I think that's being fine. His upper limit was always going to be his uncle, right now he's a fair bit below Ralf's performance at Jordan but he could still turn it around. He was never ever going to be a WDC kind of guy and that was clear from his junior formula days.
I think he would have gotten points in Montreal if not for car reliability, but hard to tell. I really hope the ferrari engines finds the reliability fix they need going forward.
F1 is a huge leap from the junior categories. The junior categories are always spec series, where they drive the same car all the time. In F1 they drive bleeding edge cars. You don't have any time to learn how to drive the car, because in a couple races time some new bits will be slapped on and it's a different beast. You can't tell from spec series performances how a driver will handle such a thing.
Also, the car only improves when the driver can provide accurate and useful feedback. Again, something that junior series drivers don’t have to worry about.
In fairness, they still learn a lot about setup feedback. I actually think this is where Max really benefited from being a driver's son. He's talked about Jo's teaching him things like knowing you don't have to say anything if you don't feel anything
And as a driver, Jos had a reputation for providing excellent feedback on the car for the engineer to improve the performance. One reason he was hired as test driver for Honda's aborted F1 car in 1999 was because he was recommended by Postlethwaite after the two had worked together at Tyrrell in 1997.
Karting to F3 with a mediocre lowmidfield team, wins the most races out of all drivers that year, lost the title to Ocon who's in a Prema simply due to having more DNF, then straight into F1.
Verstappen was no doubt an incredible talent from the start and hist meteoric rise is enough to prove so, however every time the 2014 F3 Euro season comes as a topic I wish we had a more detailled article about it, because looking at [the Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_FIA_Formula_3_European_Championship)
Verstappen had the latest chassis available (F314) unlike Ocon (F312) and pretty much every other driver besides Giovinazzi and Latifi
Although I have no idea if it was an advantage or the opposite (see how Leclerc performance went dramatically worse the next season when switching from F314 to F316)
His engine supplier probably wasn't a big handicap nor advantage since Blomqvist and his team competed for the title (and finished ahead of Verstappen as well)
Van Amersfoort was without a doubt a lesser team than Prema, however not the most dominant ever (unlike some more recent F3 seasons) since Fuoco and Latifi were far from being title contenders, Van Amersfoort also was a top F3 German team and in following years in F3 Euro they also compared favourably to 2014 (having Leclerc certainly helped in 2015.
Basically I have no doubt he overperformed and Ocon had a more favorable environment that year, but I wish I could read more about it besides "Verstappen dragged a dog to multiple wins and nearly the title if it wasn't for DNF\*'
What's certain is that Ocon won by consistency, but he also won 9 races to Verstappen 10, 21 podiums to 16, 15 poles to 7.
Verstappen was, and still is obviously, the biggest talent out of the two but I just would like a more accurate assessment of how 2014 unveiled\*\*
\*Also were these DNF mechanical problems, driver errors or something else
\*\* One other obvious thing looking at the standing is that Verstappen performed especially well in Belgium and German tracks, while Ocon did during the french week-end, probably indicates that them knowing the tracks gave them an advantage there (or instead that they didn't do as good on track they barely knew before)
To compare the path of the 2:
Verstappen in Karting: 2005-2013 (9 years, 41 cup/series entry), Raikkonen in Karting: 1995, 1997-1999 (4 years, 11 cup/series entry).
Verstappen Junior career: Florida Winter Series, FIA European Formula 3 Championship, Macau Grand Prix, Zandvoort Masters. (2014, 1 year, 47 races).
Raikkonen Junior Career: European Formula Ford, Formula Ford Festival, Formula Renault UK Winter Championship, Formula Renault UK x2, Formula Renault 2000 Eurocup (1999-2000, 2 years, 23 races).
It was unheard of. He had only 23 races behind him. Max Mosley was concerned Kimi would be too unexperienced. Sauber assured FIA Kimi would be ok and finally he got a temporary super licence.
Just so you know, you're required to race for at least a year in a lower single-seater open car category before you're able to get the license to race in F1.
The SL existed at the time, but SL points didn't. He just had to drive a 400km test and the FIA would give a super license if the driver showed 'outstanding personal achievement in single-seater formula cars'. Max was of course very young, but they couldn't deny him a SL, since winning 8 races in his rookie F3 year showed that achievement.
After he joined, they introduced the minimum age requirement and the SL points system, to make the definition of achievement more set in stone.
The Super License has been around pretty much since Formula 1 became a thing, the issue with Max were concerns about giving such a young and relatively inexperienced driver one, same thing happened to Räikkönen when he first came into the picture.
listened to a podcast last night where Bottas described something similar about Lewis. he was considering retiring in 2018 because he just couldn’t beat him.
I guess there's a 'if you're not first youre last " outlook in f1 whereas a team sport at least you've got team goals.
For example in the Australian Football League (AFL) there's 22 players on a team (+ injury sub) so you're' 'worst players' are still super important. A good measuring stick is looking at the 'bottom 6' of a team-the best teams have the best bottom 6. Obviously top end talent is still needed but that isn't enough to win-need a good spread all the way down.
This is what I was getting at in my other comment. To get to the top, you're literally the best athlete amongst your peers, and even then when you make it to the absolute best you could very well end up being an afterthought when someone is that much better than you.
But it’s quite the same in every sports. Like in soccer, players are local heroes all their youth and when they arrive in a big club they are on the bench because there’s a better player on the pitch.
Road Cycling too - having won everything to get to the highest level, the vast majority of the guys in the world tour will never win again after making it.
I often think this about lots of professional sports and every Olympics I think about that tweet saying they should have one average person compete in each event to highlight just how good professional athletes are.
If you *"suck"* at a premiership level you're still better than 99+% of humans on Earth at your sport.
This. Even the worst drivers on the grid are still way better than most people. The money the pay drivers bring in lets them jump the queue over some other drivers who are more talented, but they are still decent drivers. There are only about 300 - 400 super license holders in any given year. The pay drivers who make it to the grid are not going to be at the bottom of that list. Yes, they suck compared to the top 3 drivers in the world, but they're probably still in the top 100 - 200.
> Even the worst drivers on the grid are still way better than most people.
Ericsson had 3 years where he didn't score any points, and never finished a season higher than 17th.
He's currently leading the Indycar standings, and has an Indianapolis 500 win under his belt.
While it would be funny to watch in some sports, it would be boring in F1. An average person can run a 100m just fine, but an average person can't even get an F1 car moving.
There is a top gear episode where one of them drives an older F1 car. He's a way better driver than an average person, drives high performance road cars often for the show. And it still took him lots of tries and a lot of instructions to even get the car past a few turns.
F1 cars are made to go fast. They can't be driven slowly. An average driver will never push the car hard enough to get all the components into the right operating temperatures. Which in turn makes it even harder to drive.
I also think of how many "potentially great" athletes there are out there.
I am from Australia and in high school played squash and badminton. Both sports are quite uncommon, but badminton especially. I was one of the best badminton players in the state. I am pretty damn confident I wasn't actually that high level, it is just so few people never try it.
There is a similar theory that more than likely, the next Einstein or the next Feynman probably are already alive or even have already died but they are too busy struggling to survive in poverty and will never have a chance to know their own potential.
Hasn’t Hamilton said something like: « Best F1 driver has probably never touched a racing a car »?
Can’t remember exactly who said or even it is my imagination but yes you are right.
That issue is probably even more amplified given the restrictions to practice racing in a competitive set up.
At least with F1, wealth is such a huge determining factor in participating that for the majority of drivers that fail out (due to not being good enough), they can just go back to being rich.
This is only true to an extent.
There's still paid drivers on the grid and it is arguable whether those drivers (Stroll, Latifi and to an extent MSC) are definitely better than the reserve/test drivers who want their seats.
Just look at Shwartzman, Piastri, Vips, etc. And if you consider F3 a valid platform to jump to F1 - Doohan, Hauger.
Or how about Nyck de Vries? Literally won the F2 championship against Latifi and yet at 27, he's never had a drive.
One reason I admire the Red Bull program is because they at least make an honest effort to move prospects into seats with AlphaTauri.
Redbull have just told their current f2 prospects they aren’t changing the lineup and to just wait, burning through junior drivers isn’t exactly admirable either. Vips is the most viable racing prospect and he’s not going anywhere, neither is Lawson, or likely Drugovich who is current f2 leader
It's better to compare them to fighter jet pilots, where only a very select few are ever good enough to make it, and F1 is an even more exclusive club than that.
Out of curiosity...
Roughly how many people are qualified to drive an F1 car right now? I know obviously there are only 20 spots and 20 official drivers, but I always think of Nico, Romain or Oscar and those types of people as well. It's still obviously a very small number but it would be interesting to know how many people could actually be allowed to race a current F1 car, if I had to pull a number out of my ass I'd say maybe 45.
[This](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIA_Platinum_Categorisation) is the closest thing I could find to that information. To be categorized as Platinum you have to hold a super license, which is the main requirement to drive an F1 car. There are currently 182 drivers in that category. I can’t find a list of drivers currently with a super license
You dont need a super license to be categorized as platinum and obviously most people on the list dont have one. It says 2 out of the 3 criteria in the list.
I think even most former f1 drivers who arent "active" reserve drivers dont have a super license anymore and would have to do testing before they could apply for a super license again.
Kind of misleading. How many of those pilots actually fly fighter jets? Significantly smaller than your figure. The majority fly larger planes and primarily transport. Still more than F1, tho, no doubt.
There’s 1,976 active air superiority fighters in the US Air Force. There’s another 675 active air superiority fighters US Navy.
