There is nothing worse for a sportsman than to be prevented from using his talent on his field of play. Fernando Alonso stressed that emphatically this morning at the Wrooom press conference, when he was asked how useful was the work done in the simulator.
“It’s an important tool but more than anything, it is a way of assessing some mechanisms,” explained Fernando. “How much a new technical component can deliver in terms of performance remains a question mark after being tried out only on the simulator. Formula 1 is one of the very few sports in which training is forbidden: you don’t ask a footballer or a tennis player to do nothing in between one match and another or for two months prior to a big tournament. Having a go in a kart helps because it is more like driving a single-seater, but it’s like telling Leo Messi to train with a little tennis ball or Raffa Nadal to play with a ping-pong bat… We go karting because we have no alternative.”