Oct.23 (GMM) Franz Tost is relieved that Sebastien Loeb’s opportunity to make a one-off formula one debut in a Toro Rosso at Abu Dhabi did not eventuate.
The team’s Austrian boss said he would have agreed to owner Red Bull putting the multiple world rally champion at the wheel of a Faenza based car.
“If Red Bull wanted something like that for marketing reasons, then it would of course have been done,” Tost told Germany’s Auto Motor und Sport.
But he insists the idea made “little sense” from a “sporting point of view”.
“The competition in formula one is higher than ever before,” Todt insisted, explaining that Loeb would need about 15,000 test kilometres under his belt in order to be competitive.
“At worst, Loeb would have been between three and four seconds behind,” he added, referring to specialist open-wheeler drivers like Luca Badoer, who raced this year and was markedly off the pace.
“He (Loeb) knows how to drive a car: you don’t become rally world champion six times if you don’t. But (in F1) the last second is the most difficult, which is something Valentino Rossi realised as well,” Tost said.
