After the British Grand Prix hype wound down and the British public had had enough time to think to themselves, “Yes, I will wash those hands that supported Lewis Hamilton’s crowd-surfing”, Silverstone welcomed Formula One back to its hallowed circuit for the second in-season test of the year.
With the exception of Sauber, which didn’t attend on cost grounds, every team featured a young driver on at least one of the test’s two days, as stipulated by the rules.
Some of the names were familiar for having spent significant time hovering by the Formula One door, with Mercedes running Esteban Ocon; Red Bull Racing, Pierre Gasly; Williams, Alex Lynn; McLaren, Stoffel Vandoorne; Renault, Sergey Sirotkin; and Manor, Jordan King.
Others would have been less familiar to those not following the junior categories, including Charles Leclerc at Ferrari, Sergio Sette Camara at Toro Rosso, Nikita Mazepin at Force India, and Santino Ferrucci at Haas.
While some on this list of rising stars still have time to go until they’re ready to fill a Formula One seat, many of them could mount comprehensive arguments as to why they deserve a chance sooner rather than later.
Stoffel Vandoorne is the highest profile among them, teetering as he is on the brink of a drive with McLaren, depending on the team’s decision to retain or drop Jenson Button. If it keeps the 2009 world champion, Vandoorne may attempt to forge his own deal for one of the scarce few seats available for 2017.
Esteban Ocon is also of Formula One maturity, and he too is tipped for a 2017 drive. It will most likely be with Renault as a replacement for either Kevin Magnussen or Jolyon Palmer – or both, if Toro Rosso loans Carlos Sainz to Renault in exchange for 2017 power units and to make space for Pierre Gasly.
Alex Lynn is on Formula One’s radar, but only just. A winner of the Macau Grand Prix and the 2014 GP2 champion, Lynn is Williams’s development driver, but his name is rarely mentioned in the team’s driver permutations for next season.
Sergey Sirotkin is another to have flirted with an Formula One future, briefly winning one of Sauber’s 2014 race seats in a deal that never materialised.
In a year or two Charles Leclerc will be knocking on the door, he is a teenager and Ferrari young driver rated as highly as Jules Bianchi and Max Verstappen. As will Jordan King and Red Bull junior Sergio Sette Camara, not to mention the three others younger Red Bull-backed drivers impressing in the lower divisions.
The future would be bright but for the glaringly obvious problem: where do we put them?
Formula One comprises only 22 seats, notionally occupied by the best 22 drivers in the world. It should never be easy to make it to Formula One, but with the increasingly professionalised world of the junior single-seat categories, a bottleneck has emerged between Formula One and everything else.
Generations of talent are at risk of being lost to the sport – indeed, generations have already disappeared.
Robin Frijns was Max Verstappen before Max Verstappen turned up, but nothing came of his development deals with Sauber or Caterham. He now races in the GT Series.
Alexander Rossi continues to keep his foot wedged in the closing Formula One door as a reserve driver after his fleeting five-race deal with Manor last season came to nought. This year he won the Indianapolis 500.
Sam Bird was an LMP2 champion in 2015 after his test driver deal with Mercedes couldn’t open doors for him and Fabio Leimer’s 2013 GP2 championship amounted to nothing in the Formula One sphere.
Also consider Davide Valsecchi, *the* next Italian Formula One driver: when Kimi Räikkönen bailed early on Lotus at the end of 2013 the 2012 GP2 champion was overlooked for Heikki Kovalainen. He’s now one of Sky Sports Italia’s Formula One presenters.
Meanwhile, Kimi Räikkönen has been re-signed for at least one more season despite scoring 58 per cent of his teammates’ points since joining Ferrari in 2014.
A merit-based contract system could present a solution. If you’re a driver with more than three years of experience and can’t score 60 per cent of your teammate’s points total – and that’s a fairly generous threshold in the cut-throat world of Formula One – your contract is terminated, forcing you to re-negotiate terms among a number of talented, hungry, and cheap young drivers.
To grease the conveyer belt of Formula One’s feeder series, Formula One’s commercial rights holder, which also owns GP2, ought to put up prize money on behalf of the year’s GP2 champion to boost his bid for one of the vacated seats, thereby fulfilling the category’s aim.
It wouldn’t guarantee perpetual driver change – a driver who had been heavily outscored due to poor reliability could still be re-signed by a team – but it would give new drivers a better chance of making it to the top of the motorsport tree.
It isn’t a perfect solution, but Formula One puts its claim to hosting 22 of the world’s best drivers at risk if it allows the future of motorsport to pass it by.
How would you help to promote young talent into Formula One? Leave a comment below.
Follow @MichaelLamonato on Twitter
Michael Lamonato
Expert
Fair enough to make a counter-point, I'm proposing this more as a discussion than a solution! For sure Raikkonen's looking for comfortable in the car this year, but consider that Vettel has had three non-scoring finishes due to no fault of his own, while Raikkonen has only once suffered a reliability-related DNF. In each of Vettel's three point-less races (though this is obviously not testable), based on his form up to that point, it's not a stretch to assume he'd have finished ahead of Raikkonen.
