Hi Delta, is it true that Nico developed an ed in 2016?
i think the first thing to say about this is that f1 is an environment that is extremely conducive to disordered eating in general. valtteri bottas is probably the driver to have talked the most openly about this in recent history, and he's said that his eating disorder began in 2012, long before there was ever a championship or even a race victory up for grabs. the very nature of racing is that lighter cars go faster. teams put a lot of work into making their cars as light as possible because that will make them go faster. and once you've done all you can to the car, the weight of the driver has an impact. and all of the drivers know this. even if there was never an explicit demand for drivers to lose weight or be thinner, there was an implicit benefit to it, and as many athletes in many sports do, lots of drivers engaged in extreme dieting and weight loss to try and make themselves lighter and therefore faster.
back in the early 2000s when there were no weight minimums it was common for the tallest drivers (e.g mark webber, jenson button) to be extremely thin to compensate for the additional weight that came with their height. smaller drivers equaled lighter drivers, and so the grid was, on average, much shorter than they are now. these days, cars and drivers are weighed together before the race and if they are under the minimum, ballast is added to bring the car up to minimum weight. but there is still an advantage to being under that weight minimum, because teams can choose where to place the additional weight, which can help them balance out the car. it is still better for them that the car and driver combined is underweight, and just as before, when everything has been done to make the car as light as possible, attention turns to the driver. even now, even in top teams, you will hear drivers saying that they're fasting before the race to make sure that they're under the weight minimum, and although we don't call all of that talk evidence of an eating disorder, it probably does constitute some form of restrictive/disordered eating.
one thing about nico, i think, is that people tend to treat his experiences and decisions as unique and uniquely self destructive within f1, when actually, a lot of what he did was extremely common amongst f1 drivers and athletes in general, it's just not talked about very openly. i don't know for sure either way whether he had an eating disorder during his time in f1, over the years he has made a couple of comments about his weight that people have suggested speak to disordered eating, and he's been photographed eating plates of just vegetables, which has prompted similar comments, but he's never said that he had an eating disorder (unlike valtteri bottas who has publicly acknowledged his) but if he did, i think it's unlikely it would have only started in 2016, or that he even recognises it for what it is, simply because disordered eating is so so common in f1.
i think that the idea he developed an ED in 2016 has come from the restrictive/weight loss behaviours that he has been open about engaging in. during the summer break in 2016 he stopped cycling in order to lose muscle weight from his legs, believing that it would make a difference/make him faster. i think this is still not a healthy approach, and definitely qualifies as a "restrictive" behaviour, but it was ultimately a training decision rather than a nutritional decision.
i also feel the need to point out that it made no difference to his season. in places where he outqualified lewis it was by a time difference greater than the supposed speed advantage given by the loss of weight, and the only qualifying lap that was within that margin was suzuka, where he had outqualified lewis the previous two years anyway and the real difference was his race start. he was winning that season regardless of his weight/weight loss.
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