Haas F1’s Guenther Steiner believes that Formula 1 needs a team that is similar to Minardi in order to allow young drivers to have the chance to race in the sport due to the lack of seats available on the grid currently.
F1 needs another team like Minardi for young drivers – Guenther Steiner
Minardi made its debut in 1985 and remained on the grid for over 20 years before being bought out by Red Bull. This buyout meant that the team became what is known as Toro Rosso in present day – a team that allows for the development of young drivers in Red Bull’s talent programme.
In its 20 years on the grid, a number of talents progressed through Minardi to achieve F1 stardom, including Fernando Alonso, Mark Webber and Giancarlo Fisichella.
“The difficulty for young drivers is they need to be in the right time at the right place,” said Haas’ Steiner. “There is nothing else you can do for it, at the moment you cannot even buy a cockpit. When Minardi was around, Minardi was maybe happy to be last, that was their duty to bring drivers up.
“Maybe they were not happy to be last but they could live with it because that was their business model – to develop drivers, that’s a good business model. It’s like when Ricciardo drove the HRT, you knew he was not going to do anything but it gave him experience and that’s not there anymore,” he added.
Due to the rising financial demands of Formula 1, a number of young teams on the grid including Manor, Caterham and HRT have ended up leaving the sport. This has meant that what was a field of 24 drivers has dropped to a field of 20 for 2017. With the exit of small independent teams from F1, a number of talented drivers are being bypassed and may never get their chance to race in the series while the likes of Antonio Giovinazzi, Charles Leclerc and Pierre Gasly wait on the sidelines.
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