Formula One’s teams are split over whether to run their Young Driver Test programme at Yas Marina circuit after the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix or at Silverstone following the British Grand Prix.
The choice of venue was offered recently and this week Lotus boss Eric Boullier told journalists that while he felt the Silverstone date was wrong he would sign up for it purely on the grounds of staffing and costs. However, in today’s official FIA press conference in Barcelona, Red Bull Racing technical chief Adrian Newey, Toro Rosso Technical Director Giorgio Ascanelli and McLaren Sporting Director Sam Michael said their preferred option remains Abu Dhabi. “If you go back to the essence of what the test is meant to be for, which is to develop young drivers, it’s down to: are you best off evaluating prospective new young drivers in the middle of the season or at the end of the season,” said Newey, whose team has already said it will test potential drivers at Yas Marina in November.
“Personally, I would have thought at the end of the season because they’re not at a junior formula they’ve been competing in, they’ve finished their championship, you can see how they’ve gone, they’ve got a bit more experience. To drop them into a Formula One car in the middle of the season and then hoof them out again and tell them to wait until another eight months before you drive it again - I’m not sure of the value of that.”
Ascanelli meanwhile cited engine use and budget as a motivating factor in choosing Abu Dhabi over Silverstone. “We have budgeted our resources to support 15 days of testing and we were counting on the fact that eventually the young driver test would occur at the end of the year, so that we could sustain it with the engine mileage which was left over from the races,” he said. “So a second test in the middle of the season, which wasn’t planned, for us is half a million? We don’t have it.”
McLaren’s Sam Michael concurred with Ascanelli, again citing engine use as a significant disincentive to staying on at Silverstone. “I’ve got the same view as Giorgio and Adrian,” he said. “Our plan at McLaren at the moment is to test in Abu Dhabi. We’re not testing at Silverstone for all those reasons. Engines are a significant factor, as Giorgio said. If you want to test at the end of the year, you have so many part-mileage engines with the race team that all have a little bit of mileage on them so you can effectively do it for free, in terms of your race engines.
“If you try and do that in the middle of the year, you can’t use your race engines so you have to prepare a special test engine. And also the point that Adrian made is very important, I think, because if you try and have it in the middle of the year, and run your young drivers, then you are running them in the middle of their championship year so you to be at the end, so that they have finished their Formula Three or Formula Two or whatever they’re doing and they have the capacity to concentrate on their Formula One test.”
Not all teams, however, are in agreement. Pierre Wache, Head of Vehicle Dynamics at Sauber said his team would prefer to test young talent at the British track. “For us it’s quite different,” he said. “The better compromise in terms of cost would be to test at Silverstone for plenty of reasons: for logistics and costs.” He was joined in that assessment by Caterham F1 Team Technical Director, Mark Smith, who said: “It’s the same for us: logistically and cost-wise, Silverstone sits better for us.”