Gary Anderson: Cadillac needs to find a young driver

      In various sources, suggestions are sounding increasingly confident that Cadillac has settled on the lineup, and in the debut season the American team will field Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas.

      Of course, the management of General Motors’ factory project in Formula 1 have their own reasons for this, but that does not mean everyone is prepared to accept such a decision as the right one. Time will tell, however, and Gary Anderson, an expert at The Race and a former racing-car designer who once built Jordan’s first chassis, doubts the effectiveness of such an approach.

      Gary Anderson: “For any new team preparing to enter Formula 1, the experience its drivers possess is critically important. This is mainly because the amount of testing on real circuits is very limited, and debutants, unlike other teams in the championship, by definition do not have cars from previous years with which to optimise all the necessary working procedures.

      All of this will have to be dealt with during the preseason tests, and time flies very quickly there. Before you know it, you have to take the start of the first Grand Prix.

      However, simulators, so necessary to modern F1 teams, can make their lives somewhat easier. Therefore I believe that if Cadillac had included in its lineup an experienced professional paired with a young and promising talent, that would be the right approach.

      Cadillac needs to spend a year or two searching for a driver who can produce good results immediately once the team reaches a normal level. And in the first two seasons even the most outstanding drivers will only be likely to score points by chance — and even then it would be akin to a miracle.

      By the time the team is ready for major achievements, Bottas and Pérez will long have passed their peak. At that point it will be too late to look for talented drivers, and Cadillac will still be playing catch-up.

      In 1991, when the Jordan team debuted in Formula 1, we ran Andrea de Cesaris and Bertrand Gachot, and their experience helped us get through pre-qualifying (at that time the qualifying format included a preliminary selection stage).

      We needed them in the first half of the season, although in those days, if your budget allowed, you could do as many tests as you wanted until something started to work.

      But when Michael Schumacher came to Spa, it immediately became clear what a bright young talent could do. He spent just one weekend with us, but that was already enough for de Cesaris to understand something. The driver’s job is to give everything behind the wheel, not to try to make the car he is given resemble the machinery he drove at earlier stages of his career.”

      Gary Anderson is referring to a specific historical and statistical fact: the 22-year-old Schumacher, at the wheel of an unfamiliar car and on a circuit he did not know very well, qualified seventh then, while the experienced de Cesaris was only 11th.