Lars
Guest
I thought the discussion needed a counterpoint. Though an interesting fact is that right now Kimi is the best (in points) F1 driver not driving a Mercedes.
Michael Lamonato
Expert
But by enough? One teammate is (almost) always going to outscore their teammate, but if we're talking in the region of almost twice (or even three times, in Kimi's case against Alonso) as many points, surely the sport would be better served by seeing a more competitive driver in that seat.
Michael Lamonato
Expert
It'd be great if all the major teams had a junior team (providing it wasn't at the expense of genuine privateers), because as a bonus we'd get a bolstered grid. I think Toro Rosso is a great example of a junior team, because Red Bull appears to be providing enough money for it to be competitive, and a handful of giant-slaying performances can lead to a big boost in prize money at the end of the year, which in turn would make it even more potent a force.
Michael Lamonato
Expert
What if there were a maximum age for Formula One? But then you'd have to decide where to set it, and the career span of a professional athlete seems to be getting perpetually longer.
Michael Lamonato
Expert
This'd definitely be a preferred solution!
Michael Lamonato
Expert
It's an interesting point, but then it suggests that signing Raikkonen had more to do with merchandise money than performance. While he's doing better this year than in the last two for Ferrari, a top team supposedly aiming to overhaul Mercedes shouldn't be settling for a driver that simply gets along with Vettel because he doesn't bother him.
Michael Lamonato
Expert
Third cars put the smaller teams at a disadvantage in the constructors championship, so you'd first have to come up with a way that all teams could run a third car to make this viable — and then presumably mandate a young driver be run in it. Fundamentally it's a good idea, though.
Luke Delmo
Guest
3rd cars are a great solution, in a substitute for a return to 30 car grids comprised of 15 teams. The premise of running a 3rd car is sound if its restricted to rookie drivers coming up from junior formulae.
Rodney Gordon
Expert
We've always lost very good drivers at the expense of the one's who are better or have deeper pockets. This year's grid is the best representation of the best talent available that we've had for a long, long time - so I'm far from pessimistic about the future of F1's young drivers.
Rodney Gordon
Expert
Nice
Xav
Guest
I could agree more... Kimi, Jenson, Palmer, Kyviat and Massa need to exit. Here are my thoughts on a way to get these young unknown quantitities into an F1 race seat. One option is to field 3 cars per team or require the likes of Ferrari, McLaren and Renault to field a junior team. Another option would be for the FIA to provide with the likes of Dallara a running competitive chassis and engine at a set price to attract new team ownership and sponsor revenue. It's gleamingly obvious why Verstappen is where he is today. Sure he's a Verstapoen but what about those who don't come with a Pedigree for a name. Imagine if the Fangios, Senna's, Prost and Hunt's had been stuck in the perpetual hamster wheel of the junior formulas? Obviously these fixes to fans like myself are obvious. The problem is Bernie and his money. Reverse Grid and Easy acces to in depth coverage via an app is too much to ask and the rights to this coverage are worth Billions. What's to give? The logic and solutions are clear.
Lars
Guest
So... Kimi's ahead of Seb so far in 2016. Perhaps replace Seb with a younger driver?
Dale D
Guest
Add to your list of ideas the possibility of another team or two. I think the grid needs a few more cars to restore it to previous levels.
steve
Guest
There would be a few more open seats if the likes of Massa, Raikkonen, Button etc weren't hogging seats that these younger guys could take. It would be most disappointing to see the likes of these three run around again in 2017. Then there are a couple of others with questionable amounts of talent like Ericson, Kvyat, and drivers like Nasr who brings in sponsorship dollars, though paid drives through sponsorship dollars has been around for years..
Ian
Guest
People forget that an F1 Driver does more than just drive fast, he is also the star for any possible sponsorship/merchandise revenue.. I'll preface this by saying that I'm a Kimi fan, but I really don't see what the problem with re-signing him is. He gets along well with Vettel, doesn't throw strops when things don't go his way (Rosberg and Hamilton), but more importantly he is hugely popular which equals $$$. We also know that Ferrari never employ unproven juniors, so the logical options that Ferrari had were Ricciardo (who had already signed a new contract with RB, and Vettel didn't exactly warm to him in 2014 after being beaten by him) or Perez (who whilst arguably better than Kimi, just doesn't bring in the same sort of interest from fans and sponsors that Kimi does). Button is another one. There is no denying Vandoorne is supremely talented (and after Bahrain was the only points scorer for McLaren for a time!) but Button does wonders for sponsorship, particularly in Britain where McLaren are based.
Naveen Razik
Roar Pro
3rd Cars. If you have the money to run them, do.