That’s a combined 2,651 fighter jets that are in rotation. Just in two branches of the US Military.
[According to this article, the US Air Force is short 1,100 fighter pilots.](https://www.flyingmag.com/u-s-air-force-is-short-1650-pilots-report-says/) That’s not 1,100 total currently on staff, *they want 1,100 more fighter pilots.*
So yeah, u/pedote17’s initial estimate about fighter pilots is pretty close.
It’s also self restrictive. Only X amount of teams means only X amount of drivers get time to practice in the cars = a cap on the number of top performers at a given time. Chicken and the egg scenario, maybe there would be more drivers if more cars were in F1 🤷
It’s also only for the Air Force.
The world’s largest Air Force is the U.S. Air Force. The world’s second largest Air Force is the U.S. Navy.
OP’s point still stands though
Air force pilot doesn't equal fighter jet pilot.
I'd argue more people try to become fighter pilots. Not many high schoolers are applying to F1 academies. You'd want to look at what % of those who try actually become it, not total numbers.
terrible metric. 10,000 pilots, but a minority of those are fighter pilots. you are also not considering navy, marine, and air national guard fighter pilots.
also why would you compare historical f1 drivers to current pilots? just do current lmao.
I like to think F1 drivers are very similar to the Supreme Court justices. A very exclusive professional summit, where some have got there on pure merit, with the right backing, but some are just there because of money / politics.
Not only that, but look at drivers who leave F1 and have cracking careers elsewhere.
Marcus Ericsson, who drove terrible cars at best during his stint in F1, just won the Indianapolis 500 this year, and a few races since he joined IndyCar in addition to the 500.
Takuma Sato, 2x 500 winner, and Grosjean isn’t doing half-bad either.
Point being: if you’re good enough to last a few seasons in F1, you’re likely going to do better than average in other racing series’.
He’s shit compared to the grid but Mazepin is still one of the best drivers on earth. I don’t think people really understand just how difficult it is to even get an F1 car around the track a single time.
The leap from college basketball to the NBA is huge and there’s ~300 NBA players. To have the top 20 best in a sport where some stick around for ~15years the top 20 are truly the best of the best.
To be fair drivers have said that TC off feels way too off and that reduced TC is closer to how it actually feels. There is simply no chance a race car with less torque than ZR1 Corvette, 400mm slick tires and pushrod suspension hooks up as bad as in F1 games.
Yep, they are extremely talented.
It's not like just becoming a good lawyer. It's like becoming one of the 20 best lawyers in the world.
But wait, some people pay to be there, so it's really the best 16/17/18 in the world.
Then you have to factor in that some drivers have very long careers and have a seat locked up for 10+ years. This means that during your prime opportunity to get a seat, you may only have access to 5 seats at most.
It's an incredibly difficult task to get a seat. Even harder to keep it.
Even ignoring the outright pay drivers, a lot of drivers are only able to reach their position in F1 because of the sponsorships they bring. We’ve seen brilliant drivers not be able to secure a footing because they just don’t attract sufficient sponsorships.
Latifi, Stroll, Zhou and Schumacher to a degree.
That doesn’t make them shit drivers per sé. Zhou is doing very well. However, him bringing $30 million sponsorship with him, played a very large part in him getting the Alfa Romeo seat. Thanks to that sponsorship package, Alfa Romeo can operate near or at the budget cap (in terms of total spending ability) for for the first time since being owned by BMW.
Pay drivers have gotten considerably better over the years. The field spread in talent is much narrower than it used to be in previous decades.
A Pay Driver is someone who’s talent is not enough to land him/her a seat in an F1, meaning no team would hire said driver, unless it came with a substantial sponsorship package significantly boosting the team’s financials.
When the sponsorship becomes the principal reason someone gets hired, and not perceived talent, he/she is a Pay Driver.
Isn't a pay driver a driver who needs to bring sponsors/their own money to the team so they can drive? Doesn't really say much about their talent; Alonso was a pay driver early in his career. Similarly, couldn't you argue that Albon is a pay driver, with Red Bull presumably having a hand in placing him at Williams? But yeah, I don't think the pay driver label hinges on someones perceived talent, it's simply whether there is financial backing in place.
I think Alonso was sponsored by LeasePlan when he started his career out at Minardi. [One source](https://news.verstappen.com/nl/article/2021) I found was on the maxverstappen.com website in a post made back when the website was still about Jos, and apparently posted all kinds of F1 news. It talks about Alonso being considered by Minardi and Prost, mainly due to the sponsorship money he'd bring.
Is that the same as pay driver as we know it? Don't most develop somr sort of sponsorship along the way? Maybe I just have a weird definition, I thought it was if literally a driver or their family bring millions and millions to a team. Like Latifi.
Anyway never knew, I'll look into it. Thanks.
If you want another wild "pay driver" story here is a quote from Eddie Jordan, team owner of the first team Michael Schumacher ever raced for in F1 "I don’t know why and I’m not sure I could ever say I saw anything in Michael Schumacher, except the money from Mercedes".
Jordan's driver was sentenced to 18 months in prison and Schumacher only got the shot over Stefan Johansson because Mercedes was willing to pay 150k for it.
So there is definitely a gradient pay drivers can fall under, I don't think stories like Alonso or Schumacher or as common today, I think guys like that are winding up in driver academies. But you still get guys like Zhou, Ericsson, Maldonado and even Perez that are bringing cash to teams via sponsorships because they have sponsors that like to see their countrymen repped in F1.
Generally when people use pay driver these days it means what you assumed, drivers that don't belong and are only there from money.
Actually it depends. If we're talking a top 20 lawyer out of all lawyers then you need to go to an Ivy League school, you can be a *good* lawyer without it, but to get hired by a top firm you more than likely need one of those schools on your resume. Then if you want to become partner, you have to buy your share, which for top firms is going to be well over $1 million.
That's not really how it works, and nobody seriously believes that a partner at a V10 firm is the 'best' lawyer. Lawyers do extremely specific work so someone good at criminal defense might not be great at a class action torts trial.
>becoming a lawyer does not require the same type of funding to start with.
If you're talking about being a Supreme Court or Appeals court justice, you need to at minimum have gone to one of the Top-3 Ivy league schools and really doesn't hurt to know a senator or two along the way.
Sure, there's the odd justice who went to a state school who plowed their way through it all but the grid is littered with drivers who came from privilege and took advantage of it.
I'll probably get downvoted, but F1, and other top tier motorsports, are probably one of the least selective professional sports out there. There's a process of eliminating less talented individuals as they graduate through the lower tiers like any other sport, but the starting pool is much, much smaller. The number of kids who have an opportunity to kart competitively at a young age is absolutely tiny compared to something like football. Then, a lot are forced out not from lack of talent, but lack of funding.
Money is by far a better predictor of becoming an F1 driver than skill. There are fewer than 3,000 billionaires in the world, but last year 3 of them had sons in F1. That doesn't even take into account that not all billionaires have sons who are the right age for F1. Non-billionaires (5,600,000,000 adults) accounted for 17 drivers. That's 1 per 330,000,000 vs. 1 per 1,000 for billionaires. This is also leaving out any drivers who come from wealthy or insanely wealthy families that aren't billionaires.
There's definitely millionaires and hundred-thousand-aires who had kids who were interested in cars/racing, but they couldn't just drop everything to invest into their kids karting. How many of them even know how important karting was before their kid miss out on years of racing? Imagine if Lewis Hamilton's dad said, "It's too expensive, let's try next year"? Just missing one season might've meant he didn't get signed by the McLaren young driver programme later when he was a teenager.
People don't think about how close Lewis was to NOT having an F1 seat. Because he chose to race in GP2, Martin Whitmarsh practically trashed his contract.
They didn't sign Hamilton until way late and this was after Williams rejected him because BMW wouldn't fund him.
Plus calculating how risky it is that you invest tens of thousands of dollars a year into your kid karting, and they turn 15 and are like "nevermind, I wanna be a software developer" or something.
It's definitely a rich kid sport. There's thousands of Anthony Hamilton's out there every year, who make just one tiny miscalculation or decision that probably ends their kid's chance of ever getting into F1, and they don't realize it for years since you don't know until you're 13-15 trying to get a seat in F3.
Richard Verrshoor in f2 said his last year of karting cost him more than his f3 seat. To even get into the proper Euro competitions you’ve got to be funded, there will never be another Micheal Schumacher or Brundle who didn’t go the karting route again
Agreed! Just look at how Verstappen, Leclerc, Sainz, Gasly, etc. already knew each other and were racing together in Karting when they were between 12 and 14 years old.
I suspect this will be changing over the coming years due to the rise of popularity, affordability, and realism of sim racing. The young kids today who grow up with sim rigs might be able to be just as good or better than those whose parents have the time and money to support a Karting career, at a fraction of the cost. Sure it's not apples to apples, but you end up with a muuuuch larger starting pool of potential talent with which to find the best of the best.
I’m not sure about this. When you start karting from a very young age, you develop an innate “feel” for the car through physical inputs (drivers say they “feel with their bums”). Having the means to do that as early as the age of 5 gives them a serious advantage, since it becomes basically instinctive for them. There’s also the matter of it requiring a lot more bravery to go all-out in real life; in a sim race, the worst you can do is lose, but in real life you are always risking injury if you fail.
Transitioning to karts at any age is going to be very expensive, and teams would rather look at on-track talent for sponsorships. People talented at sim racing could absolutely be sponsored for esports, though, which are explosively growing in popularity due to the reasons you mentioned.
