Modern F1 cars 'are like driving a bus', says Kubica

Robert Kubica isn't a huge fan of modern-specification Formula 1 cars, complaining that they're overweight and need to go on a diet.

"The first thing I noticed was the weight," he told Auto Motor und Sport. "The cars are now at least 60 kilograms too heavy. In slow corners, it feels like a bus."

Kubica is ideally placed to compare today's cars with those of a decade ago. He competed for BMW Sauber and Renault before his rallying crash in 2011 which curtailed his F1 career.

"They weighed 605 kilograms and had 50 kilos of ballast on board," he recalled of cars in the old days. "The tyres also had a shorter life so you could attack the whole race.

Kubica was speaking after taking part in pre-season testing at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya this week.

Williams appointed the 33-year-old as their official reserve and development driver for 2018, after he lost out on a full-time race seat to Russian rookie Sergey Sirotkin.

• Kubica tired of hearing about his 'limitations'

Kubica said that the heavy cars were behind many of the problems in the sport at the moment - particularly a lack of overtaking.

"From the outside it looks like the drivers are all on their own," he said. "That's because everyone is keeping their distance because of overheating.

"It's impossible today, you have to manage everything," he complained.

"Bring down the weight, then many problems will resolve themselves," he suggested.

And he was no fan of the constant stream of information fed to drivers by their race engineers. That wasn't the case when he was originally racing in Grands Prix.

"The drivers today may have gotten lazy," he said. "I see no reason why a good driver needs any instructions from the pits."

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