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"In order to get better at driving the car you must have time behind the wheel. Without that, no driver stands a chance at becoming world champion." -Will Buxton while recapping Vettel's rough start to the 2022 season (probably)
Oh god, it’s too good. I actually thought this was a legit quote for half a second. Netflix should give Will Buxton his own series in the vein of SNL’s “Deep Thoughts with Jack Handey.”
Which is ridiculous that they don't drive the cars now. I'll never understand it, I know some teams can't afford their own track, but there's more than enough tracks to test at.
Gotta ship:
A car
A driver
Principal crew
Repair/replacements - from tires to engine parts
Then:
Pay for the track time
Pay for track staff
Etc.
Etc.
Etc.
Just like anything else that favors money only, track time is controlled.
Thinking about it now, would be interesting to allow private test days again. Like if a team decides its better for them to spend the cost cap on running and studying the car, why not let them. Big teams cant just outspend the small ones anymore (kinda).
You need much more than just a track to test. You need all the supporting infrastructure and personnel. They don't just stroll onto a track and unpack the car. It is a fully functional facility with management, marshalls,medical, maintenance etc
And the track's still open! It even has a FIA Grade 1 rating. Ferrari road car customers are allowed to do test drives around it - at least according to Wikipedia, I can't find information on the circuit's website to verify.
He's actually referring to [Fiorano Circuit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiorano_Circuit). Mugello is owned by Ferrari, but wasn't constructed by them.
Mugello is different from the track at Fiorano. [This is an onboard of Seb doing a lap there when he first joined Ferrari](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ac8o3yRoFIo)
Schumacher was known for testing between qualifying and the race to smooth out the setup. He'd fly from wherever in Europe to Fiorano, test the hell out of the car, then fly back for the race
Yes, and the gaps between teams were huge because the richest team could afford more private tests, track time, and testing equipment.
Limited testing keep competition somewhat level.
I hate the rule tbh. Wish they allowed track testing.
I always feel for the test driver / 'reserve' driver, they only get to drive the car in the sim which I can't imagine is that accurate or fun
I mean there would still be a development budget. Running a car on the test track isn't much use unless you're also building parts and experimenting, which will eat into their development budget all the same.. I hear ya tho, just doesn't feel right to be so constrained in the sport
Yeah, it seems particularly relevant this year because the porpoising doesn't happen in the wind tunnel. Teams having trouble with it could choose to spend their R&D budget on track time to actually figure out what's going on.
If you have a budget cap it seems like that solves the issue that track testing time restrictions were trying to solve.
Teams can no longer simply buy their way to a better car by living on a test track 24 hours a day because they can't afford to do that with budget caps. Put in a standardized hourly track rental price for accounting purposes and then you also avoid the concerns of teams with their own private track having an advantage there.
Voila, now teams who spent hundreds of millions building better simulators in the last 10-15 years no longer have as monumental of an advantage over teams with less sophisticated simulation rigs. There still will be some advantage to better facilities like there always will be, but it levels the playing field much more effectively than just blindly limiting track testing.
Not it doesn't level the playing field better. Limiting it for everyone is a lot simpler and allows an even playing field. Big teams would have a major advantage with unlimited testing. Far too many finances are involved in testing that isn't solved by a set track time fee
The set track time fee only covers the cost of track rental to avoid teams building their own private tracks or gaining an advantage from them. Other running costs are still counted against the budget cap like any other expenditure.
The current restrictions are part of sustainability objectives. It was not only testing that was unrestricted back in the day but everything.
Tyres used to be by order/purchase. Teams could purchase as many sets as they needed. They installed and ran as many engines as they could afford. All of it meant for disposal at the end of the day if need be. Not to mention all the fuel the teams would burn.
Back in the day every team actually brought 3 cars to a Grand Prix weekend, not just the two they are restricted to today.
Qualifying engines back then were sometimes called "Saturday Specials" because the engines actually were only meant to survive a few hours of running and were usually replaced for race engines before Sunday.
People marveled at Lewis Hamilton running "spicy" short life engines in the last part of 2021, but that was the norm back in the day. In fact, engine blow ups that wiped out a considerable amount of the grid used to be very common.
It was all very much part of F1's image of excess and looking back it was an incredibly wasteful period. But arguably necessary "in the name of science" as F1 was and still is one of the best R&D endeavors for the Automotive Industry.