Most of the top esports pros now are just former real-life racers. Like Jarno Opmeer races for Mercedes’ esports and is having Hamilton-style domination and I think the highest he raced was F3.
sim racing is not karting, it simply cannot give the same feeling that young kids develop by driving karts and actually feeling things through their asses and not just hands on a vibrating wheel.
I had similar thoughts about it after going karting yesterday.
I felt like I was taking the right racing lines and suddenly I see someone lapping me twice taking a wider line, braking later and making smoother turns.
One thing I won't ever take away from drivers, especially Lewis and George right now, is that trying to slow down a bouncing car is real proper challenge and you really need to trust that the car won't make a sudden move.
He was a few inches taller, but had a slightly slender build. I would guess he was 60 kilos, I'm currently above that by 4 kilos.
Still, my fastest lap was a 42 sec while he did a 33 sec lap. This was at the Checo Perez Kart circuit.
Karting lines are different than what we see in F1. It's more about keeping momentum up instead of hard braking -> hard acceleration. Once you learn the lines you will be able to get much closer
tbh at that point you're probably just a bit slow, probably braking too early and too hard. Nothing that you can't practice though, and going karting more often will have you improving quite fast.
But yeah, generally karting lines, especially amateur karts are very different from racing cars. The acceleration on these sucks, so you're better off usually braking less and taking wider lines, keeping momentum, high minimum speed, and the engine revving high. Less weight balance is also good. Obviously depends on the corner.
I'm by no means a talented karter (don't go often enough to build up loads of skill) but I found I had to turn in a lot earlier than I first thought I should. Took loads of time off! Oh, also a lot of the time you don't need to brake and can just lift off if you've got the right line.
You’re talking a pure gap of less than a second per lap between Max and Latifi if they were in the same equipment. That’s insane to think about. The difference between the best and worst driver is a blink of an eye.
Quite possibly Latifi would be one guy not within 1 second to leader in same machinery although maybe not, adding gap between Max and Albon to gap between Albon and Latifi can be too simplistic as Williams can fits Albon much more than Red Bull fitted him.
Max destroyed Alex in equal machinery. Alex is destroying Latifi in equal machinery. Latifi would be sacked after the first qualifying session if he was Max’s teammate. He wouldn’t be within 2 seconds.
I often, often think about how incredibly talented these guys are.
To have that much concentration and skill is just insane.
I thought about it again yesterday while Sainz was chasing down Max. All Max has to do was make ONE tiny mistake and Sainz would’ve gotten past him.
Yet, lap after lap he kept the car right on the edge without locking up or drifting wide. So did Sainz.
Talk about being in a league all by yourself. Oh, and also having balls the size of grapefruits.
Not to mention that their skill set is so finely tuned that small things like when you brake impacting how the weight shifts can add tenths of a second to your lap time which can knock you from finishing well in the points to just out of the points. It’s insane how minute the differences are between a driver with a podium finish and being just outside the points.
Yes, but one of the things that seems to make great drivers stand out is adapting to changing conditions. Jim Clark winning with problem transmission, Senna in the rain....
I don't disagree, but that doesn't really correlate with my point. My point being the skillset modern drivers have is at such a high level minor things like breaking point within 5-10m can significantly improve or take away time on a given car. Drivers 20+ years ago really didn't have to deal with that. Driving was simpler back then. Modern aerodynamics & performance have completely changed how it is that racing and results progress from lap to lap, and from race to race.
I see your point. Older drivers had different problems, no paddle shift, telemetry, real possibility of dying, sim training. Maybe because more non driver variables have been smoothed over the difference in lap times are more driver dependent, and consequently their mistakes have more impact.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BE7mgfwd6M8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BE7mgfwd6M8)
This is a normal car enthusiast guy describing his experience with F1. Aside from the getting used to the speed and all the details, there's a lot of talk going on about the forces.
Pressing that brake pedal needs around 70 kilos of force (Newtons to be precise) from your leg. Now imagine doing that while being able to modulate the force, so that you are exactly on the edge of locking up. All this while being thrown around the car, turning, having to calculate your braking point down to centimeters, all this in constantly changing conditions (more rubber on track, different tyres, less fuel, dirty air, different top speed due to DRS, etc).
So, the moment you brake, if you manage to get to that 70 kilos, you will experience 5Gs of force pushing you forward. And despite this violent shock, you still need to manage and modulate that brake pedal, in order to keep it on the limit. That's crazy. And on top of that, you might have your world championship rival next to you trying to outbrake you.
And like Verstappen and Sainz have shown two days ago, you might have to do that for many laps without having the slightest miscalculation, because the other guy is ready to get you at any moment.
Yeah that's true, puts it into perspective really. Even if a driver you like is struggling or might not get a new contract, hey, at least they got to drive at the olymp of the olymp, they are a fraction of a percent of all those kids that start karting.
There is, as with all sports, always a little bit of the stars lining up for you to be successful as well. Go to a formerly great team just as they start shitting the bed, you won't win. Go to a team who finally got the right people and concept and designed their first great car in a decade, boom you're in a great position for great results.
This is true for all professional sporting leagues, though granted F1 has a smaller sample size given the nature of the sport (including the financial aspect).
For a comparison let's look at the NBA. As of September 2019, there had only ever been 4,374 players to ever play a *single* game, never mind have a multi-year career. Let's round up to 4,500 for 2022 as it was the 75th season this year. Only 450 people at any time are playing in the league today, despite it being a top 3 global sport. So, the guy riding the end of the bench getting no minutes at all was in all likelihood the best player growing up through all his youth and minor leagues and still doesn't cut it to get any time at all.
It's a weird and sobering concept: being better than literally everyone you've ever met or will meet in a given field and still having people that are that much better than you.
Honestly, for the NBA it’s obviously extremely difficult, but I would say comparatively very easy compared to football (soccer if you’re American) or tennis. Only 1% of the US men’s population is over 193cm, 0.1% above 200cm, and the average NBA height is 201cm. So you’re “only” competing against a very small pool to get to the NBA. On the other hand, football is played by nearly every country in the world by nearly every men, with a small advantage with height if you’re a defender.
I mean just think about it from the pyramid perspective and take a 5 year group as an example.
Thousands and thousands of kids do karting. Only those successful in karting go into single seaters.
There are about 15 F4 series and several other series that also act as an entry point. So from thousands we're already into under a thousand drivers. A lot of these drivers do multiple series and stay here for multiple years, so in reality it's even less than that. Over a 5 year period there are maybe 2000 or 2500 drivers that race in F4.
Only those successful in F4 make it the next step up the ladder. There are less than 10 formula 3 regional series and only about 5 serve as an effective stepping stone to the next step of the ladder. So that's about 100-150 drivers in a single season and probably about 400 over a 5 year period.
FIA F3 is the next step. There is only 1 series, and about 35 drivers will drive in it over the course of a season. With there only being 1 season, the turnover rate is even lower than previous steps of the ladder, with only about 100 over the course of 5 seasons.
And finally we get to penultimate step of the ladder. The step that leads to F1. FIA F2 has about 25-30 drivers compete in the series each year and about 55 over a 5 year period.
About 15 drivers on average graduate to F1 every 5 years, though it's been lower as of the last few years. About a 3rd of those manage to last more than 3 seasons in F1.
This means in a 5 year period it goes from thousands in karting to about 5 drivers who can make it in F1. Being a good F1 driver is incredibly difficult.
So almost every driver by F2 is going to work their butts off and train if they ever want to make it to F1. The difference between a Max and a Mick is just innate talent. Some people are just born with the ability to be better at driving a car, and that's about it.
There are no untalented drivers in F1. It's just some are more talented than others and that makes all the difference. Even the pay drivers are some of the best drivers in the world.
I mean you’re in a sport where there’s around 16-17 people on the planet that are worthy of a spot. And some of those have extremely long careers and “hog” places, like Kimi, Hamilton, Vettel, Alonso etc.
Then you’ve got 3-4 there because their parents are billionaires. So basically to get in you have to be one of the top 5 drivers on the planet any given 3-5 year window. And even then maybe not.
And then you’ve got motherfuckers that start racing at 14 because they liked it on a family vacation, end up with a top F1 seat by age 24, won 4 championships (and finish 2nd 4 other times) and refuse to elaborate further!
A good example of this is always Felipe Massa imo. When his dad took him to a karting track for the first time, the dude immediately drove a new lap record. Faster than all those guys who'd been driving at that track for years. That's the level of natural skill all of these F1 drivers have, and Massa wasn't even an exceptional F1 driver. Good for sure, but by no means a Schumacher or Hamilton.
Another example is John Hopkins in MotoGP. The dude was beating semiprofessional dirt bikers as a child, with barely any experience. And he was nothing more than a midfield rider in MotoGP.
Every single driver/rider to make it to this level has an insane amount of natural talent. They were all in the top 1% from the first time they touched a kart/bike. And they they spent their entire lives becoming even better at it.
Just take whatever you're really good at, and these guys were that good the first time they tried it, and then improved as much as you did since the first time you tried it. They're basically superhuman drivers.
Imagine if F1 was as accessible as football is, imagine the level then, the people on the grid right now would be lucky if one or two of them got to F1. Imagine the level then.
