Making testing kms mandatory for rookies!

the best rookie seasons i can recall in the last few years were Hamilton & Villeneuve, both of them had thousands of kms of testing and despite their successes did make a few mistakes as well.

so how are untested rookies to go about racing with the big boys? with no pre-season testing and 30-40 laps a race weekend, their on the nob learning is bound to be more expensive than testing (with crashes and cost of replacements etc)

F1 really needs to sort this out, it puts drivers in danger and its being penny wise pound foolish in my opinion.

Kimi Raikkonen did alright without much experience. There's no need to coddle rookies.

the best rookie seasons i can recall in the last few years were Hamilton & Villeneuve, both of them had thousands of kms of testing and despite their successes did make a few mistakes as well.

so how are untested rookies to go about racing with the big boys? with no pre-season testing and 30-40 laps a race weekend, their on the nob learning is bound to be more expensive than testing (with crashes and cost of replacements etc)

F1 really needs to sort this out, it puts drivers in danger and its being penny wise pound foolish in my opinion.

How do you simulate wheel to wheel racing in tests?

Kimi Raikkonen did alright without much experience. There's no need to coddle rookies.

He had only raced 23 car races before. An amazing feat.

How do you simulate wheel to wheel racing in tests?

Do some racing laps against your teammate. Contrive some overtaking opportunities while you're doing it. Simple really.

The dozen or so years of racing they do before they get anywhere near F1 should be enough to teach them how to race safely.

Some people forget that even though you might not have heard about some of the F1 rookies most of them have won or at least came close to winning championships in lower racing series before they got anywhere near an F1 car.

They aren't coming from nowhere, and racing in F1 isn't that different from any other open wheeled series.

The dozen or so years of racing they do before they get anywhere near F1 should be enough to teach them how to race safely.

Some people forget that even though you might not have heard about some of the F1 rookies most of them have won or at least came close to winning championships in lower racing series before they got anywhere near an F1 car.

They aren't coming from nowhere, and racing in F1 isn't that different from any other open wheeled series.

The same thing Petrov was saying before his first season. That driving F1 car is surprisingly easy. Then he was crashing left and right when the season begun.

May I ask you how do you know that "racing in F1 isn't that different from any other open wheeled series"?

Kimi Raikkonen did alright without much experience. There's no need to coddle rookies.

Please, just like any other driver before the test bans, he most certainly did thousands and thousands of kilometers in winter testing, unlike the rookies today.

Kimi Raikkonen did alright without much experience. There's no need to coddle rookies.

Yeps, one out of a gazillion drivers. That's a valid percentage.

Serious, there should be a minimum testing mileage to grant super licenses to rookies, simple as that. They can't simply race in F-Obscurity and then buy a seat. And whoever has gone over 12 months without racing should get some minimum mileage as well.

Edited by Atreiu, 07 November 2012 - 11:16.

Do some racing laps against your teammate. Contrive some overtaking opportunities while you're doing it. Simple really.

Except nobody does that in testing.

Yeps, one out of a gazillion drivers. That's a valid percentage.

Serious, there should be a minimum testing mileage to grant super licenses to rookies, simple as that. They can't simply race in F-Obscurity and then buy a seat. And whoever has gone over 12 months without racing should met some minimum mileage as well.

there is, 300km of testing (unless the guy is a reigning champion in one of the feeder series)

Please, just like any other driver before the test bans, he most certainly did thousands and thousands of kilometers in winter testing, unlike the rookies today.

He did not. He was only rewarded a Superlicence because of his performances early in the year.

He did not. He was only rewarded a Superlicence because of his performances early in the year.

from memory Kimi did at least 3 tests for Sauber in 2000 before being signed. Plus whatever preseason testing they did in 2001

I've always thought that at a time when safety is taken so seriously in F1 it is ludicrous to ban testing. It simply cannot be safe to allow drivers to come into F1 with very limited prior testing. I appreciate that when someone gets into F1 they are already at the top of their game but it is IMHO unsafe to allow such limited testing and therefore preparation. We are also in an era where new parts and ideas are being tested during race weekends in the full glare of the public and when running time is so limited and when there are more cars on the track at any one time. All of this seems to me to be fundamentally at odds with the FIA's increasing drive to make F1 as safe as possible.

Winter testing is more than sufficient testing from the perspective of safety. The rookies just need to figure out brake points and car behavior under varying fuel loads, and they do enough laps in the winter to figure that out. There are simulators too.

There may be many reasons to have increased testing, but safety isn't one of them.

Kimi Raikkonen did alright without much experience. There's no need to coddle rookies.

Well the guy is a world champion, he is quite clearly special and an exception to the rule.

there is, 300km of testing (unless the guy is a reigning champion in one of the feeder series)

I didn't know that. 300km still is a ridulous short ammount. One day of riding around and then your apt for the super license, LOL.

...on the nob learning...

That sounds more like prostitutes training.

There simply should be more testing. If you increase the number of mandatory testing kms for a rookie, but don't increase the testing limit for the teams, then what happens is that you're shutting out rookies if a mid-season seat comes up for example. Alternatively if you give out many free KMs to rookies only, then teams may gain an advantage from using rookies (ex. Paffett for McLaren in "young drivers test") and experienced guys may get out of favor unfairly.

I agree with the principle, it's only a matter of how to enforce it.