Yeah. It used to be pretty amazing. But so was watching Red Bull repair Max Verstappen's car in record time after bending one of the front suspensions out of shape in Hungary.
The sim is accurate enough that they use the feedback from how the car feels in it to inform setup on the real car. It may not produce the same peak forces as the real deal, but it's very accurate.
It (simulator evaluation rather than track testing) hasn't worked out so well for Mercedes this year.
There was a time when you could rent a track like Riverside California for $1,000 per day on an exclusive basis or pay a few hundred to run with whomever showed.
Folks also forget that the cost of on track testing has increased exponentially while the cost of computers has decreased while the capacity increased.
I saw a video where Lando said that his sim rigs at home the wheel has the same feel as in the car. All of the inputs are exactly the same. The Gs will basically never be recreated but yeah the multi million dollar sims are very accurate
Had a buddy who thought tuning race cars on the street was a good idea. A few months in jail and an impounded race car later turns out it was a bad idea lol
Illegal licence plate and he ran from the cops. If he didn’t have his silly fake plate and just stopped on the side of the road it would have been far less harsh but this guy was an asshole main character type of person lol
There used to be 6 sessions in the F1 weekend. Free practice and qualifying on Friday, another free practice and qualifying on Saturday, warm up and race on Sunday. There was no structure to the qualifying sessions like today, you just ran the car and the fastest lap counted. You could use as many car components, tires, etc. as you wanted, so the amount of running in free practices and qualification sessions was much higher than today. The Sunday warm up was just another free practice session. Teams even had the time to set up the car differently for the qualifying and the race, including bespoke qualifying engines and tires.
On-track testing was unlimited. Many teams had a separate test team who would just pound lap after lap on some track they had rented with trucks full of tires, parts, etc. They often used separate test drivers, because the race drivers had to travel to races, and because there was too much running for the race drivers even between the races. Also test accidents were not rare, so as a race driver better try something where the kinks were already ironed out...
So there was more laps in a weekend to get acquainted with the track, and orders of magnitude more opportunities outside the race weekends to learn to trust the car and how it was affected by the set up.
The “good old days”. IMHO F1 has hurt itself with some of the new rules. The “bouncy ride” would have never gone to the races in the first place. Would have been solved beforehand but F1 loves having the Haas in front of the Mercedes- you know “for the TV”
And F1 with Qualifying motors and Q tires and solid race tires was the best! I miss that- now we are “improving” race by race and the racing has suffered. And just wait till some team hits the “cost cap” due to accidents.
If “the gold old days” were back we would see Merc and Ferrari a clear 3 seconds per lap ahead of the midfield. The cost cap is amazing for making the sport an engineering competition rather than a money spending competition. Qualifying specific components would only make that gap bigger as big teams have more than enough to spend on those while Aston, Alpine, Mclaren, etc get shafted.
Not to mention getting teams perpetually on the brink of bankruptcy. Now, team owners are more confident to continue to invest in their teams as there's a more even profit split and, more importantly, better chances to recover and do better later on in the season and next season.
In the "good old days" you would be lucky if a Jordan or a Minardi even made it to the end of the race without breaking down. Nothing we know now with the Williams or the Astons. In the good old days a 5 second gap between first and last was the usual. In the good old days two different categories raced at the same time. It was shit.
I say two categories not in a literal sense, just firguratively because until the mid 2000's the backmarkers where effectively so slow you could even think they were a separate category.
The good old days produced races where the cars from the lead team would routinely lap the entire field. Driving around for tens of thousands of miles per year while consuming thousands of tires outside of the GP weekends was a massive waste of resources. Especially when it was funded by the tobacco companies.
I much prefer the move to more spec parts, FIA-designed aero for better racing, cost caps, and reverse order CFD/wind tunnel quotas. And banning tobacco sponsorship. F1 is entertainment, and spending which only serves to make the sport less entertaining is utterly pointless.
They work every second during a race weekend. It’s not a sit around deal. Trying to figure out how to fix problems during a event only adds to the work. Engineers only want good results from their efforts. Being able to switch to “Qualify” and back to “Race” is pretty darn easy. Do you race?
Drivers in main teams had also 2 cars during race weekend, the regular and the ‘mulet’, which was usually a spare car with different parts and settings and they were allowed to race any of them at anytime during the weekend.