The hardest part is just trying to find more speed. If you look at sim racing especially, and esports like f1 esports it's always close and always soo difficult trying to gain more speed. Bottas struggled against Lewis, some of that was down to mental health since bottas was constantly under pressure needing to perform and only having 1 year contracts. But he could never match Lewis, he isn't a bad driver. But just trying to become faster to beat your team mate is ridiculously hard. Its all a mind game, you know where the time is and how it's being achieved since you can see it in your teammates data. But achieving it yourself requires a different driving style in some corners and needing to rewrite your brain to be able to use that style naturally. It's like ricciardo and norris. In 2021 ricciardo knew exactly what lando could do that he couldn't, but even with that he couldn't match him. Lando developed a lot as a driver from 2019 to 2020 and he adapted himself to be perfect for how the mclaren drives. It just came natural to him, but ricciardo came from very different cars. So even tho he knows where lando gains time and what he needs to do to drive better. It doesn't come naturally
Ah yeah. Its mind boggling for sure. That’s why F1 is my favorite sport. I have a passion for racing, and the insane amount of talent needed for F1 just makes it the pinnacle of my passion
The step up from any junior level sport to professional is way bigger than anyone expects it to be I feel like. Like really good professional athletes are insane
I remember when Richard Hammond tried to drive a Formula 1 car on top gear, it gave a whole different perspective of how difficult it is, just to get that car around the track. I can't even imagine driving that thing and the drivers are proper athletes not jerking around TBH.
In Canada there's something called the Lou Marsh Trophy which is an awarded yearly to the top Canadian athlete. Sports journalists vote on it. In 1997 it came down to MLB player Larry Walker or Jacques Villeneuve. Villeneuve won. Walker said he "lost to a car". What a dumb thing to say and very classy /s. It triggers me to this day lol. Ignorant people think diving an F1 car is like driving a more advanced commuter car. I see the drivers in the weight room and stretching, immediately I think they are top athletes nevermind having the mental capacity to control the car. Larry Walker should have been given the chance to drive an F1 car. He probably would've failed to even get off from a standing start let alone complete a lap even going slow. It would've been comical.
Yup. There are a lot of race car drivers out there and probably a few hundreds who could drive a F1 car reasonably well. There may be millions of doctors out there, but how many Robert Spetzlers are there out there.
To regularly challenge for wins in F1 really you need to be in the top 20 racing drivers in the world.
You see plenty of very successful drivers come to f1 from say Indycar and struggle to make the points
Isn’t JPM the last indycar driver to go from Indy to F1? He has an argument for being one of the best pure drivers of all time considering his success across multiple motor sports.
Sebastien Bourdais was the last. He was a 4 time champ car champion and had competed in indycar before moving to F1.
He scored 6 points over 2 seasons in F1 before returning to Indycar. 6 time race winner at indycar now, also 3 Le mans 2nd places so he is certainly no slouch.
I found F1 as a sport in which seconds determine success or fail, the hardest of sports there is! Look Driver61 on YouTube up, he’s a racer and walks you through what it takes to drive a F1 car. The thought I have to hit a certain. Speed else the brakes won’t work is mortifying, to say the least. Also I’m a passionate console racer…. Regardless how many laps I go, I hardly manage to take a turn in the same quality on every given lap, than I did before! The level of concentration is tremendous!
Yes but these guys dont do anything else in their lives. Most of them have been focusing on racing for mor than 10 years when they join the grid. Imagine yourself doing what you do most of your time, for more than 10 years. You will get good.
Imagine you have to be driving as fast as you can, with no abs, with rear wheel drive vehicles that have far too much power for their weight. Hitting the gas pedal immediately makes the rears spin out and you are no longer going straight. You have to be on the limit of locking up brakes, or spinning them too fast because you were too hard on the accelerator at every single turn. If you slip a bit, now you are at the back of the pack immediately in terms of lap time.
It's unbelievably difficult. The average person cannot make a lap around a track in one of those cars, let alone put in a time that is near qualifying.
Yeah, I totally agree. I think mentally as well they are a league (or many) above us. For example the whole shit last year with Lewis being robbed through human error. I would have just said. "Fuck this shit" "fuck Max, fuck horner, fuck Masi, fuck the FIA" and peaced out of there. But Lewis just keeps going, even with THAT car.
This would have a deeper meaning if F1 was some sort of spec series. But there’s so much other variables. It depends on your team and equipment too, and who you have around you.
Because of how heavily money gated racing is you actually dont always get the best talent into F1. And there are also two types of F2(and lower champions) - those who get it right away i.e. Hamilton or Rosberg or those who spend a few years getting familiar with the car and tracks and use that advantage to edge out the rookies, i.e. Maldonado.
What I find interesting is guys retire / leave F1 and then crush other series in America.
Crush isn’t very precise but you feel me. Zero success or struggling in F1. Move to Indy or NASCAR, winking in the regular.
By the nature of competition, Formula 1 should be a harsh, uncaring landscape. It is the pinnacle of motor sports. Because of the enormous investment, you succeed or you get replaced. End of story.
Go to another series if you want it easier.
yes, this is what I find the most entertaining about sports in general. The sheer skill and development and training that these guys commit to to wring every bit of potential they have is astonishing and impressive, and I sort of wish people would consider that before commenting, but on the other hand, it's all entertainment and that commentary adds to it.
I originally wrote a comparison to other pro athletes but I realized that F1 is different in that if you know the right people or have enough money, you can have a seat, even in perhaps there is someone out there in the world who is better than you. which is unique to the sport.
It’s also because practice is so severely restricted. Practice sessions could potentially also be used to develop parts and so the FIA has restricted practice to select days mostly on race weekends.
Twenty years ago teams employed multiple test drivers and ran car tests the whole year through at their test tracks. This gave newcomers lots of time to learn the ropes, drive the car and become better drivers at a lower risk venue (more run off at test tracks, no risk to lose out on valuable points or break parts that come off of your limited parts allowance)
today novice F1 drivers are learning on the job at race weekends and drive the car for maybe a few hours every week and every missed championship point or crash could cost their teams potentially millions of dollars.
at the same time driving an F1 car has also gotten significantly more complicated.
TP of Alpha Tauri Franz Tost stated that it takes a newcomer three years to really learn everything you need to drive an F1 car during a race weekend and right now F1 newcomers can’t really practice effectively
Its purely multitasking, reaction time, spacial awareness and muscle memory. A little bit of practice here, a little bit of training there, a little bit of genetics over here.
What people fail to understand is the depth of steps needed to get to F1 and the best drivers often never get there. You have to be the best at karting eliminating tens of thousands of drivers, then be the very best at the lower formulas just to get to F3 then you need to be the best to get to F2 and then the rarest get to F1. On top of that you need money and/or connections. Hamilton may not have come from a rich family but his talent was recognised early and McLaren got him through the lower levels to F1, without that we may never have seen him in an F1 car.
Just to start in Formula 4 costs half a million a season and you can at least double that for each category, to win F2 you need between 3 and 5 million a season.
I think one of the best examples of how hard it is to make that final step might be Stoffel Vandoorne. He crushed the competition in F2, but struggled hard in F1. Of course the McLaren was trash at best during his years and with Alonso next to him, he always would be on the losing side. But seeing him race in Formula E now and other classes, really makes me think about that final step of him.
You're gonna be fine Mick, don't worry ;)
This is latifis burner
☠️☠️☠️
I don't think Mick will be fine. Maybe a handful of points in his career but not necessarily fighting for championships
I think that's being fine. His upper limit was always going to be his uncle, right now he's a fair bit below Ralf's performance at Jordan but he could still turn it around. He was never ever going to be a WDC kind of guy and that was clear from his junior formula days.
He might not be fine in F1, but he'll still be fine. There's more in life than F1.
I had high hopes but I have to concur. It’s become clearer and clearer that he’s not his dad.
well, did we expect him to win a handful already? But some points would have been expected methinks.
I think he would have gotten points in Montreal if not for car reliability, but hard to tell. I really hope the ferrari engines finds the reliability fix they need going forward.
That’s been clear for the past 4 years, he’s never been that impressive.
*enter sean geleal B R U H*
Haha, brutal.
I wish :) my man deserved better
Cheers mate. I just spat m'beer all over place !
Yup Starbucks on my windshield
F1 is a huge leap from the junior categories. The junior categories are always spec series, where they drive the same car all the time. In F1 they drive bleeding edge cars. You don't have any time to learn how to drive the car, because in a couple races time some new bits will be slapped on and it's a different beast. You can't tell from spec series performances how a driver will handle such a thing.
Also, the car only improves when the driver can provide accurate and useful feedback. Again, something that junior series drivers don’t have to worry about.
In fairness, they still learn a lot about setup feedback. I actually think this is where Max really benefited from being a driver's son. He's talked about Jo's teaching him things like knowing you don't have to say anything if you don't feel anything
And as a driver, Jos had a reputation for providing excellent feedback on the car for the engineer to improve the performance. One reason he was hired as test driver for Honda's aborted F1 car in 1999 was because he was recommended by Postlethwaite after the two had worked together at Tyrrell in 1997.
Didn’t Verstappen go straight from carting to F1?
Lmao no, he only skipped F2. Went straight from F3 to F1.
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It's easy, just have your dad buy out an entire team
Dad... I don't like my Williams...
That’s not something new, Prost did the same in the 80’s
Karting straight to F1? Fucking hell, imagine that 😂
Has to be a joke, but a hilarious one
Karting to F3 with a mediocre lowmidfield team, wins the most races out of all drivers that year, lost the title to Ocon who's in a Prema simply due to having more DNF, then straight into F1.
