Seriously! Three days of preseason Formula 1 testing is simply ridiculous,and this is my reasoning for that statement with reflections of a bygone era.
Bahrain International Circuit hosts 2023 preseason F1 testing from Thursday to Saturday, for eight or so hours per day with an hour lunch break I gather as 20 drivers prepare for a gargantuan season of races.
Granted, today’s cars are virtually bullet-proof and are probably race-able out of the box, but my concern is the drivers. After all, for me, F1 is about drivers, the teams are secondary.
This year’s three F1 rookies – Oscar Piastri, Nyck de Vries and Logan Sargeant – will have approximately 12 hours of track time ahead of their debut season.
Nico Hulkenberg returns and could do with maximum track time, as do all the guys on the grid as well as the reserves. Everyone is off a three-month spell of no real racing.
Consider that F1 drivers in the past (talking sixties and seventies) would already have done several races at this point in a season; non-championship races but important for teams were the off-season Tasman Series that attracted F1 drivers down under, while most big-name drivers would already have competed in endurance sportscar races such as the Daytona 24 hours in January.
By the time the season arrived in March, F1 drivers were at the top of their game
After this period, came the era of unlimited F1 testing in which the big teams had dedicated F1 test teams, with test drivers, test mechanics and the like, all to put mileage on cars and develop them for the big-name drivers who would be otherwise committed.
These F1 test sessions would typically be at Estoril or Jerez (before Barcelona became the go-to venue until now) and would last up to five days as a stretch, a whole working week. Below is an example of the opening day test report from 2002, when Fernando Alonso (sitting out that year after a rookie season with Minardi) did the equivalent of a full season’s mileage in a couple of weeks of F1 testing.
I recall covering many F1 testing days at Estoril in the early nineties
When I lived in Estoril, there were F1 teams pounding laps on a monthly basis for days on end. From my home, I could hear them fire up, which prompted me to get into the car, with my photographic kit to go cover the proceedings.
Note that these test days were attended by very few media, maybe a handful of photographers (literally me and another guy or two) as well as local scribes who popped in to savor the sights, sounds, and smells and, of course, a couple of hardcore journos would hang out too.
No TV, no PR people, no influencers, no bullshit. Just heaven, laps, laps, laps and more laps with hardly a soul in sight, except drivers, some engineers and a few mechanics.
Veteran ace F1 journo, Tony Dodgins, and I collaborated a couple of times, on such occasions, he would put together the words and I did the snaps and a week later they would appear in Autosport.
On one such occasion in Estoril, late in 1991, I recall attending F1 testing with McLaren, Jordan, Williams and Benneton present with Alan McNish and Roberto Moreno, both test drivers for the Ayrton Senna and Gerhard Berger’s team, pounding around from 9am until sunset.
Damon Hill was on duty for Williams and, rookie of the moment, Michael Schumacher doing miles in the Benetton. This went on for three or four days, some teams stayed a day or longer. By the end of it, each driver had amassed almost a full F1 season of race mileage!
Granted, unlimited F1 testing will never return but it had a certain beauty
Perhaps those who experienced F1 like that – off the radar, maximum 100 people at the test including marshals, media; days of incessant, never-ending F1 testing – will like I do, always cherish the memories.
Fast forward to now, the eve of 2023 F1 testing and I pity the drivers. All the guys want to do is race, get track time under the belt, that’s why half them sim race in the off-season including double F1 World Champion Max Verstappen. But that’s a game, nothing like real testing to sharpen up for the battles to come.
Look at the likes of Mick Schumacher and Nikita Mazepin, one a F2 Champion and the other a front-runner in the feeder series, they come to F1 and bomb out. Hardly, any mileage meant that they spent every Grand Prix practice trying to learn a difficult car which the Haas was; more testing for both those rookies would have done them the world of good.
But in the process, they crashed so often that their mileage was sorely curtailed. It’s a double-edged sword, saving by not testing because it’s too expensive, yet conveniently forgetting how much is spent repairing the cars because the lads simply can’t drive it.
Are simulators really cheaper than real butt-in-seat F1 testing?
Consider this, no F1 testing has meant the development of highly expensive state-of-the-art simulators, as technology evolves so must these super-high-end sim rigs. At what cost? And it’s an ongoing, escalating cost as teams within teams are required to produce the software, run the simulators, drive them, upgrade them etc etc. Money, money, money.
I don’t buy that F1 testing is too expensive if you consider the massive expenses the alternatives have triggered. In the end, I don’t really care what the powers that be say, I know race drivers and they all want as much track time as possible.
There needs to be a balance, and drivers’ needs should be a big factor. I wonder if the GPDA or the F1 world champions or F1 veterans in this year’s field were consulted on the reduction to three days of F1 testing… I am guessing not.
In closing, for me, Alonso summed it up aptly: “F1 is a contradiction. It’s the most sophisticated sport in the world, with millions and millions invested but it is the only one in which an athlete is prohibited from training. It would be unthinkable for someone who goes to the Olympics to have a day and a half of training with the javelin and then to the games.
“But it is what it is, we have to look for alternative methods such as the simulator and other means to accomplish this,” lamented the double F1 World Champion. I rest my case!