George Russell and Alex Albon have backed Fernando Alonso’s continued call for an increase to the amount of pre-season testing available to Formula 1 drivers.
In 2023, pre-season testing was cut to just three days of running from six in 2022, leaving opportunities to run contemporary machinery limited in-season.
With the F1 calendar now boasting a record-breaking 24 races in 2024, teams are only able to run their current cars at two 200km private filming days per season. Pirelli tyre tests also offer limited running, albeit under strict rules and limitations imposed by the sole tyre provider.
Winter testing, therefore, is the only real opportunity for teams to gather data on their new challengers having spent millions of dollars and many months creating the machines seen on track this week.
But with teams only allowed to run one car throughout the three-day test at the Bahrain International Circuit, each of the twenty drivers will only have had one-and-a-half days behind the wheel before the first race weekend in a week.
At the launch of Aston Martin’s AMR24, Alonso branded the current arrangement as “unfair” given the considerable investment teams have made in their bid to compete.
For some, the already limited time was cut shorter when a red flag was flown during both the second and third days for a loose drain cover, restricting running even further.
“It’s difficult to understand how we can have one day and a half each driver, which is going to be one day and a quarter now after this morning, to prepare for [our] World Championship,” the Aston Martin driver told the media having lost out on track time due to Thursday morning’s stoppage.
“In football or tennis you change the racket and the balls and everything before a tournament or before a season and you let the players test all the equipment one day before a Grand Slam. And we are talking in the most sophisticated sport and 200 million budget per team a year and things like that so it seemed all ridiculous.”
Asked for a response to the Spaniard, Mercedes driver and director of the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association George Russell added: “: I think if it’s a silky smooth test and that one and a half days each is just the absolute minimum.
“But you look at what happened this morning and the drivers who lost out, it is a big disadvantage every single lap you get.
“It’s hugely valuable. The cars are more complex than ever. The tyres are extremely challenging. The cars are becoming more and more sophisticated.
“It’s not like jumping in a Formula 2 car which, you know, it’s a still very fast car, but they don’t have any of the fancy gadgets that Formula One does. Yeah, I don’t know, I’d like to see probably an extra day of testing or a second car. I think one and a half each is too little.”
Williams driver Alex Albon agreed with both Alonso and Russell saying: “Obviously it’s done to try to make it a bit more fair for everyone. At the same time, we don’t have a test car, so I know the others, they start testing quite a bit during the winter months.
“The test yesterday, that’s the first time I’ve driven an F1 car since Abu Dhabi, so it’s not even that fair in the end. And also just the money that they spend on the virtual test tracks, all the simulations that get put into it, it’s a cost cap but it also creates budget going elsewhere, so I don’t think there is really a right solution, but I do think another three days would be nice.”
With Bahrain also playing host to the first round of the 2024 season next weekend, Alonso noted that there was no reason why teams shouldn’t be able to run two cars.
“I think we all have our full crew here, all the mechanics are here, ready for next week. So I don’t know the extra cost of having both cars here, because we race here in five days time,” he continued.
“It’s not that we need to go back to Europe and then send the cars back again to Bahrain or something. So I think we all have two cars ready more or less in time. So two cars, even three days or four days should be I think the minimum for a professional sport, a professional athlete to compete in a world championship.”