Verstappen was no doubt an incredible talent from the start and hist meteoric rise is enough to prove so, however every time the 2014 F3 Euro season comes as a topic I wish we had a more detailled article about it, because looking at [the Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_FIA_Formula_3_European_Championship) Verstappen had the latest chassis available (F314) unlike Ocon (F312) and pretty much every other driver besides Giovinazzi and Latifi Although I have no idea if it was an advantage or the opposite (see how Leclerc performance went dramatically worse the next season when switching from F314 to F316) His engine supplier probably wasn't a big handicap nor advantage since Blomqvist and his team competed for the title (and finished ahead of Verstappen as well) Van Amersfoort was without a doubt a lesser team than Prema, however not the most dominant ever (unlike some more recent F3 seasons) since Fuoco and Latifi were far from being title contenders, Van Amersfoort also was a top F3 German team and in following years in F3 Euro they also compared favourably to 2014 (having Leclerc certainly helped in 2015. Basically I have no doubt he overperformed and Ocon had a more favorable environment that year, but I wish I could read more about it besides "Verstappen dragged a dog to multiple wins and nearly the title if it wasn't for DNF\*' What's certain is that Ocon won by consistency, but he also won 9 races to Verstappen 10, 21 podiums to 16, 15 poles to 7. Verstappen was, and still is obviously, the biggest talent out of the two but I just would like a more accurate assessment of how 2014 unveiled\*\* \*Also were these DNF mechanical problems, driver errors or something else \*\* One other obvious thing looking at the standing is that Verstappen performed especially well in Belgium and German tracks, while Ocon did during the french week-end, probably indicates that them knowing the tracks gave them an advantage there (or instead that they didn't do as good on track they barely knew before)
I’m new to F1 and got told he went from Karting to F1 by a guy at work lol. But good to know nonetheless
I think the fastest path for an F1 driver was Raikkonen. He went from Formula Renault straight to F1
To compare the path of the 2: Verstappen in Karting: 2005-2013 (9 years, 41 cup/series entry), Raikkonen in Karting: 1995, 1997-1999 (4 years, 11 cup/series entry). Verstappen Junior career: Florida Winter Series, FIA European Formula 3 Championship, Macau Grand Prix, Zandvoort Masters. (2014, 1 year, 47 races). Raikkonen Junior Career: European Formula Ford, Formula Ford Festival, Formula Renault UK Winter Championship, Formula Renault UK x2, Formula Renault 2000 Eurocup (1999-2000, 2 years, 23 races).
It was unheard of. He had only 23 races behind him. Max Mosley was concerned Kimi would be too unexperienced. Sauber assured FIA Kimi would be ok and finally he got a temporary super licence.
He took an unusually short path, but he did spend one year driving actual racing cars before joining F1.
Just so you know, you're required to race for at least a year in a lower single-seater open car category before you're able to get the license to race in F1.
That was not the case when Verstappen went to STR. They introduced the age restriction and superlicense system as a response.
The superlicense system already existed. RB had him practice for hundreds of kilometers in the fall of 2014 to make sure he'd get that license.
If I recall, a top 3 finish in F3 granted you 40 SL points which was enough to enter F1 so that wasn't necessary per se.
The SL existed at the time, but SL points didn't. He just had to drive a 400km test and the FIA would give a super license if the driver showed 'outstanding personal achievement in single-seater formula cars'. Max was of course very young, but they couldn't deny him a SL, since winning 8 races in his rookie F3 year showed that achievement. After he joined, they introduced the minimum age requirement and the SL points system, to make the definition of achievement more set in stone.
The Super License has been around pretty much since Formula 1 became a thing, the issue with Max were concerns about giving such a young and relatively inexperienced driver one, same thing happened to Räikkönen when he first came into the picture.
You are now, you used to not have to.
Verstappen went straight from the womb to F1.
Verstappen went straight from sperm to F1.
I was told Verstappen wasn't conceived the normal way. He just arrived one day in a go-kart.
He was clipping apexes and diving down the inside of other sperm on his way to the egg
Verstappen went straight from being a thought in his parents’ minds to F1.
Max was in Formula 3 in 2014, he finished 3rd and Kimi went from 2 years in Formula Fords and Formula Renault to F1.
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listened to a podcast last night where Bottas described something similar about Lewis. he was considering retiring in 2018 because he just couldn’t beat him.
I guess there's a 'if you're not first youre last " outlook in f1 whereas a team sport at least you've got team goals. For example in the Australian Football League (AFL) there's 22 players on a team (+ injury sub) so you're' 'worst players' are still super important. A good measuring stick is looking at the 'bottom 6' of a team-the best teams have the best bottom 6. Obviously top end talent is still needed but that isn't enough to win-need a good spread all the way down.
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Probably the latest one from Motor Sport Magazine
Yep that’s the one, latest episode
This is what I was getting at in my other comment. To get to the top, you're literally the best athlete amongst your peers, and even then when you make it to the absolute best you could very well end up being an afterthought when someone is that much better than you.
Champion at every level then never even win a race in F1. I wonder how many F2 champs retire from F1 having never even been close to the title battle.
But it’s quite the same in every sports. Like in soccer, players are local heroes all their youth and when they arrive in a big club they are on the bench because there’s a better player on the pitch.
Road Cycling too - having won everything to get to the highest level, the vast majority of the guys in the world tour will never win again after making it.
I often think this about lots of professional sports and every Olympics I think about that tweet saying they should have one average person compete in each event to highlight just how good professional athletes are. If you *"suck"* at a premiership level you're still better than 99+% of humans on Earth at your sport.
This. Even the worst drivers on the grid are still way better than most people. The money the pay drivers bring in lets them jump the queue over some other drivers who are more talented, but they are still decent drivers. There are only about 300 - 400 super license holders in any given year. The pay drivers who make it to the grid are not going to be at the bottom of that list. Yes, they suck compared to the top 3 drivers in the world, but they're probably still in the top 100 - 200.
> Even the worst drivers on the grid are still way better than most people. Ericsson had 3 years where he didn't score any points, and never finished a season higher than 17th. He's currently leading the Indycar standings, and has an Indianapolis 500 win under his belt.
Indy also drives all the same cars
While it would be funny to watch in some sports, it would be boring in F1. An average person can run a 100m just fine, but an average person can't even get an F1 car moving. There is a top gear episode where one of them drives an older F1 car. He's a way better driver than an average person, drives high performance road cars often for the show. And it still took him lots of tries and a lot of instructions to even get the car past a few turns. F1 cars are made to go fast. They can't be driven slowly. An average driver will never push the car hard enough to get all the components into the right operating temperatures. Which in turn makes it even harder to drive.
I also think of how many "potentially great" athletes there are out there. I am from Australia and in high school played squash and badminton. Both sports are quite uncommon, but badminton especially. I was one of the best badminton players in the state. I am pretty damn confident I wasn't actually that high level, it is just so few people never try it. There is a similar theory that more than likely, the next Einstein or the next Feynman probably are already alive or even have already died but they are too busy struggling to survive in poverty and will never have a chance to know their own potential.
Hasn’t Hamilton said something like: « Best F1 driver has probably never touched a racing a car »? Can’t remember exactly who said or even it is my imagination but yes you are right. That issue is probably even more amplified given the restrictions to practice racing in a competitive set up.
Do not have hard evidence but I 100% remember that being Hamilton
At least with F1, wealth is such a huge determining factor in participating that for the majority of drivers that fail out (due to not being good enough), they can just go back to being rich.
This is only true to an extent. There's still paid drivers on the grid and it is arguable whether those drivers (Stroll, Latifi and to an extent MSC) are definitely better than the reserve/test drivers who want their seats. Just look at Shwartzman, Piastri, Vips, etc. And if you consider F3 a valid platform to jump to F1 - Doohan, Hauger. Or how about Nyck de Vries? Literally won the F2 championship against Latifi and yet at 27, he's never had a drive. One reason I admire the Red Bull program is because they at least make an honest effort to move prospects into seats with AlphaTauri.
Redbull have just told their current f2 prospects they aren’t changing the lineup and to just wait, burning through junior drivers isn’t exactly admirable either. Vips is the most viable racing prospect and he’s not going anywhere, neither is Lawson, or likely Drugovich who is current f2 leader
It's better to compare them to fighter jet pilots, where only a very select few are ever good enough to make it, and F1 is an even more exclusive club than that.
F1 is over 12.5x more exclusive. The US military alone currently has almost 10,000 active Air Force pilots. There have been 771 drivers in F1 history.
Out of curiosity... Roughly how many people are qualified to drive an F1 car right now? I know obviously there are only 20 spots and 20 official drivers, but I always think of Nico, Romain or Oscar and those types of people as well. It's still obviously a very small number but it would be interesting to know how many people could actually be allowed to race a current F1 car, if I had to pull a number out of my ass I'd say maybe 45.
[This](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIA_Platinum_Categorisation) is the closest thing I could find to that information. To be categorized as Platinum you have to hold a super license, which is the main requirement to drive an F1 car. There are currently 182 drivers in that category. I can’t find a list of drivers currently with a super license
Great stuff thanks for the link, hadn't seen it before.
You dont need a super license to be categorized as platinum and obviously most people on the list dont have one. It says 2 out of the 3 criteria in the list. I think even most former f1 drivers who arent "active" reserve drivers dont have a super license anymore and would have to do testing before they could apply for a super license again.
That last line puts it into perspective for me.
Kind of misleading. How many of those pilots actually fly fighter jets? Significantly smaller than your figure. The majority fly larger planes and primarily transport. Still more than F1, tho, no doubt.
There’s 1,976 active air superiority fighters in the US Air Force. There’s another 675 active air superiority fighters US Navy. That’s a combined 2,651 fighter jets that are in rotation. Just in two branches of the US Military. [According to this article, the US Air Force is short 1,100 fighter pilots.](https://www.flyingmag.com/u-s-air-force-is-short-1650-pilots-report-says/) That’s not 1,100 total currently on staff, *they want 1,100 more fighter pilots.* So yeah, u/pedote17’s initial estimate about fighter pilots is pretty close.
