What I wanted to say is that one of the main reasons behind McLaren’s decision to bring another top driver in the team was also development skill.

“Alonso is one of the most wanteds on the grid if not the most wanted of all”

If that was true, why did Santander have to buy him a Ferrari seat ?

Your point is whether is anything that would benefit from testing with specific pre-determined inputs rather than inputs that are known precisely in the post-test analysis. My sense is that the data collection so effective that the driver’s feedback on what the tyres are doing (relatively un-monitored with just pressure and surface temperature available) would be more beneficial, but this is just my gut feel as a qualified, but in this case armchair, engineer.

I remember reading it somewhere that an anonymous team member mentioned it. Unfortunately I don’t document everything I read everywhere and this wasn’t recent so I’m afraid I can’t provide the source.

Can you provide proof that you’ve read everything out there? IF not then maybe you missed this!!

“Rubens set up and just tweeked it slightly, in terms of set up and development work that was more Rubeino area rather than Jenson.”

“He used Rubens’ set up throughout the season.”

“That’s what I’ve heard too… Rubens is probably the best in F1 at describing what the car is doing and then working to make it better.”

“although I think those that are heralded as good dev drivers (like Rubens) will always help with the overall understanding of the setup that will most optimise the baseline setup.”

“I too think that Rubens did the quality input rather than Button and that Hamilton is not particularly strong and is often asking more about what he should expect than he inputs in what he thinks he needs”

end-quotes

As for Michael, I read in one of his biographies that though he was also very good in describing his feelings about the car to the engineers, his methodology was that he’d rather have the car designed to suit his driving style, rather than work a problem up. He was good at adapting to the present car also, but he preferred to have a car which suited his own style, rather than extensive development on an under-performing car which didn’t suit his style.

best example, Eric Barnard’s designed Ferraris in the 96/97 seasons, whom openly disagreed with Schumacher’s development approach. Barnard worked with someone like Prost, who he said was the best driver at describing the technical side of the car. However Schumacher he said, had a totally different driving style, and preferred lots of oversteer, rather than understeer (Schumacher was the kind of driver who would make hundreds of minute steering corrections throughout the lap, whereas other drivers were more smooth with the steering). Instead of trying to improve upon Barnard’s current design Schumacher continually wanted something which meant that the car had to be redesigned from scratch, from the ground up and totally different from what Barnard thought was the best way to design. Consequently Barnard left, and Ross Brawn and Rory Bryne came in from Benetton.

Likewise the McLarens of the late 80s and early 90s were designed around Senna. They said McLaren had so much difficulty redesigning it after Senna left that it took them another 5 years before it was able to challenge the Williams and Ferrai and Hakkinen was to win the championship with it.

Therefore to think about as to a driver’s contribution to car development, I think Rubens was perhaps a better test driver, whereas Michael simply morphed the car to suit his driving style. I also think this is what is happening at Mercedes now, As Ralf Schumacher said that Michael doesn’t like a car with understeer, and Nico at the present is more comfortable with the car, therefore I can imagine why Ross Brawn says that they still have a lot of development work to do, even though on low-fuel it seems Rosberg can provide a lap-time which is just as fast as the other three top cars.