Glenn Freeman

Another team that was interested in joining the F1 grid around this time was junior racing powerhouse ART, run and co-owned by a certain Fred Vasseur, who we all know in F1 today as Ferrari F1 boss.

Vasseur's co-owner, Nicolas Tott, son of ex-Ferrari boss and at this point FIA president Jean Tott,

told Italian media that ART had expressed an interest in stepping up for 2011, but the plans were not certain yet.

Todd called the F1 step logical for a team that had won a lot in F3 and GP2 by this stage, but he accepted that the step was gigantic.

Which is why IOT never made a concrete declaration that they were going to enter F1.

This was just an interest.

He said they would only go into it if they knew it could be a long term program.

And in the end, they backed out a few weeks after this, citing unfavorable economic conditions.

Ed, would you have liked to see ART step up from the junior ranks to a fully-fledged F1 entry in 2011?

Yeah.

I mean, it would have been a massive throwback, wouldn't it, to kind of an era where, well, where we were at the start of the V10 era when teams could go, right, we're an F3000 team, we're going to take on F1.

The world had moved on by this point.

I covered various championships that ART were often winning in the years leading up to this.

And I remember it must have been around this time doing a thing with Fred where he explained why they weren't doing it.

And I came away from that just going,

having total i was going the reason you're so good is because you've identified that you shouldn't go ahead with this i think it's great that he's ended up in f1 not with his own team but he's you know forging quite the career now as a team boss because i think even even back then he showed he and nicholas showed that they could run a pretty slick operation and fred i think that's why fred is

surviving in F1 but yeah a shame really that just F1 had moved on from being able to do that sort of thing I think but let's get back to what was actually going on in F1 then and a team that was a little disappointed with how they were getting on was Mercedes

This was the first year of the Silver Arrows being back on the grid, having bought Braun over the winter.

But Nico Rosberg said the team's struggles were difficult to explain.

He said that although Mercedes was bringing a lot of developments and making some progress, he felt it was clear it wasn't enough progress.