Wouldn’t it be laughable failing your driving test despite being one of the 20 best drivers in the world who contest at Formula 1? Of course it would and this has happened to one of the talents who currently races for Mercedes.
Yes, George Russell could not get his driver’s license in one go as he flunked the test at 17. But the Silver Arrows racer is not the only one who has this embarrassing story of failing the preliminary test you need to pass to lawfully drive civilian cars in England.
Future Haas racer Oliver Bearman has had the same fate. But Carlos Sainz has recently revealed he had no such difficulty with the driver’s test back when he had taken it.
Carlos Sainz is now a Ferrari racer who made the headlines last year by becoming the only non-Red Bull driver to win a Grand Prix. His dominant display at this year’s Australian GP also shows the kind of talent he contains when it comes to racing.
But is the Spaniard as good at driving on the ordinary roads of Madrid as he is at racing on the iconic F1 circuits? The #55 racer recently answered this burning question that his fans had been asking for a long time by sharing his driver’s test results on a YouTube video for Formula 1’s official channel.
The F1 channel admin challenged Carlos to beat his trainer Pierluigi Della Bona at table football while answering some questions about himself. While the Ferrari racer started off, the interviewer asked him, “There’s a lot of pressure on this question Carlos yeah but how many times did it take you to pass your driving test?”
In reply to this, Carlos Sainz said to the host, “Uh, zero, I mean one! Straight away nailed it. No issues. But that’s, I guess, expected, no? For an F1 driver?” And while Carlos might think it is a given fact that F1 racers will pass their driver’s tests, it did not happen for George Russell and Oliver Bearman. But why?
Hailing from Britain, Russell qualified for getting a driver’s license when he turned 16 but the test did not go well for him.
While Carlos Sainz thinks every Formula 1 racer can pass the exam with flying colors, George had actually made a blunder. When he took the test, he was already an established racer, so he put no effort into it. But then, the examiner failed him and George Russell got into a “confrontation” with him.
Speaking on this, George’s father, Steve said, “He failed his first driving test at 17 because he thought that being a great driver on the track was good enough. We had to go back to the test center in King’s Lynn so George could confront him. That didn’t go down well.”
Meanwhile, a junior racer from Carlos Sainz’s own team has failed the driver’s license exam too. Oliver Bearman, who will debut in Formula 1 with Haas next year, performed poorly when his “response to traffic lights” was recorded.
Then, he had to take the help of a driving instructor, David Currey, before he went back to take the test for a second time. And finally, in October 2022, Oliver Bearman got his UK driver’s license.
Thus, Carlos Sainz’s assumption that F1 racers are equally good on the UK roads has been busted.