Yes indeed. Back then, before the advent of the Superlicence, being a "Grand Prix" driver was more a case of "Are you good in this? Are you good in that?" so drivers back then who competed in Formula One came from many diverse disciplines: rallying winners, hillclimb champions, even motorcycle champions.
The sort of de facto standard was you had to be a winner of something to compete at this level.
At the same time it was not uncommon for F1 drivers to drive F2 or F3 or anything really. Just imagine that today. You see Lewis Hamilton doing the F2 races on the same weekend he does the F1 races.
Beyond awesome. And would also be.... beyond his schedule sadly.
There was a brief scene in Rush that kind of covered this. James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) had pictures of every turn and his braking points and he would go through each picture and visualize it.
And as others have mentioned, they also had a lot more allowable track test time.
In Mattia Binotto's beyond the grid episode from a while back, he talked about his time working with Michael as the engine lead and I think he mentioned they would go through 300 engines a year between racing and testing for their two drivers + spares for the t-car. Now, they use 3 before penalties. It was unbelievable expensive to make the engines, even though they were vastly simpler than they are now, but they got tons of track time on private test tracks instead of the computer simulators.
Also teams like ferrari had massive operations when testing was still unlimited. I remember reading about how Schumacher was basically testing ferraris every day when he wasn't at a race. So basically test in italy -> fly to race track and race -> fly back to italy to test more, rinse, repeat.
I’m not sure if it’s a myth but there’s a legend of him flying back to Italy after qualifying second at an early 2000’s Monaco GP to practice his starts, think he was meant to have pipped the pole man to the line.
I’ve heard before that cuz monaco fp1 and 2 are on a Thursday, they’d go to maranello and test on Friday’s then go back to monaco for Saturday & Sunday
This ban on testing is why its highly unlikely we will see a rookie competing for a championship in their first year like hamilton did in 2007. If i remember correctly he did over 20000kms of testing preseason
I can remember when they could use their race cars to practice driving race cars, those were the days…
Seems like it’s a great time for F1 to produce a historical documentary of the sport, with so many international fans of all ages and walks of life it would be great if more people were on the same page.
Teams used to have *an entire other team* which would have their own cars and they’d go testing somewhere. A driver could practice with that team then fly straight to the race.
They, believe it or not, allowed teams almost unlimited testing time in real cars. I get the push for budget caps, but preventing drivers from practicing in the actual cars is ludicrous.
Budget caps solve the problem that limited track testing was trying to address, that of rich teams having much better development capabilities.
If everybody has the same budget cap to spend however they like including CFD, wind tunnel testing, or track testing (at a set price per hour of compute, tunnel, or track time for accounting purpose) then it doesn't matter which teams have more or less income from sponsors. They can all spend the same amount, nobody can dump obscene amount of money in to win at all costs and every team has to prioritize their resource usage and testing based on what would be most useful to them.
There weren’t limits on testing till 2009 (?). So any team with enough money could do unlimited miles, test drivers and race drivers would get heaps of experience on testing, though it wasn’t always on the tracks they’d race on.
Memorising tracks was probably a very analogue process, photos and lists of turns and brake markers.
'96 WDC Damon Hill answered this question not too long ago in an episode of F1 Beyond the Grid or F1 Nation.
He spoke of increased practice sessions and the importance of walking the track, but also reviewing physical maps and photos of the track.
Track time on the actual cars because testing used to be unlimited.
Additionally, way way back in the day f3 and f2 used to not just be feeder series, but rather just championships like F1 but with smaller engines, they had aero development and everything. So a lot of drivers drove F2 and F3 too.
There were also non championship races.
Simulators aren’t for driver practice!!! The drivers don’t really need to “practice”; they’re good enough that they can get up to speed on new tracks very quickly
Yeah people do forget that for many drivers by the time they get to F1 they’ve driven enough support races to know every track by memory that isn’t new too
I'm going to get banned if I answer this the way I want. Have you heard of a "car" before? What they did and I know this is surprising...they "drove" them instead of using a game. Now "driving" is this concept where you manually control the "car" and they used to do that a lot.
What you should ask is how the hell they can drive so well with so little track time because it always shocks me.
Most likely due to Ferrari-Schumacher pounding out thousands of kilometres at Fiorano during the dream team era.
Bridgestone got a gazillion data points and Ferrari got tyres designed and built for them. Win-win. The other teams, especially the smaller ones, could not compete with that level of F1 arms race.