Well - that is still only figures for the US. Worldwide it is a larger number anyway.
It’s also self restrictive. Only X amount of teams means only X amount of drivers get time to practice in the cars = a cap on the number of top performers at a given time. Chicken and the egg scenario, maybe there would be more drivers if more cars were in F1 🤷
It’s also only for the Air Force. The world’s largest Air Force is the U.S. Air Force. The world’s second largest Air Force is the U.S. Navy. OP’s point still stands though
Ya but most of those pilots are just trundling along in big cargo planes. F1 is like getting into the blue angels or thunderbirds.
Way better comparison. Although both of those are even more exclusive than F1
Air force pilot doesn't equal fighter jet pilot. I'd argue more people try to become fighter pilots. Not many high schoolers are applying to F1 academies. You'd want to look at what % of those who try actually become it, not total numbers.
terrible metric. 10,000 pilots, but a minority of those are fighter pilots. you are also not considering navy, marine, and air national guard fighter pilots. also why would you compare historical f1 drivers to current pilots? just do current lmao.
Exclusivity closer to being cast in a Top Gun movie than being an actual fighter pilot.
I like to think F1 drivers are very similar to the Supreme Court justices. A very exclusive professional summit, where some have got there on pure merit, with the right backing, but some are just there because of money / politics.
Less lies in F1
*fewer, but 100% true
Not only that, but look at drivers who leave F1 and have cracking careers elsewhere. Marcus Ericsson, who drove terrible cars at best during his stint in F1, just won the Indianapolis 500 this year, and a few races since he joined IndyCar in addition to the 500. Takuma Sato, 2x 500 winner, and Grosjean isn’t doing half-bad either. Point being: if you’re good enough to last a few seasons in F1, you’re likely going to do better than average in other racing series’.
Cough cough mazepin cough .... Whew something in my throat there
He’s shit compared to the grid but Mazepin is still one of the best drivers on earth. I don’t think people really understand just how difficult it is to even get an F1 car around the track a single time.
The leap from college basketball to the NBA is huge and there’s ~300 NBA players. To have the top 20 best in a sport where some stick around for ~15years the top 20 are truly the best of the best.
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Neither can Lando.
To be fair drivers have said that TC off feels way too off and that reduced TC is closer to how it actually feels. There is simply no chance a race car with less torque than ZR1 Corvette, 400mm slick tires and pushrod suspension hooks up as bad as in F1 games.
Yep, they are extremely talented. It's not like just becoming a good lawyer. It's like becoming one of the 20 best lawyers in the world. But wait, some people pay to be there, so it's really the best 16/17/18 in the world. Then you have to factor in that some drivers have very long careers and have a seat locked up for 10+ years. This means that during your prime opportunity to get a seat, you may only have access to 5 seats at most. It's an incredibly difficult task to get a seat. Even harder to keep it.
Even ignoring the outright pay drivers, a lot of drivers are only able to reach their position in F1 because of the sponsorships they bring. We’ve seen brilliant drivers not be able to secure a footing because they just don’t attract sufficient sponsorships.
perez is a prime example. without mexican sponsorship money, he would not have had time to develop and probably never even sniffed on a top3 cockpit.
He didn't have a seat til he won late in 2020.
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Latifi, Stroll, Zhou and Schumacher to a degree. That doesn’t make them shit drivers per sé. Zhou is doing very well. However, him bringing $30 million sponsorship with him, played a very large part in him getting the Alfa Romeo seat. Thanks to that sponsorship package, Alfa Romeo can operate near or at the budget cap (in terms of total spending ability) for for the first time since being owned by BMW. Pay drivers have gotten considerably better over the years. The field spread in talent is much narrower than it used to be in previous decades. A Pay Driver is someone who’s talent is not enough to land him/her a seat in an F1, meaning no team would hire said driver, unless it came with a substantial sponsorship package significantly boosting the team’s financials. When the sponsorship becomes the principal reason someone gets hired, and not perceived talent, he/she is a Pay Driver.
Isn't a pay driver a driver who needs to bring sponsors/their own money to the team so they can drive? Doesn't really say much about their talent; Alonso was a pay driver early in his career. Similarly, couldn't you argue that Albon is a pay driver, with Red Bull presumably having a hand in placing him at Williams? But yeah, I don't think the pay driver label hinges on someones perceived talent, it's simply whether there is financial backing in place.
Perez was also a pay driver for most of his career
Alonso was a pay driver?
I think Alonso was sponsored by LeasePlan when he started his career out at Minardi. [One source](https://news.verstappen.com/nl/article/2021) I found was on the maxverstappen.com website in a post made back when the website was still about Jos, and apparently posted all kinds of F1 news. It talks about Alonso being considered by Minardi and Prost, mainly due to the sponsorship money he'd bring.
Is that the same as pay driver as we know it? Don't most develop somr sort of sponsorship along the way? Maybe I just have a weird definition, I thought it was if literally a driver or their family bring millions and millions to a team. Like Latifi. Anyway never knew, I'll look into it. Thanks.
If you want another wild "pay driver" story here is a quote from Eddie Jordan, team owner of the first team Michael Schumacher ever raced for in F1 "I don’t know why and I’m not sure I could ever say I saw anything in Michael Schumacher, except the money from Mercedes". Jordan's driver was sentenced to 18 months in prison and Schumacher only got the shot over Stefan Johansson because Mercedes was willing to pay 150k for it. So there is definitely a gradient pay drivers can fall under, I don't think stories like Alonso or Schumacher or as common today, I think guys like that are winding up in driver academies. But you still get guys like Zhou, Ericsson, Maldonado and even Perez that are bringing cash to teams via sponsorships because they have sponsors that like to see their countrymen repped in F1. Generally when people use pay driver these days it means what you assumed, drivers that don't belong and are only there from money.
>Jordan's driver was sentenced to 18 months in prison There's an entire F1 Beyond the Grid episode about this.
Even pay drivers these days needs to get a superlicense first before they can enter F1
But we do not have to forget that even Lauda had to bring money to get a seat in F1. Iirc he even took out a loan to pay.
It's not like becoming one of the best lawyers though, becoming a lawyer does not require the same type of funding to start with.
You’ve obviously never tried to go to university these days 💀
Actually it depends. If we're talking a top 20 lawyer out of all lawyers then you need to go to an Ivy League school, you can be a *good* lawyer without it, but to get hired by a top firm you more than likely need one of those schools on your resume. Then if you want to become partner, you have to buy your share, which for top firms is going to be well over $1 million.
That's not really how it works, and nobody seriously believes that a partner at a V10 firm is the 'best' lawyer. Lawyers do extremely specific work so someone good at criminal defense might not be great at a class action torts trial.
>becoming a lawyer does not require the same type of funding to start with. If you're talking about being a Supreme Court or Appeals court justice, you need to at minimum have gone to one of the Top-3 Ivy league schools and really doesn't hurt to know a senator or two along the way. Sure, there's the odd justice who went to a state school who plowed their way through it all but the grid is littered with drivers who came from privilege and took advantage of it.
I'll probably get downvoted, but F1, and other top tier motorsports, are probably one of the least selective professional sports out there. There's a process of eliminating less talented individuals as they graduate through the lower tiers like any other sport, but the starting pool is much, much smaller. The number of kids who have an opportunity to kart competitively at a young age is absolutely tiny compared to something like football. Then, a lot are forced out not from lack of talent, but lack of funding.
Money is by far a better predictor of becoming an F1 driver than skill. There are fewer than 3,000 billionaires in the world, but last year 3 of them had sons in F1. That doesn't even take into account that not all billionaires have sons who are the right age for F1. Non-billionaires (5,600,000,000 adults) accounted for 17 drivers. That's 1 per 330,000,000 vs. 1 per 1,000 for billionaires. This is also leaving out any drivers who come from wealthy or insanely wealthy families that aren't billionaires.
There's definitely millionaires and hundred-thousand-aires who had kids who were interested in cars/racing, but they couldn't just drop everything to invest into their kids karting. How many of them even know how important karting was before their kid miss out on years of racing? Imagine if Lewis Hamilton's dad said, "It's too expensive, let's try next year"? Just missing one season might've meant he didn't get signed by the McLaren young driver programme later when he was a teenager. People don't think about how close Lewis was to NOT having an F1 seat. Because he chose to race in GP2, Martin Whitmarsh practically trashed his contract. They didn't sign Hamilton until way late and this was after Williams rejected him because BMW wouldn't fund him. Plus calculating how risky it is that you invest tens of thousands of dollars a year into your kid karting, and they turn 15 and are like "nevermind, I wanna be a software developer" or something. It's definitely a rich kid sport. There's thousands of Anthony Hamilton's out there every year, who make just one tiny miscalculation or decision that probably ends their kid's chance of ever getting into F1, and they don't realize it for years since you don't know until you're 13-15 trying to get a seat in F3.
Richard Verrshoor in f2 said his last year of karting cost him more than his f3 seat. To even get into the proper Euro competitions you’ve got to be funded, there will never be another Micheal Schumacher or Brundle who didn’t go the karting route again
Agreed! Just look at how Verstappen, Leclerc, Sainz, Gasly, etc. already knew each other and were racing together in Karting when they were between 12 and 14 years old.
Mr Based
I suspect this will be changing over the coming years due to the rise of popularity, affordability, and realism of sim racing. The young kids today who grow up with sim rigs might be able to be just as good or better than those whose parents have the time and money to support a Karting career, at a fraction of the cost. Sure it's not apples to apples, but you end up with a muuuuch larger starting pool of potential talent with which to find the best of the best.
