“Why be a test driver?,” asks GrandPrix.com.
Barrichello will slot into BAR where Anthony Davidson will just have to sit and watch another opportunity fading. Over at Ferrari they have given up even pretending: Luca Badoer and Marc Gene are handsomely paid to pound around and do the grunt work. It is a similar story at McLaren where Alexander Wurz and Pedro de la Rosa wait and hope that Juan Pablo Montoya will play some more tennis or perhaps even fall off a motorbike and down at Renault poor Franck Montagny must feel like the token gesture to France that he is. Ricardo Zonta at Toyota may also feel a little hard done by.
When I wrote my silly season predictions I wrote that I thought that Davidson would get a race drive at BAR, but this was more wishful thinking than anything else. Test drivers are often better than many racers (who can say with a straight face that Massa is better than all of the test drivers mentioned above?), yet all they ever do is get familiar with Jerez and substitute when the race drivers break a bone.
I remember when Michael Schumacher broke his leg in 1999, I was shocked that Ferrari didn’t give Luca Badoer the race seat, opting instead to give it to Mika Salo who had no previous connections to Ferrari. Of course, Badoer was already racing for Minardi — it would be just his luck; the only time a gap appears at Ferrari he’s off racing for somebody else for a change — but surely Minardi wouldn’t have minded. The closest Badoer has got to scoring any points since then was during the freak European Grand Prix of 1999, when his gearbox gave up on him. And he got out of the car and started crying.
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