[am1m]

Originally Posted by ninjatalli

It is pretty much conjecture and grossly incorrect conclusion.
...
When you do a apple-to-apple comparison

Fair enough, good data, I stand corrected. I did consider the driver academies, but those are again mostly feeder lines. It can be argued that the big teams took the trouble to make those feeder lines, but again, I would say they just cast the net wider and don't really bother 'developing' talent in-house.

But overall, I agree, my conclusion looks wrong. Thanks for taking the time to explain why.

[ninjatalli]

Originally Posted by am1m

Fair enough, good data, I stand corrected. I did consider the driver academies, but those are again mostly feeder lines. It can be argued that the big teams took the trouble to make those feeder lines, but again, I would say they just cast the net wider and don't really bother 'developing' talent in-house.

But overall, I agree, my conclusion looks wrong. Thanks for taking the time to explain why.

Good to have the discussion

As for the driver academies, I would say they are now the only relevant feeder lines as the usual route of F3 -> F2 (+other global racing events) -> F1 is no longer reliable or being given the full importance. Case in point 2024 F2 winner was Gabriel Bortoleto and runner-up was Isack Hadjar; look how they were given priority as compared to #6 Kimi Antonelli and #12 Oliver Bearman. All 4 of them were part of different driver academies; so probably the decision is being made from loads of test data that is privy only to the racing teams.

On a high level, the academy based drivers are definitely gaming the system much better than anyone else. Probably a case of a successful symbiotic relationship. And this is all thanks to Red Bull who introduced the concept of drivers' academy back in 2001 and benefitted hugely by it.