Quote:
Originally Posted by V8 Fireworks
I'm pretty sure, these people ALL work on the car (hospitality, media, IT & transport dpartments aside), F1 teams & F1 engine manufacturers are not stupid, they are racers' racers. Those hundreds of engineers & technicians are all tinkering away on CAD models and laboratories on how to make improved parts for the cars (whether or not those parts go into production).
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crikey, are you in charge of a smaller teams hr department or something?
dig into the big teams, particularly mercedes. you'll find people whose job it is to optimise workflows, improve software that reports on particular elements of the process of running a car. it's two or three levels removed from the front line. in fact, a lot of the software teams themselves aren't linked directly to the car firing up and going around in circles. the it side of things - which you handily exclude - is huge. all those complex cad systems need maintaining, developing, investment and improving by someone. those bespoke bits of software need creating, testing and integrating. who d'you think does that? cfd is only going to get more expensive from here. eliminating the development of "x" (whatever it may be) only serves to create multiple times the expense trying to improve the processes around it. see: every time the fia limit development on a particular part to limit downforce, the percentage lost is regained within a season. defeats the object, doesn't it?
it shouldn't take seven hundred people to directly produce a f1 car. that's where the fault is. not with some of the midfield and backmarker teams working with a far more realistic and sustainable budget and workforce.
so yeah, basically what chillibowl said
on a final note, i wonder how much in r&d tax rebates the big british f1 teams get? if the smaller single seater teams running spec cars can be reaching hundreds of thousands per tax year they must be raking it in.