F1 News
McLaren: 'Ricciardo needs three more race weekends to feel at home'
- GPblog.com
The amount of preparation that drivers had this season was very limited. Some new drivers and drivers who switched teams have already indicated that they are not performing at one hundred percent of their capacity in the first races of this season. McLaren pleads to go back to more testing in 2022.
For the 2021 season the number of test days was reduced to three, giving each driver only one and a half days to get used to the new car. With the agreement of all the teams this was decided upon to save costs and because the cars have changed relatively little compared to last season.
Cars are very complex
Still, the time it takes for drivers to adapt to a new car should not be underestimated, McLaren's Andreas Seidl believes. "These drivers are all very talented and have a lot of experience. They can also get up to speed very quickly. But these cars are very complex," he is quoted by Motorsport-Total.com. "You can't just hop from one car to another when you only have a day and a half to test."
Although his own driver Daniel Ricciardo is also affected by this, this is not meant as a criticism of the decision to arrange it this way this season, but does hope it is reversed for next season. "Two tests with a certain distance in between would be just right, so we can digest the findings of the first test and react to them," said Seidl who believes Ricciardo now needs three more race weekends to feel completely at home in the car.