evancharley5: Rossiter: “Young talent doesn’t get a chance”

Monday, February 18, 2013

Rossiter: “Young talent doesn’t get a chance” | 2013 F1 season

Rossiter: “Young talent doesn’t get a chance” is an original article from F1 Fanatic. If this article has been published anywhere other than F1 Fanatic it is an infringement of copyright.

James Rossiter, who tested for Force India last week, says today’s young drivers are disadvantaged by the ban on testing.

“I was very lucky that I got to do tens of thousands of kilometres in a Formula One car while I was still racing in Formula Three and that made a huge difference,” Rossiter told F1 Fanatic.

“I feel very sorry in a way for the young drivers these days that the young talent doesn’t really get a chance to show what it can do in a Formula One car, unfortunately at the moment it seems to be, unless it’s paying for a test.”

Rossiter tested for BAR and Honda before the in-season testing ban was introduced in 2009. He said that experience has helped him since joining Force India last year to work on their simulator:

“It was more important that I had F1 experience,” he said. “You know what a car should feel like, how to tune a hydraulic diff, how to work with the engineers on that level.”

“And that’s very different compared to, say, GP3 or GP2 or anything like that. Because in a GP3 or GP2 car you don’t have all the things you can change on a Formula One car. You can really only get used to all these changes that engineers like doing in Formula One if you’ve driven a Formula One car.

Rossiter drove for Force India during last week’s test at Jerez. “It was great to get behind the wheel again,” he said.

“That was certainly a very exciting thing to do and I was very impressed with the car and where Formula One is at the moment. It’s different to how I remember it.

“Many things have changed now: you’ve got KERS and DRS so there’s more actively for the driver to do over every lap because you’ve got to use KERS a couple of times per lap, the DRS a couple of times per lap.

“But at the same time that becomes very routine, you don’t even think about it. In the end you know how much KERS you’re going to use on what part of the circuit and where you’re going to open the DRS.”

F1 Fanatic’s one-to-one interview with James Rossiter will appear here tomorrow.