Quote:
Originally Posted by Richard Casto
Assuming this is true (have no reason to doubt it), I would say that in many ways the Williams situation is a poster child for why the current situation is so bad and why more technical freedom is likely not the savior of good racing or in this case, to ensure viability of small teams.
Given a fixed technical spec, its likely for the solutions to coalesce around a single design even if lots of design freedom is allowed. It will be VERY crazy at first as teams might be all over the place with their solutions with LARGE performance gaps. But in the end, Team X is successful, so a percentage of the of other looks at the details and copies it. The next seasons some large chunk of the copy cat solutions are making progress. The more seasons you use the same regulations, the more that basic design is refined. This repeats until eventually everyone is running very similar designs.
So it is harder and harder to find radical solutions that outperform the de facto standard implementation. Even then... you might find a different solution, but it might actually take more than a season to unlock it's true potential against a very well optimized existing solution. This is especially true when fighting for 10ths of seconds on track.
For a small team, they can try something radical, it then doesn't deliver, so they sink below the surface as they tumble down the grid. They then either revert back to the old design, or push on with the radical one in the hopes that it bears fruit. All the while they see funding dry up due to the lack of performance.
In the end, radical designs are a massive gamble for small underfunded teams. For all you know you could be betting it all on a new concept that a well funded team developed and test behind closed doors and then discarded as the actual performance gain may not exist.
Richard
|
Part of the problem is that if you take someone from a massive team like Mercedes it is not so clear who was responsible for what, so Williams would have been better waving the same bag of gold at the FI designer who is used to maximising resources and outsourcing. Harsh fact but it is easy to look good with another 999 talented people and Daimler's almost unlimited resources behind you. This doesn't mean that PL isn't of course a clever guy, but all about the right person in the right environment.
At Mercedes you can come up with developments, go straight to tunnel models and then full size for the car very quickly and bin it if it doesn't work, whereas Williams can't throw £150k a time at ideas that might not work, that is the difference. More worrying for Williams is that none of the developments have worked, the car is no quicker than it was in Melbourne and arguably has lost more ground, as has McLaren.