Lotus should give Valsecchi the drive. He's the only driver (Apart from Leimar) who has won the GP2 championship but not raced in F1 (Pantano did before he won the championship). Its sad to see Kimi bow out the season like this, but hopefully he will be a lot better for next year.
Meh, but he hardly did it in dominating fashion, he was woefully inconsistent and facing questionable opposition too. He and Leimer are champions of the weakest period in GP2.
And on top of all that, Valsecchi took 5 seasons of GP2 to win it...the 3rd placed driver in the championship (Gutierrez) was only in his 2nd season and the 4th placed driver (Chilton) was in his 3rd season. Neither of those two I rate particularly highly either especially in terms of season-long consistency. Both are drivers that have flashes of speed on the odd weekend but can't hook it up over the season. Yet they finished 3rd and 4th overall...no wonder that Valsecchi and Razia fought for the title with all that experience between them..and they're inconsistent themselves!
Pantano was another driver who won against a relatively weak field due to his vast experience.
And then we have Nico Hulkenburg searching for a seat when he won GP2 in his debut rookie season, even he faced a relatively weak field. But at the very least he won it first try, which is better than expected.
But anyway, lets see what Valsecchi can do now he's got the chance. But I certainly don't agree he's really been a convincing candidate that the teams have overlooked. I can't blame any team for looking at drivers like Van Der Garde who bring money and are just as good drivers (or possibly better).
Its like people talking up Stefano Coletti earlier this year...when most of the field drops out each year due to finance, moving up to F1 or moving to other series (e.g. Indycar, DTM, etc), its to be expected that drivers that have 3 or 4 or more seasons of GP2 experience are winning races. Its all about how they are doing relative to the rookies and how consistent they are.
Grosjean will be a tough opponent to be compared to and CoTA and Interlagos are two very tricky tracks to make your debut on! So I don't expect Valsecchi to perform miracles. If he wants a career in F1, he really needs to do a Kobayashi and drive some confident races to a decent strategy that gets him just in the points and robustly defend his position. Expecting anything more than that is asking too much and anything less won't be enough to convince anyone to sign him next year. (ignoring the money issue)
Perhaps he makes really good sandwiches?
