Formula One will be testing a crop of young drivers, or perhaps rookie drivers is a better term, starting tomorrow in a three-day test at the Spanish circuit Jerez. The test is designed to give “rookies”, or drivers who have participated in less than three Grand Prix events, a taste of F1.
Originally, I was planning to write-up a story featuring all of the drivers taking part in the test. I was holding off for a line-up announcement from McLaren (who has since announced that they plan to test long-time test driver Gary Paffett) and to see if Toyota would attend (they won’t be–which is no real surprise). By the time I received this information, my feature story idea had become a pretty common theme across all the F1 blogs and there is no need to duplicate great content. I’ll link to a few of the stories featuring the testing line-ups below. Think of this as a ‘Monday Morning Reading’ post.
Keith Collantine of the F1Fanatic blog wrote a nice preview on each of the drivers in a post entitled F1 Rookies test: Guide to the drivers.
Christine Blachford of Sidepodcast.com is working on a separate preview for all the teams planning to attend. You can read her content here: Who Are They, Anyway.
It looks to be a good mix of drivers and it will be interesting to see how they get on, relative to experience.
I do like the idea of the young driver sessions especially since the main testing ban came in and limited the opportunities to run, so I hope they continue!