Hamilton himself joined Formula One with the top McLaren Mercedes team in 2007 and nearly won the title that year, before taking the crown in 2008 at 23. But he had been signed up by McLaren in his days as a go-kart driver, and the Formula One team supported his career through the lower categories.

“I had the longest apprenticeship of any other driver here; I started when I was 13,” Hamilton said. “I did a lot of work on the simulator. And they put me through a lot of drills and that’s why I arrived at the first race and I was able to do good things.”

The double world champions Fernando Alonso and Sebastian Vettel, currently first and second in the championship, entered the series more slowly. Both started at the same team, one that is known for its apprenticeships of young drivers.

In 2001 at the age of 20, Alonso joined what was then the Minardi team, where he raced for a year before continuing his apprenticeship for a year as a test driver at Renault. He raced at Renault in 2003 and won his first race, before winning the titles in 2005 and 2006.

Vettel, after serving as a reserve driver at the BMW team, where he replaced an injured driver in a race in 2007, joined the former Minardi team, which had been renamed Toro Rosso, in 2008. At age 21, he scored his first victory at the team that year. The next year he joined Red Bull, and went on to win the drivers’ titles in 2010 and 2011.

“When you start in Formula One, you really need to go through a phase of apprenticeship, that’s for sure,” Pic said. “It is different in so many areas. For instance, in the GP2 series, you have just one engineer to speak to in order to improve all parts of the car — the tires, the mechanical aspects, the aerodynamics, etc. — whereas in Formula One you have a specialist for each part of the car and have to work with them all. That changes the whole way of working — and you must learn it.”

“You also learn the car setup, and even the racing itself, where there is a whole new level of strategy,” he added. “In GP2, you just have one pit stop to make and there’s not too many different choices for that. In Formula One, you can make several, you have to choose when and what tires.”