Is it such a strange choice?

IT HAS BEEN BILLED BY SOME AS A Leftfield choice. But is it really so strange that Brendon Hartley should be given a Formula 1 chance with Toro Rosso in this weekend’s United States Grand Prix at Austin?

It wouldn’t have been regarded as such when he was still a member of the Red Bull driver programme or in the few years afterwards as he continued on the singleseater ladder. Yet Brendon Hartley Version 2.0 in 2017 is not only a better driver, he is far better qualified for a race seat at the pinnacle of the sport.

The reason is his four-season stint with the Porsche LMP1 team in the World Endurance Championship. Experience of sportscar racing will help any young driver on the way up: they get to work with a team bigger and more complex in structure than any they are likely to have encountered in junior single-seaters. Multiply that by a massive factor in Hartley’s case, because he has been driving for a factory P1 squad in the era of hybrid technology.

Racing for Porsche in the WEC has been Hartley’s finishing school. It has enabled him to take the next step as a driver, but also polished off the rough edges, made him mentally stronger and given him vital experience, inside and out of the car, that will be supremely relevant when he walks through the gates of the Austin paddock.

Andre Lotterer’s one-off at Spa in 2014 for Caterham proved the level of the best P1 WEC drivers – don’t forget he outqualified team-mate Marcus Ericsson. But Hartley is jumping straight into a car significantly faster than his regular Porsche 919 Hybrid. That wasn’t the case for Lotterer, who also had his experience from Super Formula in Japan to fall back on.

The dramatic performance increase in an F1 car for this year will undoubtedly make Hartley’s task that much harder.