after watching the Team Principals press conference, i was pleasantly surprised to see how mid to lower midfield teams are reluctant to go testing and questions the benefit of it.
here's the transcript of the Team principals press conference from sinapore gp
http://www.fia.com/n...press-conferece
Q: (Joe Saward – Grand Prix Special) On the question of testing, can anyone of you think of a good argument this time next year when Bernie says ‘look, you’ve gone to four tests, you haven’t earned any money, why don’t we have four more races in 2015?’
EB: Four is not enough. Ten more is better.
Q: Could you race more, is that possible?
FT: This is what I always request. I prefer to have more races where we gain money instead of spending money for nothing, therefore I would prefer to maybe have two races more or three or four races more – I don’t care – instead of going testing for eight days where we go out to do some laps for nothing in the end, because reliability – as we can see – is no longer an issue. Ten, 15, 20 years ago we could say OK, we need to do some tests so that the cars become more reliable. That’s no longer the case. What we are doing now is to create a new test team, because the theory that the race team will do the tests on Tuesday and Wednesday is absolutely wrong because they have to go home to prepare the cars for the next race. That means that on Sunday, the test team will fly in, then we do the test on Tuesday, Wednesday, then they go back. It’s not only testing, it means bringing new parts, because the development will be increase and these are the costs.
CW: I think there are so many considerations. Like Franz said, the major one for bringing testing in is that you’ve got to create a new support team. A few years ago, Williams disbanded - whatever the word would be – our designated test team so now we’re looking at additional costs to create a new test team because you can’t have your race mechanics and engineers working that amount of time but then there are other considerations. Could you use those days for a young driver development programme, for example, that could bring in revenue for the teams? So it’s definitely conversations that we’re having internally at the moment to see which would be better whereas I don’t know whether... you bring in four more races a year or... Eric wanting ten more races. You’re going to have to bring in more personnel to support that as well, so I think again, it’s all about costs isn’t it?
EB: Just to comment on this, when I said ten more races, I know we face the same problem that today we have a team sized for twenty races, so if we go one or two more races, I think we would struggle if we could do it, but if you had ten more we would have to have a second team. This is why I said ten actually, because four races would be difficult but it’s better to race than test.
BF: I think Eric’s got a very good point there in terms of the amount of races, but the advantage you have of testing as opposed to having two or three races imposed on you is if you could make the choice of whether you wanted to go testing. You don’t have to do that, you do have to do races.
Q: (Fredrik Af Petersens – Honorary) Just a comment, and I agree with Franz when it comes to testing, but your father, Claire, once said, a few years ago when there was a lot of testing, that ‘the first race of the year, my car is about half a second slower than the quickest one. Then we go testing. At the end of the year, my car is quicker but still half a second slower than the quickest one.’ So why go testing and, as Franz says, spend a lot of money?
CW: That’s true. Yeah. I do think that there is an argument that over the course of a year, if you start the season... to use an example, where we were at the start of this year, if we had had the opportunity to do some test days after the first few races, after Bahrain or Barcelona, it may have helped us, we don’t know, so I think there’s an argument for both sides
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