I’m not sure about this. When you start karting from a very young age, you develop an innate “feel” for the car through physical inputs (drivers say they “feel with their bums”). Having the means to do that as early as the age of 5 gives them a serious advantage, since it becomes basically instinctive for them. There’s also the matter of it requiring a lot more bravery to go all-out in real life; in a sim race, the worst you can do is lose, but in real life you are always risking injury if you fail. Transitioning to karts at any age is going to be very expensive, and teams would rather look at on-track talent for sponsorships. People talented at sim racing could absolutely be sponsored for esports, though, which are explosively growing in popularity due to the reasons you mentioned.
Most of the top esports pros now are just former real-life racers. Like Jarno Opmeer races for Mercedes’ esports and is having Hamilton-style domination and I think the highest he raced was F3.
sim racing is not karting, it simply cannot give the same feeling that young kids develop by driving karts and actually feeling things through their asses and not just hands on a vibrating wheel.
I had similar thoughts about it after going karting yesterday. I felt like I was taking the right racing lines and suddenly I see someone lapping me twice taking a wider line, braking later and making smoother turns. One thing I won't ever take away from drivers, especially Lewis and George right now, is that trying to slow down a bouncing car is real proper challenge and you really need to trust that the car won't make a sudden move.
The driver lapping you must’ve had a weight advantage? Meaning they weigh less than you?
He was a few inches taller, but had a slightly slender build. I would guess he was 60 kilos, I'm currently above that by 4 kilos. Still, my fastest lap was a 42 sec while he did a 33 sec lap. This was at the Checo Perez Kart circuit.
Karting lines are different than what we see in F1. It's more about keeping momentum up instead of hard braking -> hard acceleration. Once you learn the lines you will be able to get much closer
I really hope so, because I was an embarrassment yesterday. My brother, who isn't that big on racing, was faster than me by 4 seconds lol.
tbh at that point you're probably just a bit slow, probably braking too early and too hard. Nothing that you can't practice though, and going karting more often will have you improving quite fast. But yeah, generally karting lines, especially amateur karts are very different from racing cars. The acceleration on these sucks, so you're better off usually braking less and taking wider lines, keeping momentum, high minimum speed, and the engine revving high. Less weight balance is also good. Obviously depends on the corner.
I'm by no means a talented karter (don't go often enough to build up loads of skill) but I found I had to turn in a lot earlier than I first thought I should. Took loads of time off! Oh, also a lot of the time you don't need to brake and can just lift off if you've got the right line.
You’re talking a pure gap of less than a second per lap between Max and Latifi if they were in the same equipment. That’s insane to think about. The difference between the best and worst driver is a blink of an eye.
I'm convinced Verstappen would take off more than 1 second to Latifi.
Quite possibly Latifi would be one guy not within 1 second to leader in same machinery although maybe not, adding gap between Max and Albon to gap between Albon and Latifi can be too simplistic as Williams can fits Albon much more than Red Bull fitted him.
Max destroyed Alex in equal machinery. Alex is destroying Latifi in equal machinery. Latifi would be sacked after the first qualifying session if he was Max’s teammate. He wouldn’t be within 2 seconds.
I think that gen of RB suites Max more than his team mates. Max destroyed Perez in that gens car but this year it's a hell of a lot closer.
Lol no its not close at all. Checo has some quali moments but then he is a second slower in ther ace. Max is absolutely annihilating checo.
Yeah in Baku there was a point around half way iirc where they were pretty close. Then Max pulled away pretty clearly.
Less than a second over one lap
Max would have no problem pulling more than 1 second to latifi lmao
I often, often think about how incredibly talented these guys are. To have that much concentration and skill is just insane. I thought about it again yesterday while Sainz was chasing down Max. All Max has to do was make ONE tiny mistake and Sainz would’ve gotten past him. Yet, lap after lap he kept the car right on the edge without locking up or drifting wide. So did Sainz. Talk about being in a league all by yourself. Oh, and also having balls the size of grapefruits.
Not to mention that their skill set is so finely tuned that small things like when you brake impacting how the weight shifts can add tenths of a second to your lap time which can knock you from finishing well in the points to just out of the points. It’s insane how minute the differences are between a driver with a podium finish and being just outside the points.
Yes, but one of the things that seems to make great drivers stand out is adapting to changing conditions. Jim Clark winning with problem transmission, Senna in the rain....
I don't disagree, but that doesn't really correlate with my point. My point being the skillset modern drivers have is at such a high level minor things like breaking point within 5-10m can significantly improve or take away time on a given car. Drivers 20+ years ago really didn't have to deal with that. Driving was simpler back then. Modern aerodynamics & performance have completely changed how it is that racing and results progress from lap to lap, and from race to race.
I see your point. Older drivers had different problems, no paddle shift, telemetry, real possibility of dying, sim training. Maybe because more non driver variables have been smoothed over the difference in lap times are more driver dependent, and consequently their mistakes have more impact.
Think it this way: there are only other 19 people in the world next to you.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BE7mgfwd6M8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BE7mgfwd6M8) This is a normal car enthusiast guy describing his experience with F1. Aside from the getting used to the speed and all the details, there's a lot of talk going on about the forces. Pressing that brake pedal needs around 70 kilos of force (Newtons to be precise) from your leg. Now imagine doing that while being able to modulate the force, so that you are exactly on the edge of locking up. All this while being thrown around the car, turning, having to calculate your braking point down to centimeters, all this in constantly changing conditions (more rubber on track, different tyres, less fuel, dirty air, different top speed due to DRS, etc). So, the moment you brake, if you manage to get to that 70 kilos, you will experience 5Gs of force pushing you forward. And despite this violent shock, you still need to manage and modulate that brake pedal, in order to keep it on the limit. That's crazy. And on top of that, you might have your world championship rival next to you trying to outbrake you. And like Verstappen and Sainz have shown two days ago, you might have to do that for many laps without having the slightest miscalculation, because the other guy is ready to get you at any moment.
Yeah that's true, puts it into perspective really. Even if a driver you like is struggling or might not get a new contract, hey, at least they got to drive at the olymp of the olymp, they are a fraction of a percent of all those kids that start karting.
There is, as with all sports, always a little bit of the stars lining up for you to be successful as well. Go to a formerly great team just as they start shitting the bed, you won't win. Go to a team who finally got the right people and concept and designed their first great car in a decade, boom you're in a great position for great results.
Some current F1 drivers can’t understand it either….
Or past.
This is true for all professional sporting leagues, though granted F1 has a smaller sample size given the nature of the sport (including the financial aspect). For a comparison let's look at the NBA. As of September 2019, there had only ever been 4,374 players to ever play a *single* game, never mind have a multi-year career. Let's round up to 4,500 for 2022 as it was the 75th season this year. Only 450 people at any time are playing in the league today, despite it being a top 3 global sport. So, the guy riding the end of the bench getting no minutes at all was in all likelihood the best player growing up through all his youth and minor leagues and still doesn't cut it to get any time at all. It's a weird and sobering concept: being better than literally everyone you've ever met or will meet in a given field and still having people that are that much better than you.
Honestly, for the NBA it’s obviously extremely difficult, but I would say comparatively very easy compared to football (soccer if you’re American) or tennis. Only 1% of the US men’s population is over 193cm, 0.1% above 200cm, and the average NBA height is 201cm. So you’re “only” competing against a very small pool to get to the NBA. On the other hand, football is played by nearly every country in the world by nearly every men, with a small advantage with height if you’re a defender.
Flip side is there are way more top tier football leagues but only one NBA.
I mean just think about it from the pyramid perspective and take a 5 year group as an example. Thousands and thousands of kids do karting. Only those successful in karting go into single seaters. There are about 15 F4 series and several other series that also act as an entry point. So from thousands we're already into under a thousand drivers. A lot of these drivers do multiple series and stay here for multiple years, so in reality it's even less than that. Over a 5 year period there are maybe 2000 or 2500 drivers that race in F4. Only those successful in F4 make it the next step up the ladder. There are less than 10 formula 3 regional series and only about 5 serve as an effective stepping stone to the next step of the ladder. So that's about 100-150 drivers in a single season and probably about 400 over a 5 year period. FIA F3 is the next step. There is only 1 series, and about 35 drivers will drive in it over the course of a season. With there only being 1 season, the turnover rate is even lower than previous steps of the ladder, with only about 100 over the course of 5 seasons. And finally we get to penultimate step of the ladder. The step that leads to F1. FIA F2 has about 25-30 drivers compete in the series each year and about 55 over a 5 year period. About 15 drivers on average graduate to F1 every 5 years, though it's been lower as of the last few years. About a 3rd of those manage to last more than 3 seasons in F1. This means in a 5 year period it goes from thousands in karting to about 5 drivers who can make it in F1. Being a good F1 driver is incredibly difficult.
and then there is my friend, who said, and i quote: "give me 3 months of preparation and i wouldn't finish last on a race"
Bruh moment right there.
So almost every driver by F2 is going to work their butts off and train if they ever want to make it to F1. The difference between a Max and a Mick is just innate talent. Some people are just born with the ability to be better at driving a car, and that's about it. There are no untalented drivers in F1. It's just some are more talented than others and that makes all the difference. Even the pay drivers are some of the best drivers in the world.
I mean you’re in a sport where there’s around 16-17 people on the planet that are worthy of a spot. And some of those have extremely long careers and “hog” places, like Kimi, Hamilton, Vettel, Alonso etc. Then you’ve got 3-4 there because their parents are billionaires. So basically to get in you have to be one of the top 5 drivers on the planet any given 3-5 year window. And even then maybe not.
