Test Drive Unlimited (Centrale article)

[Yannick]

This message is just to say thank you for the very informative article on F1 test drivers from the era of unlimited testing. That was posted a few days ago to the gprejects centrale section of the website https://gprejects.com/centrale/features ... esting-era

If this were anything other than the successor of the F1Rejects website, the likes of and Franck Montagny would have to be on this list as well. But because they are so well-known on this very website, they are not.

However, there are more drivers that come to mind who might be interesting choices for a 2nd volume, a follow-up article, if there was to be one.
James Rossiter comes to mind.

Who else can you think of?

[Nuppiz]

First off, thank you for liking the article!

To avoid having to make an extremely long article (or a multi-parter), I wanted to focus on drivers who either tested for a long time or for multiple teams while having few to no race entries. But I admit that I completely forgot about Franck Montagny while making this article being involved with so many teams. I also didn't realise just how long and varied James Rossiter's testing career was, so that's another huge miss (for some reason I considered him to be too recent to have done serious full-time testing).

In fact, I missed quite a few regular testers from the 2000s like Luciano Burti, Antônio Pizzonia etc. I tend to find that era of F1 a lot less fascinating than the 80s and 90s.

Luca Badoer was not included due to having way too many race starts to fit my criteria, while drivers like Emanuele Pirro, Jean-Christophe Boullion and Marc Gené were excluded due to scoring championship points (and apart from Boullion, starting too many races as well).

So perhaps there will be a follow-up at some point, focusing on the drivers I missed or who didn't fit the focus of the first article.

[Yannick]

Thanks again for the article. Hats off to you by posting the only available smile with a hat on in this forum

[Har1MAS1415]

Something different and worthy of a sequel if one can think of enough test drivers that haven't already been mentioned.

[CoopsII]

That was a great article, really enjoyed it. And I was so pleased you included Oliver Gavin, I was a fan and really believed he was the next British superstar back in the day. Cheers for writing!