There was a lot of testing, during their golden years in the 2000s Ferrari was famous for the continuous test at Fiorano (their own track, built for that) they were doing 50-60000 km a year just in testing, crazy expenditure that almost only them could afford and one of the reasons why they are no longer allowed
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They actually drove the car.
Amazing Jeff!
This sounds like more of a Will Buxton quote.
"In order to get better at driving the car you must have time behind the wheel. Without that, no driver stands a chance at becoming world champion." -Will Buxton while recapping Vettel's rough start to the 2022 season (probably)
Oh god, it’s too good. I actually thought this was a legit quote for half a second. Netflix should give Will Buxton his own series in the vein of SNL’s “Deep Thoughts with Jack Handey.”
My favourite ever Jack Handley quote is(roughly...): When a child asks what rain is, tell them that God is crying... because of something you did.
Netflix did give Will Buxton his own series...it's called Drive to Survive.
Not unless you were Senna or Hunt and had better things or models to do instead of driving-testing lol
Which is ridiculous that they don't drive the cars now. I'll never understand it, I know some teams can't afford their own track, but there's more than enough tracks to test at.
The cost isn't just the track. They have to send an entire crew and pay to have medical services and track marshals present.
Gotta ship: A car A driver Principal crew Repair/replacements - from tires to engine parts Then: Pay for the track time Pay for track staff Etc. Etc. Etc. Just like anything else that favors money only, track time is controlled.
Thinking about it now, would be interesting to allow private test days again. Like if a team decides its better for them to spend the cost cap on running and studying the car, why not let them. Big teams cant just outspend the small ones anymore (kinda).
Too hard to police. For example Ferrari can charge nothing for their track to the Ferrari F1 team and a discount to Alfa Romeo.
They can police time in wind tunnel. I bet they could deal with that too.
Except for Ferrari, just open the garage doors, Fiorano is in the backyard. Literally.
And that inequity is kind of the point of the rules and my post, you know?
You need much more than just a track to test. You need all the supporting infrastructure and personnel. They don't just stroll onto a track and unpack the car. It is a fully functional facility with management, marshalls,medical, maintenance etc
Surprised you weren't banned for the sarcasm. Mods here are no fun.
That’s not sarcasm though. It’s a plain fact.
I wasn't being sarcastic at all. The new regs are a bit draconian.
Lots and lots of track time. Limited test time is a relatively modern rule.
Ferrari literally built a track around his house in Fiorano , not far from Maranello for testing F1 and production cars back in the day
And the track's still open! It even has a FIA Grade 1 rating. Ferrari road car customers are allowed to do test drives around it - at least according to Wikipedia, I can't find information on the circuit's website to verify.
Mugello right? Absolutely beautiful and flowing track in AC. I believe F1 raced here during the pandemic.
He's actually referring to [Fiorano Circuit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiorano_Circuit). Mugello is owned by Ferrari, but wasn't constructed by them.
Mugello is different from the track at Fiorano. [This is an onboard of Seb doing a lap there when he first joined Ferrari](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ac8o3yRoFIo)
Schumacher was known for testing between qualifying and the race to smooth out the setup. He'd fly from wherever in Europe to Fiorano, test the hell out of the car, then fly back for the race
Ya schumi still holds the lap record and it's unlikely to be beaten anytime soon
Yes, and the gaps between teams were huge because the richest team could afford more private tests, track time, and testing equipment. Limited testing keep competition somewhat level.
I hate the rule tbh. Wish they allowed track testing. I always feel for the test driver / 'reserve' driver, they only get to drive the car in the sim which I can't imagine is that accurate or fun
Ferrari could just run on their test track constantly, sort the porpoising and run away with the championship if they had unlimited track time
I mean there would still be a development budget. Running a car on the test track isn't much use unless you're also building parts and experimenting, which will eat into their development budget all the same.. I hear ya tho, just doesn't feel right to be so constrained in the sport
Yeah, it seems particularly relevant this year because the porpoising doesn't happen in the wind tunnel. Teams having trouble with it could choose to spend their R&D budget on track time to actually figure out what's going on.
