draw the line between victory and defeat, triumph and disaster. But what precisely happens in that hour before the lights above the grid go out? The final 60 minutes leading up to a race are something of a paradox – not enough time and yet too much. The seconds can pass at a tortuous plod but equally run through your hands like water. The meticulously measured world of Formula 1 appears to keep a different time to our internal clocks. The minutes are ticking down to this year’s Australian Grand Prix, but there’s no sign of stage fright on the face of Nico Rosberg. “Not after 128 F1 races,” says the Mercedes man with a shrug of the shoulders.

Rosberg analyses the start of last year’s GP, the way the race panned out, the areas of concern. Even professional racing drivers never stop learning. The German driver pushes in his ear plugs, pulls the fireproof balaclava over his head, presses on his helmet and lowers himself into the cockpit. The eight-cylinder engine lurking behind his neck bursts noisily into life. A chilled drinks bottle holds 3 pints of the top-secret “special mixture” he sips on inside the cockpit. That’s the maximum amount of liquid permitted by the regulations (to prevent it being used as movable ballast). Rosberg will need to have emptied the bottle by the halfway point of the race to avoid it getting too hot in the stuffy carbon confines of the cockpit. 36 minutes to go: The weather is holding, the rain staying away, so the mechanics send the car out onto the grid shod with Pirelli’s slick tires.

Three minutes: Off come the covers keeping the tires warm. Without them, the Pirellis would bring next to no grip to the track in the early stages of the race. The tires have reached 80°C (176°F), but the cool of an Australian autumn afternoon is already drifting over them. Two-and-a-half minutes: Nobody is allowed near the cars now. Two minutes: Green light for the formation lap. Rosberg may be driving a single-seater, but with his engineer’s voice in his ear – urging him to get heat into the brakes and keep the engine cool – he is not alone. 60 minutes are up: The five red lights on the gantry above the grid light up at one-second intervals, then disappear in a single jolt.