Once upon a time, I had to drive across Iceland after logging zero sleep on the red-eye flight over. What’s more, the highway had just gotten a nice dusting of snow, and each time a lorry passed me, it threw some of it right into my windshield. I survived, obviously, but good lord — driving tired in a foreign land is not a good idea.
Of course, no one knows that fact better than the 22 drivers in F1, who compete in a couple dozen competitions from Melbourne to Monaco in a span of nine months. They race cars at speeds of 220 mph, in a crucible where split-second decisions could decide a Grand Prix (or even end a career).
Suffice to say, sleep is of critical performance to F1 drivers — and probably of even more importance for them than other elite athletes.
In a display of its commitment to consistent, high-quality sleep for its team, Aston Martin recently announced a partnership with Eight Sleep, the sleep system that thermoregulates your bed, auto-adjusts throughout the night and collects biometric data.
Jefferson Slack, a managing director at Aston Martin Aramco, said of the collaboration: “In F1, performance is the result of marginal gains accumulated over an entire season. Sleep is a critical performance input…Eight Sleep’s approach will give our drivers and team a real edge, and we’re excited to partner as we continue to raise the bar for performance.”
Will It Make a Difference?
How much will this tangibly impact Aston Martin’s performance in the 2026 season? Hard to say. Credit where credit is due, Eight Sleep is a powerful product — research into the company’s member base has demonstrated a “34% improvement in deep sleep, and reports of 41% better overall sleep quality.”
At the same time, a racing team like Aston Martin already employs a small army of specialists who cater to the shifting sleep needs of their marquee drivers.
Team physicians and performance directors help drivers adjust their circadian rhythms following long-haul travel; they track sleep scores; they time caffeine and meal times in accordance with qualifying sessions. (Probably the least realistic part of the F1 movie is when Damson Idris’s character hits a nightclub in Las Vegas.)
Still, the partnership is another fantastic step for Eight Sleep, which has made a series of performance partnerships over the last six months (inking Arturo Coello, the number one Padel player in the world; or UAE Team Emirates, the world’s best cycling team). Eight Sleep’s black-and-white decal will pop beautifully against Aston Martin’s iconic Racing Green.
Sleep Tech Is Here to Stay
It’s pretty amazing how far sleep tracking has come in such a short amount of time. Wrapping a heavy, jet-black mattress with tubes coming out of it around a mattress you already own was not in vogue 15 years ago.
But after years of WHOOP, Oura and Apple Health, consumers are used to seeing the words “sleep” and “performance” slapped together, and more curious than ever about the sleep routines of their favorite athletes. That way they can adopt them for their own hectic workweeks (or amateur athletic dreams).
Whether Eight Sleep puts Aston Martin on the podium or not, partnerships like this one are putting sleep front and center. I’d expect the conversation around sleep tech to only accelerate.
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