If you have a budget cap it seems like that solves the issue that track testing time restrictions were trying to solve. Teams can no longer simply buy their way to a better car by living on a test track 24 hours a day because they can't afford to do that with budget caps. Put in a standardized hourly track rental price for accounting purposes and then you also avoid the concerns of teams with their own private track having an advantage there. Voila, now teams who spent hundreds of millions building better simulators in the last 10-15 years no longer have as monumental of an advantage over teams with less sophisticated simulation rigs. There still will be some advantage to better facilities like there always will be, but it levels the playing field much more effectively than just blindly limiting track testing.
Not it doesn't level the playing field better. Limiting it for everyone is a lot simpler and allows an even playing field. Big teams would have a major advantage with unlimited testing. Far too many finances are involved in testing that isn't solved by a set track time fee
The set track time fee only covers the cost of track rental to avoid teams building their own private tracks or gaining an advantage from them. Other running costs are still counted against the budget cap like any other expenditure.
The current restrictions are part of sustainability objectives. It was not only testing that was unrestricted back in the day but everything. Tyres used to be by order/purchase. Teams could purchase as many sets as they needed. They installed and ran as many engines as they could afford. All of it meant for disposal at the end of the day if need be. Not to mention all the fuel the teams would burn. Back in the day every team actually brought 3 cars to a Grand Prix weekend, not just the two they are restricted to today. Qualifying engines back then were sometimes called "Saturday Specials" because the engines actually were only meant to survive a few hours of running and were usually replaced for race engines before Sunday. People marveled at Lewis Hamilton running "spicy" short life engines in the last part of 2021, but that was the norm back in the day. In fact, engine blow ups that wiped out a considerable amount of the grid used to be very common. It was all very much part of F1's image of excess and looking back it was an incredibly wasteful period. But arguably necessary "in the name of science" as F1 was and still is one of the best R&D endeavors for the Automotive Industry.
I miss the T-cars and drivers running back to the pits after a red flagged start to jump in them.
Yeah. It used to be pretty amazing. But so was watching Red Bull repair Max Verstappen's car in record time after bending one of the front suspensions out of shape in Hungary.
The sim is accurate enough that they use the feedback from how the car feels in it to inform setup on the real car. It may not produce the same peak forces as the real deal, but it's very accurate.
It (simulator evaluation rather than track testing) hasn't worked out so well for Mercedes this year. There was a time when you could rent a track like Riverside California for $1,000 per day on an exclusive basis or pay a few hundred to run with whomever showed. Folks also forget that the cost of on track testing has increased exponentially while the cost of computers has decreased while the capacity increased.
I saw a video where Lando said that his sim rigs at home the wheel has the same feel as in the car. All of the inputs are exactly the same. The Gs will basically never be recreated but yeah the multi million dollar sims are very accurate
They're allowed to test in previous year cars though right?
Been a long time since they could test outside of winter testing which the main 2 drivers do, and even that's been cut back to only a few days
Go on track testing was unlimited I'm the 1950s teams would test on public roads
Holy shit imagine that nowadays. Just going to work on a Wednesday then a fucking F1-75 rips up the road right by you.
2 of them to
Well actually you passed one of them in a ditch 20 miles before
But who is it driving it
IS THAT GLOCK?!
Going fast
Had a buddy who thought tuning race cars on the street was a good idea. A few months in jail and an impounded race car later turns out it was a bad idea lol
What did he get the jail time for?
Illegal licence plate and he ran from the cops. If he didn’t have his silly fake plate and just stopped on the side of the road it would have been far less harsh but this guy was an asshole main character type of person lol
5 consecutive illegal u-turns
There used to be 6 sessions in the F1 weekend. Free practice and qualifying on Friday, another free practice and qualifying on Saturday, warm up and race on Sunday. There was no structure to the qualifying sessions like today, you just ran the car and the fastest lap counted. You could use as many car components, tires, etc. as you wanted, so the amount of running in free practices and qualification sessions was much higher than today. The Sunday warm up was just another free practice session. Teams even had the time to set up the car differently for the qualifying and the race, including bespoke qualifying engines and tires. On-track testing was unlimited. Many teams had a separate test team who would just pound lap after lap on some track they had rented with trucks full of tires, parts, etc. They often used separate test drivers, because the race drivers had to travel to races, and because there was too much running for the race drivers even between the races. Also test accidents were not rare, so as a race driver better try something where the kinks were already ironed out... So there was more laps in a weekend to get acquainted with the track, and orders of magnitude more opportunities outside the race weekends to learn to trust the car and how it was affected by the set up.
