Test Driver good team VS Starter bad ?

Hard to say as there are examples of success and failure from both approaches

I think if you are a young driver being a testdriver in a good team gives you great understanding of the whole business - you learn in a very systematic manner in a supportive team. By young I am refering to people in the late teens very eearly twenties.

If you move from racing to test driver your career as a race car driver is pretty much over. Olivier Panis was the only one who sort of broke the trend. Alex Wurz has been trying for ages to duck the trend.

But there are new drivers who started off with poor cars immediately and made a name for themselves - Eg. Alonso, Schumacher, Webber, etc. But these were excellent drivers to begin with and their rise to the top was inevitable. However, Minardi and Jordan is littered with examples of drivers who joined them but got kicked out and never cam back - Alex Yoong for instance

 

I would have to say racing on a so-so team (Like Minardi or Jordan) will always be much better than testing for a top teir team.

 

Agreed. Unless all you want to do is drive around by yourself for hours on end. Right now, Friday practice is about as glamorous as it gets for these guys. I think it would be cool to let them race, but it won't happen. It seems to me like when Panis took the McLaren test job a few years back it created this aura of having revolutionized the position, after which drivers started opting for similar top test spots rather than crappy race rides. Unfortunately I don't think it has panned out as most of them hoped, other than the occasional fill-in spot for Marc Gene. F1 moves on way too quickly, and once you step off the starting grid it's very difficult to make it back.