After several years of witnessing a certain timidity on the part of F1 teams towards young drivers, 2024 was an advent for academy talents. Oliver Bearman did one race at Ferrari and one at Haas and finished in the points on both occasions, while Franco Colapinto opened his tally in three races at Williams.
For Jock Clear, former head of the Ferrari academy and current performance engineer for the Scuderia, this is proof that the work taught in the academies is well enough prepared to familiarize young people with the profession of Formula 1 driver.
“I think it’s a testimony to all academies” Clear said on the F1 Nation podcast. “How is it possible that Bearman can get into a car he’s almost never driven and qualify 11th and work his way up to seventh in his very first race, when he’s never tested this car?
“I think simulators are very good today and it’s a natural evolution of technology. As soon as you tell an F1 team ‘you can’t do any more testing’, the “F1 teams are aggressively developing other ways to do exactly the same job.”
And according to the engineer, it is not inevitable for pilots to have fewer tests: “No one in F1 ever accepts that if you can’t test you will be doomed to being less prepared than before. No, everyone in F1 is wondering how to make sure we are as well prepared than we were before.”
“The fidelity of the simulators is such today that what we see with Colapinto and Ollie is the result. In fact, when they arrive here, all this is not foreign to them. They know what to do with it the tires. They know what to expect. The virtual track they drive on in the simulator is so good.”
“A lot of what we do here with our young drivers happens in the classroom. We give them lessons and we talk to them about how the car works, how to balance the brakes and what it takes do with tires, and I hope what you see in Ollie and Franco is the result of that education.”
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