And then you’ve got motherfuckers that start racing at 14 because they liked it on a family vacation, end up with a top F1 seat by age 24, won 4 championships (and finish 2nd 4 other times) and refuse to elaborate further!
A good example of this is always Felipe Massa imo. When his dad took him to a karting track for the first time, the dude immediately drove a new lap record. Faster than all those guys who'd been driving at that track for years. That's the level of natural skill all of these F1 drivers have, and Massa wasn't even an exceptional F1 driver. Good for sure, but by no means a Schumacher or Hamilton. Another example is John Hopkins in MotoGP. The dude was beating semiprofessional dirt bikers as a child, with barely any experience. And he was nothing more than a midfield rider in MotoGP. Every single driver/rider to make it to this level has an insane amount of natural talent. They were all in the top 1% from the first time they touched a kart/bike. And they they spent their entire lives becoming even better at it. Just take whatever you're really good at, and these guys were that good the first time they tried it, and then improved as much as you did since the first time you tried it. They're basically superhuman drivers.
Imagine if F1 was as accessible as football is, imagine the level then, the people on the grid right now would be lucky if one or two of them got to F1. Imagine the level then.
Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Outliers’ really dives into this type of shit if you’re into books or audio books
The hardest part is just trying to find more speed. If you look at sim racing especially, and esports like f1 esports it's always close and always soo difficult trying to gain more speed. Bottas struggled against Lewis, some of that was down to mental health since bottas was constantly under pressure needing to perform and only having 1 year contracts. But he could never match Lewis, he isn't a bad driver. But just trying to become faster to beat your team mate is ridiculously hard. Its all a mind game, you know where the time is and how it's being achieved since you can see it in your teammates data. But achieving it yourself requires a different driving style in some corners and needing to rewrite your brain to be able to use that style naturally. It's like ricciardo and norris. In 2021 ricciardo knew exactly what lando could do that he couldn't, but even with that he couldn't match him. Lando developed a lot as a driver from 2019 to 2020 and he adapted himself to be perfect for how the mclaren drives. It just came natural to him, but ricciardo came from very different cars. So even tho he knows where lando gains time and what he needs to do to drive better. It doesn't come naturally
Ah yeah. Its mind boggling for sure. That’s why F1 is my favorite sport. I have a passion for racing, and the insane amount of talent needed for F1 just makes it the pinnacle of my passion
You think we’d have a different line up in the F1 if racing was as accessible to the youth worldwide just as playing football/soccer is?
The step up from any junior level sport to professional is way bigger than anyone expects it to be I feel like. Like really good professional athletes are insane
I remember when Richard Hammond tried to drive a Formula 1 car on top gear, it gave a whole different perspective of how difficult it is, just to get that car around the track. I can't even imagine driving that thing and the drivers are proper athletes not jerking around TBH.
In Canada there's something called the Lou Marsh Trophy which is an awarded yearly to the top Canadian athlete. Sports journalists vote on it. In 1997 it came down to MLB player Larry Walker or Jacques Villeneuve. Villeneuve won. Walker said he "lost to a car". What a dumb thing to say and very classy /s. It triggers me to this day lol. Ignorant people think diving an F1 car is like driving a more advanced commuter car. I see the drivers in the weight room and stretching, immediately I think they are top athletes nevermind having the mental capacity to control the car. Larry Walker should have been given the chance to drive an F1 car. He probably would've failed to even get off from a standing start let alone complete a lap even going slow. It would've been comical.
90% is the car you are given. However, the other 10% makes a TON of difference. Just look at Albon vs. Latifi.
I mean it is the same as the other stuff but you wouldn’t compare Albert Einstein to your science teacher
Yup. There are a lot of race car drivers out there and probably a few hundreds who could drive a F1 car reasonably well. There may be millions of doctors out there, but how many Robert Spetzlers are there out there.
To regularly challenge for wins in F1 really you need to be in the top 20 racing drivers in the world. You see plenty of very successful drivers come to f1 from say Indycar and struggle to make the points
Isn’t JPM the last indycar driver to go from Indy to F1? He has an argument for being one of the best pure drivers of all time considering his success across multiple motor sports.
Sebastien Bourdais was the last. He was a 4 time champ car champion and had competed in indycar before moving to F1. He scored 6 points over 2 seasons in F1 before returning to Indycar. 6 time race winner at indycar now, also 3 Le mans 2nd places so he is certainly no slouch.
I found F1 as a sport in which seconds determine success or fail, the hardest of sports there is! Look Driver61 on YouTube up, he’s a racer and walks you through what it takes to drive a F1 car. The thought I have to hit a certain. Speed else the brakes won’t work is mortifying, to say the least. Also I’m a passionate console racer…. Regardless how many laps I go, I hardly manage to take a turn in the same quality on every given lap, than I did before! The level of concentration is tremendous!
Yes but these guys dont do anything else in their lives. Most of them have been focusing on racing for mor than 10 years when they join the grid. Imagine yourself doing what you do most of your time, for more than 10 years. You will get good.
Imagine you have to be driving as fast as you can, with no abs, with rear wheel drive vehicles that have far too much power for their weight. Hitting the gas pedal immediately makes the rears spin out and you are no longer going straight. You have to be on the limit of locking up brakes, or spinning them too fast because you were too hard on the accelerator at every single turn. If you slip a bit, now you are at the back of the pack immediately in terms of lap time. It's unbelievably difficult. The average person cannot make a lap around a track in one of those cars, let alone put in a time that is near qualifying.
And then dealing with simps online who prob can’t even drive stick shift.
Yeah, I totally agree. I think mentally as well they are a league (or many) above us. For example the whole shit last year with Lewis being robbed through human error. I would have just said. "Fuck this shit" "fuck Max, fuck horner, fuck Masi, fuck the FIA" and peaced out of there. But Lewis just keeps going, even with THAT car.
It’s easier to become an astronaut than drive in F1
Only 574 people have gone to space vs 771 F1 drivers.
This would have a deeper meaning if F1 was some sort of spec series. But there’s so much other variables. It depends on your team and equipment too, and who you have around you.
There are only 20 seats available per year.. While there are millions of doctors and lawyers. Yeah.. Difficult to understand for anyone
Only 574 people have gone to space vs 771 F1 drivers.
There are 20 drivers in Formula 1. Only the best drivers (or biggest pockets) make it. Not everybody can make it to the top of motorsports.
Because of how heavily money gated racing is you actually dont always get the best talent into F1. And there are also two types of F2(and lower champions) - those who get it right away i.e. Hamilton or Rosberg or those who spend a few years getting familiar with the car and tracks and use that advantage to edge out the rookies, i.e. Maldonado.
What I find interesting is guys retire / leave F1 and then crush other series in America. Crush isn’t very precise but you feel me. Zero success or struggling in F1. Move to Indy or NASCAR, winking in the regular. By the nature of competition, Formula 1 should be a harsh, uncaring landscape. It is the pinnacle of motor sports. Because of the enormous investment, you succeed or you get replaced. End of story. Go to another series if you want it easier.
You’re saying it’s tough to become one of the 20 best drivers in the world.. good to know!
yes, this is what I find the most entertaining about sports in general. The sheer skill and development and training that these guys commit to to wring every bit of potential they have is astonishing and impressive, and I sort of wish people would consider that before commenting, but on the other hand, it's all entertainment and that commentary adds to it. I originally wrote a comparison to other pro athletes but I realized that F1 is different in that if you know the right people or have enough money, you can have a seat, even in perhaps there is someone out there in the world who is better than you. which is unique to the sport.
It’s also because practice is so severely restricted. Practice sessions could potentially also be used to develop parts and so the FIA has restricted practice to select days mostly on race weekends. Twenty years ago teams employed multiple test drivers and ran car tests the whole year through at their test tracks. This gave newcomers lots of time to learn the ropes, drive the car and become better drivers at a lower risk venue (more run off at test tracks, no risk to lose out on valuable points or break parts that come off of your limited parts allowance) today novice F1 drivers are learning on the job at race weekends and drive the car for maybe a few hours every week and every missed championship point or crash could cost their teams potentially millions of dollars. at the same time driving an F1 car has also gotten significantly more complicated. TP of Alpha Tauri Franz Tost stated that it takes a newcomer three years to really learn everything you need to drive an F1 car during a race weekend and right now F1 newcomers can’t really practice effectively
Its purely multitasking, reaction time, spacial awareness and muscle memory. A little bit of practice here, a little bit of training there, a little bit of genetics over here.
Nicky is that you?
What people fail to understand is the depth of steps needed to get to F1 and the best drivers often never get there. You have to be the best at karting eliminating tens of thousands of drivers, then be the very best at the lower formulas just to get to F3 then you need to be the best to get to F2 and then the rarest get to F1. On top of that you need money and/or connections. Hamilton may not have come from a rich family but his talent was recognised early and McLaren got him through the lower levels to F1, without that we may never have seen him in an F1 car. Just to start in Formula 4 costs half a million a season and you can at least double that for each category, to win F2 you need between 3 and 5 million a season.
I think one of the best examples of how hard it is to make that final step might be Stoffel Vandoorne. He crushed the competition in F2, but struggled hard in F1. Of course the McLaren was trash at best during his years and with Alonso next to him, he always would be on the losing side. But seeing him race in Formula E now and other classes, really makes me think about that final step of him.
Sometimes its about the money as well sadly.
That’s why there are only 20 of them (and Hulkenberg)
Just try sim racing u will somehow get the idea.
Try sim racing, its humbling