Hoffman900 wrote: ↑19 Jun 2023, 18:50
There are a handful of Indy Car drivers who are talented enough, they just didn’t have as big of a sugar daddy as some F1 drivers do
Maybe. The Andretti, Zanardi (albeit originally ex-F1), Da Matta and Bourdais cases sadly put teams off.
If a multiple CART/Champcar champion like Bourdais isn't the next Sebastian Vettel in parallel let alone the next Verstappen, and multi-champion Da Matta barely better than Olivier Panis if at all, the teams are obviously concerned of the likelihood of finding a Tier 1 driver from Indycar.
Obviously ex-Indycar drivers without backing are not going to be taking any of the pay driver F1 places, but rather the 'talent' places that go to the likes of Piastri on the basis that Piastri
might be a tier 1 or at least tier 1B driver.
The Indy Lights/NXT series is not that competitive compared to Formula 2, so many of the Indycar rookies coming from Formula 2 will be drivers who have
already been passed over by Formula 1 teams while the rookies from the American junior series are not that highly regarded by F1 teams due to that lower level and lack of relevant circuits and tyres (yes, F2 is a much more expensive series than Indy Lights and is a rort to extract money with the organisers having successfully killed off cheaper rival Formula Renault 3.5 V8 with the superlicense points allocation, but oh well).
You can appreciate it is a
huge risk for Red Bull to simply
assume Palou or Herta is better than Perez (or indeed at the same level as Verstappen or better than Verstappen) and put them directly into Red Bull Racing, hence Red Bull wanting to place them first at AlphaTauri for evaluation. Not only did their past pick Bourdais not progress beyond Toro Rosso, he wasn't picked up by any other F1 teams either after all...
mendis wrote: ↑19 Jun 2023, 09:38
When there are ample examples of failed F1 drivers performing well in Indycar, it makes one wonder if an Indycar driver has what it takes to be a successful F1 driver?
Even the best performing ex-Indycar/Champcar drivers in recent years (Jacques Villeneuve, Juan Pablo Montoyta) were not exactly the next Michael Schumacher, 7xWDC.
FW17 wrote: ↑19 Jun 2023, 12:02
Just that an Indycar champion would be further up the development curve in both mental and racing development in comparison to an F2 winner.
It seemed more valuable for Verstappen to get to F1 ASAP and forget doing both F2 & Indycar before coming to F1 entirely. Yes, Montoyta did both F3000 and Champcar before his F1 debut, but he didn't win a single WDC in the end (indeed his F1 career was unusually short, perhaps an F1 debut in '97 instead of doing F3000 would have given Montoyta a longer F1 career?).
Indeed, would Montoyta have done
better if he had gone directly from Formula Ford or Formula Renault to Formula 1 like Button and Raikkonen respectively?
The evidence tends to suggest that drivers who skipped F2 like Button, Raikkonen and Verstappen did better. Speed of getting to F1 being of the essence, it seems. The best, most efficient learning for a young driver about F1 can, it seems, be done
in F1. Before Hamilton, not a single F3000 champion had ever won a F1 WDC if I recall correctly.
(Though I'm not familiar with the old 2L Formula 2 before the change to Formula 3000/GP2/modern F2 and if that was a more useful training ground for drivers.)
For their single non-pay-driver place it would be quite the risk for Williams to replace Albon with Palou IMO. Would Albon have
really learnt more by going to Formula E (as planned) or Indycar before F1 and delaying his F1 debut?!
Many years of Formula E training does not seem to have done De Vries all that much good, if at all...
