Raikkonen to participate in Young Drivers’ Test

2013 F1 season

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Lotus have confirmed they will take advantage of the opportunity to run one of their race drivers in next week’s Young Drivers’ Test.

Kimi Raikkonen will drive for the team at Silverstone to evaluate the changes Pirelli are making to their tyres for the next race at the Hungaroring.

Team mate Romain Grosjean will not participate in the test.

Test drivers Nicolas Prost and Davide Valsecchi will also appear for the team. Valsecchi briefly substituted for an unwell Raikkonen during pre-season testing at the Circuit de Catalunya.

“Our aim on the third day will be to help Pirelli understand the latest changes to their tyres at the same venue where they most notably had issues this season,” said trackside operations director Alan Permane.

“For Nico and Davide it’s an opportunity to learn and improve, while for the team it is a great opportunity to try to refine some of the latest developments we have for the E21.

“Kimi is also allowed to run, enabling him and other race drivers to test tyres for Pirelli. This will benefit both him and Romain by granting us a better understanding of these tyres before we head to the next event in Hungary.”

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Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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12 comments on “Raikkonen to participate in Young Drivers’ Test”

  1. Nico Prost? Not again, how is his limited F1 experience going to help anyway? What about Marco Sorensen? What’s the point of having a Junior Team if this is what’s gonna happen?

    1. I agree, it is a bit strange to see him popping up in the car. On the one hand, judging by his wikipedia entry, he must have some talent, but on the other hand, he is clearly not on the career path of someone breaking into F1. Apparently, someone must be willing to pay quite a bit of money to get him into the seat, although I’ve never completely understood this. Why pay a lot of money so that a no-hoper (and certainly N. Prost is not the worst in this regard – @SpeedyGonzalez anyone?) can get some time in an F1 car?

  2. I’m still unclear about the rules of this year’s young driver’s test. Are all teams allowed to run their race drivers? Do they even have to get a ýoung driver’to sit in one of their cars?

    I’m hoping Ferrari make full use if this by putting Alonso and Massa in the car for all the says. They should finally be able to evaluate some of their upgrades, and it will also give Massa enough time to learn how to keep an f1 car on track

    1. Regular drivers are allowed to take part but they aren’t allowed to develop the car. But if the team field a “young driver” (I believe the criteria is that a young driver must have taken part in fewer than two Grands Prix) then they are allowed to develop the car.

      God knows if they’ll successfully enforce that rule, though.

    2. They should finally be able to evaluate some of their upgrades

      I don’t think that it will be easy for any team to do it because in YDT teams can test new parts but once they are mounted on the car they cannot be changed to guarantee consistency in evaluating the tyres for Pirelli, so the teams won’t do the usual testing procedures of comparing new parts vs old parts but anyway it maybe gives an idea where they are at the moment

    3. Alexander (@)
      12th July 2013, 14:29

      Racing drivers only gets one day of testing.

  3. so how many days of this 3 day test r the race drivers in the car?

  4. I guess Kimi qualifies as a young driver, well, younger than Webber.

    1. and only slightly older as regular participant Paffet, right.

      1. haha, yeh was just going to say, Paffet has been a young driver for how many years now?

  5. Kimi and Testing???

    Did i heard it wrong??

  6. atleast now all can be sure that he’s motivated…:p

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