James Rossiter has highlighted the plight of young drivers who have few testing opportunities and at times have to pay for them.
Last week the 25-year-old tested the new VJM06 for Force India at the Jerez circuit, moving from the simulator to the actual track.
Rossiter, though, is one of the very few lucky ones as he got to test for BAR and Honda before the ban on in-season testing was introduced in 2009.
"I was very lucky that I got to do tens of thousands of kilometres in a Formula One car while I was still racing in Formula Three and that made a huge difference," he told F1 Fanatic.
"I feel very sorry in a way for the young drivers these days that the young talent doesn't really get a chance to show what it can do in a Formula One car, unfortunately at the moment it seems to be, unless it's paying for a test."
The Brit believes his experience out on track with those teams helped him secure his current job as Force India's simulator test driver.
"It was more important that I had F1 experience. You know what a car should feel like, how to tune a hydraulic diff, how to work with the engineers on that level.
"And that's very different compared to, say, GP3 or GP2 or anything like that. Because in a GP3 or GP2 car you don't have all the things you can change on a Formula One car.
"You can really only get used to all these changes that engineers like doing in Formula One if you've driven a Formula One car."
