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Originally Posted by isynge
Perfectly fair points Chernaudi - and I guess what I was trying to think of was an example of a factory getting it wrong to a serious extent -at risk of mentioning a bad word the McLaren MP4/18 in F1 is an example of this. Perhaps the Matra MS640 coupe that Henri Pescarolo crashed might be a possibility, I also seem to recall there was an Alfa blind alley somewhere in the early '70s, but right now lack the enthusiasm to pop downstairs and wade through Time and Two Seats.
I'd still stand by the privateer examples as being illustrative - Rondeau's 482 was so far inferior to the 382 in 1982 that you could argue it cost them the titles that year. While the question about whether the R10's successor will be a great leap forward is interesting, the same question could be asked about whether the next Courage/Pescarolo/Creation etc will be substantively better than their predecessors is interesting too.
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The reason why I mention that Privateer teams have a lot of problems with improving their cars is a lack or resources.
The Rondeau M379 and M382 in reality shared the same chassis, which basically was a steel tube spaceframe incased in an aluminimum monocoque(think Ferrari 312 family and the origianl Ferrari 126), where as the 482 was a true monocoque chassis-but the car's aero was probably as bad as it looked, and the chassis wasn't as stong as it could've been.
Audi and Peugeot have tons of resources avialble to them-Paolo Cantone is the chief designer of the Peugeot 908, and the Courage C60 and LC70. Courage's budget is a shoe sting compared to Peugeot's, and the C60 and LC70 were intended as customer cars. Those things may've contributed to those cars lack of torsional rigidity and chassis flex, problems that Pescarolo and Oreca had to fix.
Is every car an advance on it's predecessor? Usually yes. But are those effects immediate? Not always. The Lotus 80, for instance, used Coke-bottled sidepods to reduce drag. Of couse, the Lotus 80 wasn't particulary successful, the when ground effects were banned(and even on ground effect Lola and Panoz Champ cars, and the Dallara IRL car), the Coke-bottle sidepods are a common feature on open wheel cars.
And as mentioned, when teams/manufactures take a big leap, they're taking a lot of risk, and their pioneering effors will likely(barring major rules changes) be topped by a competitor, or themselves just to maintain their advantage. The Audi R10 was first, the Peugeot 908 was at first far inferior to the R10, but has now equaled and exceeded it. Audi has made up a ton of ground at the shorter LMS circuits(where Audi and Peugeot were matched on pace, especially at Spa), but Audi knows that to truly regain the initiative, they'll need to look at the stuff that they've found out about racing the R10 for the past 3 years, and probably either:
A: radically modify the R10, or
B: Build a newly designed car-curing the R10's minor but noticeable problems would likely require a very big detail redesign of the R10 anyways, so why not bite the bullet, and build a new car?
If Darwinism it true, it definenitly applies to mechanical devices, race cars included.