Where will the next F1 stars come from?

How can our sport identify and nurture the best driving talents and bring them to F1? What is the best way to evaluate a young driver?

One of the eye catching lines Bernie Ecclestone came out with recently in an interview with my Financial Times colleague Christian Sylt was a dismissal of the revived Formula 2 series as merely something Max Mosley came up with when he was going through “a problem with his private life “ last summer. It was “all done for the wrong reasons,” he said.

While it is true that F2 was announced in the midst of the Mosley/News of the World situation, on closer inspection it is a serious project and it could turn out to be a threat to GP2, which is why Bernie was scathing. I spent some time recently with the man charged with running the series for the FIA, ex F1 driver Jonathan Palmer, and got a look at what he and the FIA think is the model for the future of motor sport.

Bringing a driver up to F1 level is very expensive; it costs £600,000 for a season of Formula 3 and an eye watering £1.3 million for a season of GP2. Admittedly the GP2 is a good show; the racing is exciting, the series supports all the European Grands Prix and has a strong TV package because it is sold with F1 to rights holders. So it’s high profile and gives the drivers 24 races a season. There is a lot of value there.

But in this climate young drivers will find it much harder to raise £1.3 from family, friends and sponsors because everyone is hurting for cash at the moment.

Mosley has been banging on about racing being too expensive for a long time. Sometimes his argument is undermined by changing the F1 rules, like V8 engines or KERS, which initially cost a fortune, but his argument is generally valid that it doesn’t have to be this expensive to go racing.

He saw this recession coming long before most people in racing and so he set up F2, partly to give Bernie a bit of a tweak, but also to set in motion a new model for racing. The car, built by Williams under the direction of Patrick Head and powered by an Audi turbo engine, has to comply with exacting FIA crash tests, so it’s not cheap to build, but the FIA said that the series must cost no more than £200,000 a season.

Palmer won the tender to run F2 for five years and is sinking £6 million of his company’s money into it. The key to it is that he will operate all 24 cars, so they will all be equal. This is the main point of departure from F3 and GP2, where the best teams spend money on developing their car to make it faster. Their drivers usually win the races and the championship. But can you be absolutely sure that the best driver won, or was he just driving the best car? This is how it is in F1, because the teams have to build their own car and some do it better than others, but why does it have to be that way in the feeder series? Why waste all that money on car development when what you really want to know is, who’s the best driver?

It is a model that other series have used before, but it’s very interesting that it’s now being used at this level. Feeder level racing is not about the teams and wasting money on development. This aligns with recent thinking in F1 cost saving. The F1 teams now know that the best way to control costs is to eliminate areas where they do not need to compete with each other on development, like engines, gearboxes or suspensions. Being F1 they need to have some areas of competition between the teams, so they work on aerodynamics (in a more limited way than before), electronics and mechanical solutions. Below F1 there is no need to spend any money on developing the car, so why do you need teams at all?

F1 teams will arguably be able to evaluate the drivers more effectively in F2 because the cars are all the same and an company with an active young driver programme, like Red Bull, can evaluate several drivers for the price of one in GP2. Red Bull have bought three cars in the F2 series.

It seems to me to be the right product for the moment because young drivers have to race every year, otherwise their career stalls and there are surely many more youngsters right now who can get £200k together than there are able to raise £1.3 million?

Another point in its favour is that the F2 brand is easy to understand. If you stop the man in the street and ask him what is the feeder series for F1 he’d say F2. Simple.

So where does this leave the teams at feeder level? Well the FIA believes that they will realign according to the economic circumstances, some will merge, some will race in other series. But if the F2 experiment works it will put pressure on many of the feeder series like World Series by Renault and Formula 3 to adopt a similar low-cost approach and take the money away from car development and teams competing.

Palmer has sold 18 of the 24 cars so far, four of them to sons of ex Grand Prix drivers and believes that drivers holding out for a GP2 budget will realise too late that they missed the boat. Time will tell. GP2 is a strong package, I really enjoyed commentating on it in 2006 and 2007, but keep an eye out for the entry list of F2. It could be worth watching. Live coverage is on Eurosport… always chaotic, but at least they show things. Here's the calendar. Check it out.

F2 calendar 2009

31/05 Valencia Ricardo Tormo, Spain


21/06 Brno, Czech Republic 


28/06 Spa-Francorchamps, Belgium

19/07 Brands Hatch Grand Prix
, GB

16/08 Donington Park, GB


06/09 Oschersleben, Germany

20/09 Imola, Italy