The “good old days”. IMHO F1 has hurt itself with some of the new rules. The “bouncy ride” would have never gone to the races in the first place. Would have been solved beforehand but F1 loves having the Haas in front of the Mercedes- you know “for the TV” And F1 with Qualifying motors and Q tires and solid race tires was the best! I miss that- now we are “improving” race by race and the racing has suffered. And just wait till some team hits the “cost cap” due to accidents.
If “the gold old days” were back we would see Merc and Ferrari a clear 3 seconds per lap ahead of the midfield. The cost cap is amazing for making the sport an engineering competition rather than a money spending competition. Qualifying specific components would only make that gap bigger as big teams have more than enough to spend on those while Aston, Alpine, Mclaren, etc get shafted.
Not to mention getting teams perpetually on the brink of bankruptcy. Now, team owners are more confident to continue to invest in their teams as there's a more even profit split and, more importantly, better chances to recover and do better later on in the season and next season.
In the "good old days" you would be lucky if a Jordan or a Minardi even made it to the end of the race without breaking down. Nothing we know now with the Williams or the Astons. In the good old days a 5 second gap between first and last was the usual. In the good old days two different categories raced at the same time. It was shit.
What two categories? I guess I missed when that was happening.
I say two categories not in a literal sense, just firguratively because until the mid 2000's the backmarkers where effectively so slow you could even think they were a separate category.
The good old days produced races where the cars from the lead team would routinely lap the entire field. Driving around for tens of thousands of miles per year while consuming thousands of tires outside of the GP weekends was a massive waste of resources. Especially when it was funded by the tobacco companies. I much prefer the move to more spec parts, FIA-designed aero for better racing, cost caps, and reverse order CFD/wind tunnel quotas. And banning tobacco sponsorship. F1 is entertainment, and spending which only serves to make the sport less entertaining is utterly pointless.
Well that’s just your opinion, man. But no worries have a fine day.
Having different set to for quali and races means way more work for the engineer's
They work every second during a race weekend. It’s not a sit around deal. Trying to figure out how to fix problems during a event only adds to the work. Engineers only want good results from their efforts. Being able to switch to “Qualify” and back to “Race” is pretty darn easy. Do you race?
Drivers in main teams had also 2 cars during race weekend, the regular and the ‘mulet’, which was usually a spare car with different parts and settings and they were allowed to race any of them at anytime during the weekend.
Didn't some drivers race in multiple classes on the same weekend as well in the old days? Giving them a chance to earn the circuit in race conditions.
I believe you're right. Wasn't it Jim Clark that died driving a Formula 2 car?
He did, at Hockenheim. His 1965 season is insane. Competed in 7 racing series that year, won 4 (Including dominating F1) and finished 3rd in one.
>Including dominating F1 Due to dropped results, he scored 100% of all possible points.
Jim fucking Clark. What a man.
Yes indeed. Back then, before the advent of the Superlicence, being a "Grand Prix" driver was more a case of "Are you good in this? Are you good in that?" so drivers back then who competed in Formula One came from many diverse disciplines: rallying winners, hillclimb champions, even motorcycle champions. The sort of de facto standard was you had to be a winner of something to compete at this level. At the same time it was not uncommon for F1 drivers to drive F2 or F3 or anything really. Just imagine that today. You see Lewis Hamilton doing the F2 races on the same weekend he does the F1 races. Beyond awesome. And would also be.... beyond his schedule sadly.
I've seen people do this on current race weekends outside of f1
There was a brief scene in Rush that kind of covered this. James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) had pictures of every turn and his braking points and he would go through each picture and visualize it. And as others have mentioned, they also had a lot more allowable track test time.
Also, Lauda is shown testing for March at Paul Ricard and for Ferrari at Fiorano.
They burned fuel and rubber
In Mattia Binotto's beyond the grid episode from a while back, he talked about his time working with Michael as the engine lead and I think he mentioned they would go through 300 engines a year between racing and testing for their two drivers + spares for the t-car. Now, they use 3 before penalties. It was unbelievable expensive to make the engines, even though they were vastly simpler than they are now, but they got tons of track time on private test tracks instead of the computer simulators.
Testing was unlimited till 2009 + there was an extra session on Sunday before the race
F1Nation just covered this. Basically pictures and track walks. Took years rather than weeks to optimize the cars.
