For Formula1 rookies like George Russell at Williams racing driving in F2 was an excellent preparation for driving an F1 car. What it doesn’t – indeed cannot – do, is prepare them to race one.

“Think of it like this: at Williams, there are 750 people I’m working with. At the race track, there might be 60 or 70. Compare that to an F2 weekend where I would be working with an engineer and two mechanics. Everything is very different,” said Russell.

The relative size of the teams reflects the nature of the task. While F2 has been built to encourage drivers to think about set-up, the choices on offer in that series are limited in scope. F1 is very different: there is a vast amount of performance to be released through set-up. A full garage crew and ranks of engineers, trackside and back at the factory, are there to unlock pace – but the fine tuning process is ultimately led by the driver.

“In F2, I probably looked at the data twice over the course of the whole weekend,” confirms Russell. “It was very much a case of: get in, drive it, make the most of it. F1 is much more complex: you have three practice sessions and a lot of track time, so naturally it’s more about fine-tuning.

“There’s more work to be done in analysing the data; in understanding what you want to focus on to improve the car. There are so many tools to make it go quicker: you have to deal with differential settings, torque settings, brake migration, and shaping those maps to optimise it fully.”