I think Pedro de la Rosa has the most interesting route in to F1. RC champion to racing driver. Bizarre.

Hope you enjoyed the break, Kate!

The trouble with F1 is that there are currently only 3 methods to get into F1, the main two of which don't necessarily involve talent:

1) Have a humungous pile of money that you can throw at a seat. GP2 is doing well here; the sheer expense of it is proof to a potential F1 tail-ender that a given candidate can back up their claims to a king's ransom with the ability to spend a prince's ransom on their "application form". Other series, being much cheaper, cannot do this.

2) Being picked up by a F1 driver scheme. This is better than 1) because driver schemes rarely pick really rubbish drivers - though they'll take mediocre ones if the marketing hit is right. This seems to happen in the first 2 years of a single-seater career. Certainly I can't think of anyone recently who's picked one up after leaving F3-or-equivalent for the level above. Once picked up by such a scheme, you go where the scheme tells you. Provided you do well, it's unlikely that the series' name will matter, even if it's one of those rare schemes which allows some destination discretion.

3) Go an unconventional route, get a small budget just in case and hope Vijay Mallya or Peter Sauber sees you as an opportunity (very unlikely, but the one and only route non-millionaires who aren't on a driver scheme have got). WSR and DTM appear to be the best routes for this purpose, but in theory anything might work, so anything may be tried.

While this remains the case, there is little incentive for the best drivers to compete with one another or take a route defined by the FIA (as opposed to one proving the size of their wallets), and therefore little likelihood that FIA F3 will be anything more than just another series - if, perhaps, one that contains the best of the talent that has no realistic chance of being in F1. If/when the finances in F1 are sorted, then FIA F3 has a good chance of coaelescing the weaker F3-level series into something powerful.

This is true, and a major problem for drivers. It's not particularly clear which scheme is the best one for a particular driver, and it's rare these days for them to get a second bite at the cherry with a different scheme. Most of the drivers entering in the middle of last decade had been through one driver scheme (at least briefly) and then been taken on some time after leaving by an unconnected team. Even Sebastian Vettel spent part of his apprenticeship at BMW. The idea seems to have faded now, not necessarily to the advantage of anyone involved.

The trouble is that your chances with even a large driver scheme like Red Bull's are better than your chances of being picked up by an "unaffiliated" team, unless you are the possessor of a king's ransom. (In that case, talent is only necessary to a certain minimum level - even teams in desperate need of dollars are not prepared to have fan-made reviews of their seasons posted on YouTube with "Yakety Sax" as the soundtrack!).

My intended point is that while most of the F1 teams are only taking people in driver programmes or with huge wallets, any restructuring of the system will fail to provide the desired effect.

I don't think Jean Todt merely intends for Peter Sauber and Vijay Mallya to have a better idea of who is good; I think he wants a sea change in how teams across the different senior series pick drivers. While there are eleventy billion junior series, it's easy for bosses to say they can't tell who's good. Combining them into a smaller number, on its own, won't sort out the underlying attitudes. Address those, and the restructure stands a chance of working as intended.

It must be remembered that while an aligned tier system would be nice, it cannot be an enforced ladder as such due to competition laws.

It's basically there to stop someone mandating a specific ladder route, for example ensuring only GP2 drivers went to F1, etc...

The trick would be to ensure the requirements to do well in one tier of the ladder closely aligned to the minimum requirements of the next. That way, the FIA would be justified in saying, "Right, you can get to the next level by winning any title of the previous one we approve, or finishing in the top X positions in the series we'd prefer you to do" because fewer of the requirements would have been proven. To a certain extent, this already happens. GP2 is the only series where simply showing up enough times can qualify you for F1, while Indycar has slightly more relaxed qualification rules than WSR, which in turn is easier to qualify through than F3. Even within F3, some series are allowed to be direct stepping stones to F1 (Nippon, most European ones) while others are not (South America, Australia). This is because different series are already acknowledged to have varying relevance to F1.

All that would be needed is to specify that some of the intermediate steps would have requirements on similar lines, differentiated according to relevance for that series. I anticipate that the FIA would only need to specify that organisers need to require relevant experience, and the organisers would then determine themselves what that meant for their series. Licences would become guidelines of capability rather than automatic entrances (except the Superlicence, which would remain the only acceptable way into F1).

To complete the analogy, you have to have the right paperwork to be a lawyer or doctor, but they don't force you to get them in one specific location. They simply state that you can qualify anywhere that meets minimum criteria, and that to specialise or take the more "elite" routes, you must specialise or do particularly well. To get either, it is generally necessary to get specific results on a relevant course, and for the location running the specialised/high-level course to recognise the qualification as of sufficient relevance and quality to enable success on their course. The series are the qualification locations. The FIA is the qualifications co-ordinator. (In British education, a similar debate is occurring concerning a profusion of qualifications believed to be of limited use to learners).

That we should. This is very much more your sort of territory than it is mine.

F1 journalists, repeat after me. WSR is the name of the event, FR3.5 is the series. Though admittedly not as snappy a title ;)

Driver development schemes are certainly not to be relied on. The teams who seriously want a young driver will pick someone very early and make sure they develop the guy themselves to keep full control (Red Bull, Ferrari's Bianchi and Marciello). Everyone else is arguably just hedging their bets by contributing to a drivers career, and gaining good press where it is to be found.

It's also not just about the drivers. It's about the engineers, mechanics, and managers too. Spec series and paint-by-numbers motorsport doesn't offer nearly the same opportunities to develop young engineers and mechanics as the series like F3 and FFord with looser regulations and free engine and chassis choice.

It's going to require a lot of thinking from some completely impartial and uninvested people, but there is most definitely a time limit. Interesting times.

I hate hate hate FR3.5WSRkitchensink SO MUCH! Seriously, trying to work out which is the most appropriate abbreviation for the series gave me a major headache, so a couple of years ago I just gave up and now call it WSR all the time. Would you mind if I just started calling it Fred? ;)

That's a very good point you make about engineers, mechanics, etc. Because working on a car isn't just working on a car - they also need to have a clear sense of which series are likely to elevate them into a role in F1/Le Mans/whatever, and which series are likely to go nowhere.

A wealth of opportunity isn't always a good thing, is it?

West Surrey Racing. Now that takes me back.
:)