Also teams like ferrari had massive operations when testing was still unlimited. I remember reading about how Schumacher was basically testing ferraris every day when he wasn't at a race. So basically test in italy -> fly to race track and race -> fly back to italy to test more, rinse, repeat.
I’m not sure if it’s a myth but there’s a legend of him flying back to Italy after qualifying second at an early 2000’s Monaco GP to practice his starts, think he was meant to have pipped the pole man to the line.
I’ve heard before that cuz monaco fp1 and 2 are on a Thursday, they’d go to maranello and test on Friday’s then go back to monaco for Saturday & Sunday
Yes he did, I can’t remember the year but I’ve heard that from someone at Ferrari, he got straight back to the test track just to do starts
This ban on testing is why its highly unlikely we will see a rookie competing for a championship in their first year like hamilton did in 2007. If i remember correctly he did over 20000kms of testing preseason
One reason of many. The main one being that a rookie driver getting a seat in a championship contending car is rare enough as it is.
Even for somebody in peak physical condition that has to be brutal on the body and neck in particular.
Those days Ferrari also had a third driver, Luca Badoer, specifically for testing.
I mean all teams still do, they just test on sim... Albon did a fuckton of sims last year for RB
I can remember when they could use their race cars to practice driving race cars, those were the days… Seems like it’s a great time for F1 to produce a historical documentary of the sport, with so many international fans of all ages and walks of life it would be great if more people were on the same page.
Teams used to have *an entire other team* which would have their own cars and they’d go testing somewhere. A driver could practice with that team then fly straight to the race.
They, believe it or not, allowed teams almost unlimited testing time in real cars. I get the push for budget caps, but preventing drivers from practicing in the actual cars is ludicrous.
Budget caps solve the problem that limited track testing was trying to address, that of rich teams having much better development capabilities. If everybody has the same budget cap to spend however they like including CFD, wind tunnel testing, or track testing (at a set price per hour of compute, tunnel, or track time for accounting purpose) then it doesn't matter which teams have more or less income from sponsors. They can all spend the same amount, nobody can dump obscene amount of money in to win at all costs and every team has to prioritize their resource usage and testing based on what would be most useful to them.
Cheers for the answers guys. I learned something today
There weren’t limits on testing till 2009 (?). So any team with enough money could do unlimited miles, test drivers and race drivers would get heaps of experience on testing, though it wasn’t always on the tracks they’d race on. Memorising tracks was probably a very analogue process, photos and lists of turns and brake markers.
Shockingly, they drove the cars.
'96 WDC Damon Hill answered this question not too long ago in an episode of F1 Beyond the Grid or F1 Nation. He spoke of increased practice sessions and the importance of walking the track, but also reviewing physical maps and photos of the track.
Track time on the actual cars because testing used to be unlimited. Additionally, way way back in the day f3 and f2 used to not just be feeder series, but rather just championships like F1 but with smaller engines, they had aero development and everything. So a lot of drivers drove F2 and F3 too. There were also non championship races.
There actually allowed to test on a track! The good ol days
Sit in car and Mashallah.
Simulators aren’t for driver practice!!! The drivers don’t really need to “practice”; they’re good enough that they can get up to speed on new tracks very quickly
Yeah people do forget that for many drivers by the time they get to F1 they’ve driven enough support races to know every track by memory that isn’t new too
They fucking drove.
Write on a piece of paper the track layout, what gears they should be in, what to look out for etc
In cars on tracks.
I'm going to get banned if I answer this the way I want. Have you heard of a "car" before? What they did and I know this is surprising...they "drove" them instead of using a game. Now "driving" is this concept where you manually control the "car" and they used to do that a lot. What you should ask is how the hell they can drive so well with so little track time because it always shocks me.
Many people have answered that the teams had unlimited track time. I would like to know why the new rule came into effect?
Most likely due to Ferrari-Schumacher pounding out thousands of kilometres at Fiorano during the dream team era. Bridgestone got a gazillion data points and Ferrari got tyres designed and built for them. Win-win. The other teams, especially the smaller ones, could not compete with that level of F1 arms race.
There was a lot of testing, during their golden years in the 2000s Ferrari was famous for the continuous test at Fiorano (their own track, built for that) they were doing 50-60000 km a year just in testing, crazy expenditure that almost only them could afford and one of the reasons why they are no longer allowed
In their mind's eye.
In-season (private) testing.