Wasted Talent

In recent weeks, yet more pieces of the driver market puzzle have fallen into place. We now know that Felipe Massa will remain with Ferrari for one more year before (probably) having to give way to a certain Herr Vettel, Nico Hulkenberg is set to make a sideways step from Force India to Sauber and that the latest Telmex protegé, Esteban Gutierrez, is tipped to join him.

What’s caught my attention, however, are not the drivers who have secured seats, but moreover the drivers that have not, or are unlikely to. I can’t think of an era in Formula One when more talent has been left to fester on the sidelines, and with more young drivers seemingly on the cusp of making their Grand Prix debut the situation looks only as if it will detierorate next season.

Here is a list of all the drivers currently under the age of 30 that have lost their F1 seat in the past three years: Nelson Piquet Jr., Kazuki Nakajima, Lucas di Grassi, Karun Chandhok, Adrian Sutil, Sebastien Buemi, Jaime Alguersauri, and Jerome D’Ambrosio. By the end of the year, we may also be able to add Kamui Kobayashi, Vitaly Petrov and Bruno Senna to that worryingly long list.

All of the aforementioned that raced in GP2, with the exception of Nakajima, were race winners and in some cases title contenders, whilst Sutil and Alguersauri were given their F1 chances on the virtue of their impressive Formula Three CVs. That means none of them are bad drivers, or didn’t deserve their F1 grid slot, yet now all have been consigned, at least for now, to the scrapheap of F1 talent with little prospect of reprieve.

So why is this the case? And can anything be done to rectify it? You may argue that I’m getting somewhat sentimental here; that the F1 driver market is a simple exercise in supply-and-demand economics. It goes without saying that in this post-manufacturer era, in which the smaller teams are now so reliant upon their drivers to bring sponsorship, the turnaround of drivers is going to be higher.

We shouldn’t forget nonetheless that F1 is, foremostly, a sport, and as such talent ought to come before sponsorship dollars. Opting for one driver over another simply due to monetary concerns can often be a false economy, particularly given the wider sponsorship opportunities open to teams that are able to secure big results as well as the extra prize money available for finishing higher in the constructors' standings.

Part of the issue is that talent isn’t being given chance to develop sufficiently, partly because of the pressures brought to bear by sponsors. Gutierrez, assuming he gets his Sauber seat next year, is a good example. The young Mexican is clearly talented, as evidenced by his success in GP3 and GP2. But, there have been too many errors in a year he was touted as being among the GP2 title favourites; as such he placed third in the championship this season.

Many drivers have of course secured F1 seats with lesser results than Esteban, but he’s only 21 years old – barely old enough to order a beer in America. He’s only had two full tests in an F1 car, at the 2010 and 2011 Young Drivers Tests at Abu Dhabi, and could surely benefit from some Friday sessions next season alongside a third campaign of GP2 before being let loose on an F1 race seat.

Sauber are known to have concerns about his inexperience, but Telmex ultimately make up a sizeable chunk of the Swiss outfit’s budget and thus their desire to see Gutierrez take a race drive cannot be ignored. And if Telmex’s wish does indeed come true, that’s one less space on the grid available for a Kobayashi, an Alguersauri or a Sutil.

Red Bull is perhaps the biggest offender in this category. Perhaps neither Buemi nor Alguersauri set the world on fire during their tenure at Toro Rosso, but they too were rushed through the junior formulae as if the energy drink giant believed that drivers were somehow past it by age 25. Buemi had just one full season of GP2, in which he was only sixth in the championship, whilst Alguersauri was parachuted into Sebastien Bourdais’s seat in mid-2009 with just half a season of World Series by Renault under his belt.

Admittedly, some drivers, chiefly Jenson Button and Kimi Raikkonen, prove it’s possible to adapt to F1 machinery with very limited experience in the lower categories. But just because they managed it doesn’t mean we should expect every up-and-coming driver to. Indeed, how many team principals these days would have given a then 21-year old Button a second chance after his terrible 2001 season in which he was totally outclassed by Giancarlo Fisichella at Benetton?

Button didn’t go on to win his first race until 2006, by which time he was age 26. Gerhard Berger was 27 when he finally took his first win, Rubens Barrichello was 28, Mika Hakkinen was 29 and Nigel Mansell was 32. Every driver takes a different amount of time to develop, so why are some F1 teams giving their drivers so little time to prove themselves?

Every team is, understandably, desperate for the next Lewis Hamilton or the next Sebastian Vettel, a driver who within a season proves he is championship material. What we shouldn’t forget though is that both of these drivers made their debuts before the era of no in-season testing, meaning both were able to rack up considerable mileage before their first F1 races – neither was quite the completely inexperienced rookie they were portrayed to be.

Perhaps the answer is therefore some kind of return to in-season testing, but only for young drivers. The best way to do this, keeping the need to minimise costs firmly in mind, would be to introduce an extra one-hour session over the course of a Grand Prix weekend designated specifically for reserve drivers. For this to work as intended, a rule would be required that stipulates reserve drivers must be under a certain age (26, let’s say) and with a season or less of F1 race experience.

Going back to the Sauber scenario, everyone’s a winner: the team can evaulate Gutierrez more accurately before handing him a race seat, Gutierrez himself will be likely to make fewer mistakes in his debut season having accumulated plenty of mileage in an F1 car beforehand, Telmex get to see their man in action every weekend, a more experienced driver such as Kobayashi gets an extra season to prove his worth, and fans get to see a larger variety of drivers on track whilst being able to make accurate comparisons between the race drivers and the reserves.

Had such a system been put in place three years ago, perhaps we would still see some of the talents mentioned earlier in this article with a race seat. Perhaps a couple of them may have even made that big breakthrough that would assured them of a permament drive. We’ll never know, of course, but it's not too late to prevent the next generation of drivers from suffering a similar fate.