Except nobody does that in testing.

Which suggests to me how important the teams really think it is.

keep in mind not all teams can afford to test. HRT for example, in the young drivers' test in the summer, just did a day so that their dude could get the 300km needed to secure a superlicense then packed up and went home. Plus last season they didn't even do any pre-season testing. It's relatively easy for the big teams to go testing if it was permitted, but they are not really the ones that will be employing the rookies. And if you force a mid field team to spread its budget further to include more testing then they will suffer relative to the other teams who will be spending that money in car development. So in a twisted way you can end up discouraging teams from employing rookies.

Kimi is an outlier i wouldn't consider his success normal. you cannot simulate racing wheel to wheel but of late the amount of errors being made by rookie drivers to me says they simply need more time in the car before they get to race.

Kimi had TWENTY THREE DAYS of testing before his first grand prix. He'd done more hours/laps in the Sauber than in all other race cars combined before then.

there is, 300km of testing (unless the guy is a reigning champion in one of the feeder series)

i dont know about thousands but he did have a few days of testing before the season began as well as a few days throughout the season. certainly seems to be more than the present gen gets

You don´t get anywhere close to Formula 1 if you have showed a zillion of times you can race properly in series with 5 times as much action on track. Only thing needed is to get used to the car´s potential, braking distances, power, grip, etc.

No need for a racing school, more testing would help them to be earlier on the ultimate pace -and it´s not as if rookies looked slower than other average drivers-, but won´t make them safer.

keep in mind not all teams can afford to test. HRT for example, in the young drivers' test in the summer, just did a day so that their dude could get the 300km needed to secure a superlicense then packed up and went home. Plus last season they didn't even do any pre-season testing. It's relatively easy for the big teams to go testing if it was permitted, but they are not really the ones that will be employing the rookies. And if you force a mid field team to spread its budget further to include more testing then they will suffer relative to the other teams who will be spending that money in car development. So in a twisted way you can end up discouraging teams from employing rookies.

exactly what i said in my initial post... it really needs to be sought out. however when it comes to the smaller teams.. there is talk about how the HRT of Narain had tech issues mid corner which caused the crash.. so there are already safety issues which make it more dangerous but thats besides the point.

my thought here was that you had a Villenueve and a Hamilton both with race experience in other formulae (Villenueve had a lot more than Hamilton) but they put in near 10,000Kms in testing and that cannot have hurt them in any way.

You don´t get anywhere close to Formula 1 if you have showed a zillion of times you can race properly in series with 5 times as much action on track. Only thing needed is to get used to the car´s potential, braking distances, power, grip, etc.

No need for a racing school, more testing would help them to be earlier on the ultimate pace -and it´s not as if rookies looked slower than other average drivers-, but won´t make them safer.

that's not true, there are huge differences between spec series where the other cars around you are predictable in what they do and where the performance comes from and F1. The obvious example was last year's Sauber which was a fast car over a lap but didn't include an EBD so it tended to be slow(er) at corner entry. And the Saubers were perpetually at risk of being rear ended.

Generally rookies benefit from the same thing rookies of yesteryear benefited from, racing mileage in an F1 car in the mid-rear of the grid. The difference is right now car performance is so close (the gap for pole to p2 a few years ago is the same as the gap from p1 to 12 nowadays) and there is a tendency to promote rookies quickly.

You don´t get anywhere close to Formula 1 if you have showed a zillion of times you can race properly in series with 5 times as much action on track. Only thing needed is to get used to the car´s potential, braking distances, power, grip, etc.

No need for a racing school, more testing would help them to be earlier on the ultimate pace -and it´s not as if rookies looked slower than other average drivers-, but won´t make them safer.

is that all it takes?

hmm...

that's not true, there are huge differences between spec series where the other cars around you are predictable in what they do and where the performance comes from and F1. The obvious example was last year's Sauber which was a fast car over a lap but didn't include an EBD so it tended to be slow(er) at corner entry. And the Saubers were perpetually at risk of being rear ended.

In my view, if anything, the racing is far more complex in these small formula series. You won´t ever enter 4 wide into a fast corner in a F1, or race a guy swerving like mad to break a tow, or triangling a braking zone towards the racing line after having covered in close company of others, that take advantge and divebomb the inside. Racing itself is much easier, and you won´t have to do hairy stuff like going alongside other people into Lesmo 2 to say a name. F1 cars won´t ever get a shot into that place, and other series car´s can.

And to be fair is not like if cars were too different between them now, don´t know from where you come with that. Pace difference between midfield and top cars is not bigger than in other series... F1 fans like us tend to think F1 is the hardest series in any way but that´s not true. You talk as if F1 was Le Mans and you had to get past a weird prototype and then and Touring car that brakes 100 metres earlier than you and has 300 hp less and weights much more. Crashes in F1 happen because people makes bad decissions mainly, and crashes because of being surprised becaus of another car performance -or lack of- are weird nowadays. And they get more weird with time, F1 is as close as it has been to spec series, even compared to recent seasons. In 2003 you could be on the 4th car of the grid and be surprised by how slow into slow corners the 3rd best car was, and be surprised because after that he keeps pulling away in the straight even with you in a prefect slipstream because he has 50 hp more.

Edited by Skinnyguy, 07 November 2012 - 15:10.