Quote:
Originally Posted by Knowlesy
The scary thing is that people want old drivers in the midfield/backmarker teams.
Yeah, let's have Pedro de la Rosa instead of blooding the new generation further down the field.
Mind boggling stuff.
|
In principle, you are possibly right; however, in practice that might not be the case.
In most instances, and yes I am sure that there are and have been exceptions, these young guns have not fully developed the ability to help the engineers set up the cars to fully utilise their capabilities, whereas a driver such as de la Rosa is acknowledged as a an excellent development driver. It may be, and I would expect it, that he will be able to extract more from the car by way of set up than somebody who has not spent the hours that he has pounding round in testing in years gone by.
This is why, in the recent decades, most team bosses chose to elevate their test drivers to the race seat when it became available; they had experience which counted for a lot to the management. Nowadays, with extremely limited testing allowed, picking somebody like de la Rosa might be a good idea because he may be able to identify areas that might be able to be improved to push the team further up the grid whereas the young gun might not have the experience to identify the problems.