{"id":12895,"date":"2011-06-23T06:45:26","date_gmt":"2011-06-23T10:45:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/?p=12895"},"modified":"2011-06-23T06:45:26","modified_gmt":"2011-06-23T10:45:26","slug":"bird-paffett-first-in-line-for-mercedes-seat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/formula-1\/bird-paffett-first-in-line-for-mercedes-seat\/","title":{"rendered":"Bird, Paffett first in line for Mercedes seat"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Mercedes would promote &#8220;one of our test drivers&#8221; to the race cockpit should regulars Michael Schumacher or Nico Rosberg be unable to drive in 2011.<\/p>\n<p>Sergio Perez&#8217;s recovery from his Monaco qualifying crash raised an interesting question, after Sauber&#8217;s official reserve driver Esteban Gutierrez was overlooked for the Montreal seat.<\/p>\n<p>Instead, McLaren&#8217;s Pedro de la Rosa got the nod, while at Mercedes GP for instance it is not believed an official reserve has been nominated at all.<\/p>\n<p>Asked by Auto Motor und Sport this week who is first in line for the Mercedes seats, motor racing vice president Norbert Haug answered: &#8220;One of our test drivers.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>It appears he is referring to GP2 driver and Briton Sam Bird, and the McLaren-linked Gary Paffett, who has just signed a multi-year contract to keep racing with Mercedes in DTM.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #888888;\"><em>\u00a9 RIF | GMM<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mercedes would promote &#8220;one of our test drivers&#8221; to the race cockpit should regulars Michael Schumacher or Nico Rosberg be unable to drive in 2011. Sergio Perez&#8217;s recovery from his Monaco qualifying crash raised an interesting question, after Sauber&#8217;s official reserve driver Esteban Gutierrez was overlooked for the Montreal seat. Instead, McLaren&#8217;s Pedro de la &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[3],"tags":[5262,5340,493,34,2401],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12895"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12895"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12895\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12896,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12895\/revisions\/12896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}