Wolff: Let top teams run extra car for young drivers

Wrong. I like it.

Can take best two cars points and scrap the third cars points. Or can just scrap all points from junior car and run it just for experience, advertising and testing.

Either which way I like the idea. Will get so much new talent in and will help unseat pay drivers.

If they are in it but wont compete then what use is it? Thats nothing but a dev driver.

Test new drivers to replace old drivers. Increase the new driver throughput to reduce the stagnation at the top. Add to the spectacle.

The biggest issue is if they use those drivers to block opponents.

I have an even better idea: scrap the points of any third finishing car of a team, regardless who the driver is. Just imagine the battle in the Mercedes team if Ocon would challenge Bottas to finish as the second Mercedes-car!

What's even more: Kimi could stay at Ferrari and battle with Leclerc. Or sometimes even with Vettel. I think we should see much more happening on track, instead of cruising for save points. So bring it on!

Well if one car doesnt get any points, you can as well use it as a crash accident creating device ...

You could. But I think you will be disqalified if you did. After all most drivers are not named Nelson Piquet junior...

a lot of platitudinous analysis of the motivations for Mercedes to do this. Of course they want to benefit themselves. But that doesn't preclude the idea from being good. I actually think what Red Bull is doing with Toro Rosso would lend itself more to corruption, but that's a separate discussion. A third car from a top team would be a win for everyone as long as it doesn't grant special advantage to the cars with a third team other than marketing and visibility, which is fair game; after all it would still cost millions of dollars. That challenge would be how to structure the payout because a third Mercedes car would likely mean that the midfield would get hosed. In general I'm in favor of a larger grid. If we can add 5 or 7 extra cars I'd be willing to consider awarding points beyond 10th place.

The concept is nice, but a lot of concepts are nice until put into practice. The engine allocation limits could look good on paper, but we all see how it looks in practice now. I too sorta see the potential pros from this, but lets not forget that this is Mercedes, and they'd abuse the living crap of this. I havent forgotten Ocon's move in Monaco this year.

What's wrong with Button spending 17 years in F1?

Costs. As Wolff says, its significantly more expensive to run a whole B-team compared to just a third car.

Of course. But if you only want to pay for two seats, perhaps you shouldn't go full-Monisha and have 4-5 drivers?

Yeah, that too.

Yeah but, that's racing in F1. Teams are there and there to stay and holding up drivers for the sake of team results is part of the game. And if they didn't implement some kind of penalty then teams would be using new engines for every race instead of getting their acts together. I don't like the penalties but they serve a purpose. With the amount of mileage those cars do in a season they should be able to go the entire season with 1 engine!

Why not whatever teams want to can? Some of the smaller teams can't afford to run 3 cars. I think most fans would like to see more cars on the grid as well as see more drivers get a chance to compete in F1. If they can't get more teams to come in why not let the teams have another car. Of course they would need to sort out the scoring, but so what, the scoring has changed in F1 many times over the years. The whole conversation is probably moot anyway because they would never get all the teams to agree on anything.

.... above was in response to @Calle's post above at 20:08 6 Sept, about Mercedes and Ocon's move.