Might sound like a mad idea, but with fewer races you could kick off the season with a non-Championship race weekend. Full practice sessions, but null points. Not testing, but it's essentially a glorified test session. Good venue and perhaps premium tickets. Perhaps showcase some feeder series, too. Might make it too much of a carnival, but perhaps you could allow the teams to run a third car with their test driver or a former driver with a super licence. Might be a disaster, but I wouldn't mind seeing Prost, Piquet and Mansell in a car again. Something like that, but perhaps Button, Räikkönen and Vettel would make more sense.

This situation puts Vasseur’s political skills to the test. While the testing ban was initially driven by cost concerns, the budget cap makes this rationale obsolete.

Do you think there's a serious desire at Ferrari to get back to more real testing? They too have had 15+ years to adapt to the new situation.

“I think 20 races would be great, keeping up the quality instead of the quantity”

Yep.

In response to the scheduling point, I’ve long believed that the Friday of F1 weekends should be scheduled as a test day.

With the exception of sprint weekends - it is. Every team is given two 1 hour sessions to do whatever they want.

Qualifying would then take place on Saturday afternoon with the race on Sunday afternoon, with the mornings given over to the support categories.

You clearly underestimate the value support categories offer to both the audience and the event promoter.
Friday is almost universally deemed boring enough as it is without taking away the variety and making the entire day non-competitive. Teams don't even (need or want to) use all the track time available to them as it is - why would they want an additional 6 hours of it with only a fraction of the audience ogling their sponsors?

Whatever it is the teams are getting, or think they are getting, it isn’t making them win races.

It is for one of them, and they are doing their design and development the same way as everyone else.
They are just doing it better.

In the past there were more 'things' for them to do better than each other, along with more ways to get it wrong.
The biggest difference being that they now rely more on data than drivers to steer their development direction.

It will be interesting to see if Red Bull's comment about the new design being faster in their simulations can also be said about the real car. The Mercedes design seemed good to them, too. At least Red Bull can always go back to last year's car. Would make for a good season if Max was in a car slightly off the pace of the McLarens.

I think more testing days might lead to more competitiveness. At least 4 days and maybe it should be organised as 4 days out of five possible days in one week to allow for adjustments to be made.

It was essentially unrestricted.

Teams could run as often as they were able to with as many cars as they could run at any circuit that had an F1 grade race or testing licence.

And it was great for fans as there was not only more opportunities to go and watch F1 track action but it was also super cheap and at times even free.

You didn't get the organised group tests that every team would attend so we would often turn up to the 1st race of the year with no idea where anyone's pace was and often the teams weren't sure where there pace was in comparison to others either.

In response to the scheduling point, I've long believed that the Friday of F1 weekends should be scheduled as a test day. Open the track for the whole day and let teams run as much as they want, with restrictions on parts etc only kicking in from the 'official' start of the weekend on Saturday.

Qualifying would then take place on Saturday afternoon with the race on Sunday afternoon, with the mornings given over to the support categories. There would be no need for a Saturday practice session given the amount of running possible on the Friday.

get more useful information with less time and resources in the virtual world

And yet F1 has just had the least competitive decade in its history.

Whatever it is the teams are getting, or think they are getting, it isn't making them win races.

No wonder Ferrari did so well

Indeed, even if a car has a crash worthy of scrapping the tub they still have a third car for the GP no problem. I assume less testing is appealing to fom because they think it may make things unpredictable. But it what sense? How true is this in reality, perhaps it more likely means teams are less ready to get the most out of their car, in theory in help the dominant team more!

Teams can use multiple cars - they just can't use them at the same time. (They can use different ones on different days, for example).

One of the motivations behind restricting teams to one car is that pre-season testing is fundamentally about testing the car's design and engineering aspects - it is not about the drivers.
Which should be rather satisfying to those who consider F1 to be primarily about building the best car…

@skipgamer
In a budget-capped formula, testing ban seem unnecessary. Teams have the freedom to develop their cars within the budgetary constraints using suitable resources. The argument regarding costs is somewhat flawed. Consider Ferrari, with access to Fiorano in their backyard and Mugello for free. Would it be more costly to test on the track or invest in advanced simulators, wind tunnels, computational power, and software ?

McLaren and RBR heavily invested in wind tunnels and simulators since the mid-noughties. Mercedes caught up during the hybrid era. None of them are eager to relinquish their advantage over the rest of the field. This situation puts Vasseur's political skills to the test. While the testing ban was initially driven by cost concerns, the budget cap makes this rationale obsolete.

https://www.atlasf1.com/news/testing/index.html

Here's a great link to a summary of f1 testing in the 2000s and late 90s

If F1 is seriously only going to have just 3 days of testing moving forward, at least let the teams make the most of those 3 days.