F1 Drivers Slam "Ridiculous" Three-Day Pre-Season Test Limit
Feb.23 - Two more Formula 1 drivers have backed Fernando Alonso's claim that a mere three days of pre-season testing with a single car per two-driver team is "ridiculous".
"We're talking about the most demanding sport, with budgets of 200 million per team per year. It seems ridiculous," said the Aston Martin driver.
"It's like swapping the racquets and balls in tennis and letting the players train for just one day before a Grand Slam," Alonso, 42, added.
When asked about Alonso's comments, Williams driver Alex Albon says it's clear that F1 cracked down on testing "to make the whole thing a little fairer" for the smaller teams.
"On the other hand, we don't have a test car at all," he said, referring to the way the F1 regulations allow teams to do some running outside of the official schedule with two-year-old cars.
"While other teams do a bit of driving in the winter months, yesterday was my first day in a Formula 1 car since Abu Dhabi," Albon explained. "That's not fair."
The three-day schedule means that drivers tend get a maximum of one and a half days of running in their 2024-spec cars before the opening race.
"Assuming the test goes completely smoothly," said Mercedes' George Russell, "one and a half days per driver is the absolute minimum."
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Totally agree... It's the same as all the electrical BS...
" F1 cracked down on testing "to make the whole thing a little fairer" for the smaller teams." I fail to see how restricting testing to a single chassis split between the two drivers makes it any fairer for the "smaller teams".
The whole kit-and-kaboodle is in town for the race next week, so why not allow both cars to test. That way, drivers get to know 'their' chassis and to tweak it for their style of driving.
This is another example of the Euro-centric style of bloated, suppurating mega-bureaucracies justifying their existence by creating rules that add to the regulatory burden. If they wanted to be fair, they'd do away with half their regulations, allowing all teams to redirect the resources devoted to sorting through the rule-books to something more creative.
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