Quote:
Originally Posted by Born Racer
Gary Anderson mentioned on Autosport that, Williams's late arrival aside, there don't seem to be any fundamental handling issues for any cars and it got me thinking that such is the level of CFD and CAD these days that teams arrive at pre-season testing closer to perfection than ever. Not that we need to lavish more pladits on Mercedes, but this does serve to underline how their margin to their rivals last year was impressive, given how it is difficult for teams to steal a march on competitors like in the past.
Perhaps the relative rules stability will ensure an ever bigger scramble for the midfield positions this year: there could be virtually nothing separating them.
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First... I have to say that I have watched some of the Autosport videos and while I have much respect for his career, Gary Anderson tends to get on my nerves. He seems to focus on things like small driver errors in testing and the extrapolate that into bigger problems (that may not be real). But I guess that is what they pay him to do.
As to your comments.. I both agree and disagree. As to what I agree with, I think the broadly the cars and the concepts behind making something generally "quick" are very well known. So they can probably show up with a totally new car and have decently good idea of setups to try on day #1. The ratio of art to science continues to move more and more into the science direction.
What I disagree with is that given the extreme level of competition you have teams implementing complex aero solutions and some teams continue to get it right and others get it wrong. I think that a majority of those who "get it right" likely broadly understand "why" it works and can reproduce the effects year in and out (not that it doesn't take work to do so). The rest, may "think" they know why specific concepts work, but in reality can't fully replicate the promise on the track. Or it works one year, but not the next and they are clueless as to why that happened.
Take Williams and even McLaren as examples. They clearly had specific aero strategies that at the start of the season they "thought" it would work. Then when it doesn't how do you switch from something that your "design numbers" says should work, but the on track performance doesn't prove it out. You have to figure out where you screwed up. You have to question and adjust your prior "knowledge". And that is hard.
As to rules stability, I think stable rules on the power units have allowed Ferrari, Renault and Honda to make ongoing and continuous improvements. I would expect that the percentage of improvements made by them is larger than whatever Mercedes can continue to extract. So that rules stability seems to be creating more performance parity (it has just taken many years to get to this point). Hopefully this year will show more of that than in the past.
But we now have some new aero rules for this year and that may shake things up. Some may get it very right and some very wrong. We already see some divergent front wing designs. It's unlikely that all the different solutions work equally well. It's hard to predict until the cars actually start racing. Then the next question is.. how fast can the teams adjust/improve imperfect solutions? Some will be better at that than others. Being well funded helps grease the skids with that process as well.
Richard