SAKHIR, Bahrain : Williams driver Carlos Sainz expressed frustration on Friday at Formula One’s limited pre-season testing and suggested teams should be allowed to trade time in the simulator for track mileage.
The Spaniard, now a director of the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association (GPDA), told reporters on the final day of testing in Bahrain that he would have liked more laps following his move from Ferrari.
Sainz was fastest on Thursday and did a hefty 127 laps but that was his sole full day in the car and he sat out Friday with the car handed over to teammate Alex Albon.
Each driver did half a day on Wednesday with teams limited to one car.
The season starts in Melbourne on March 16.
“It feels weird that I got (only) a day and a half and now I need to go racing,” said Sainz, an experienced winner of four races and now on his fifth team. “It feels not enough, feels very little. Ridiculously little.
“I feel like I don’t know exactly where to go with setup. I don’t know exactly where to go with driving, where to extract that last little bit of lap time and performance,” he added.
“I guess I will have to discover that in the first few races once you start putting plenty of soft tyres in and low fuel.”
Sainz said the best way to prepare properly was on a track with a real, current car and Formula One could put more effort into improving testing.
“You have a lot of teams spending an infinite amount of money on simulators, you have drivers flying to the UK from Monaco to go to a simulator,” he added.
“And I don’t understand why we get three days of testing when all that money could be invested into eight days of testing, I’m not asking for too much, eight or 10 days where every team picks their places to test.
“It’s nice to have a collective test, this should stay, but my proposal would be to put in the budget cap the number of days, put in the budget cap the simulator also and see where the teams want to spend their money, if it’s in the sim or 10 testing days.
“Rookies and F1 teams would benefit because even if the simulators are good, they are not as good as some of the engineers or people tend to believe they are.”
