Safety first?? Reliability more important than speed??

[Tristan]

I'm talking about a new team coming into F1.

I'm talking about your Toyotas and the BARs before them.

Right, Toyota launched a really conservative car last year, it was safe enough but not really competetive. They deliberatley put the emphasis on reliability to aid development.

However, after these early cars they're going to have to do a BIG step. From a car that was slow to begin with they've got a huge step up to even get a mid grid car. All the other manufacturers are moving forward. Toyota will have to move forward doubly as much.

BAR STILL are yet to produce a single decent car. They have NOT managed to do the step.



OK, I'll get to my point!!

Why not go radical?? Toyota had the money AND the opportunity to build a car effectively from scratch. Why not build something fast that goes BANG?? You can work on the reliability alongside the development in the subsequent years.

Put it like this, in making "the jump" from a conservative to a competetive chassis a lot of things are going to go wrong anyway. So what's the point of the early car??

I say (and this applies to existing teams for their 2004 cars) get radical. Isn't that a better investment for the future??

[Glen]

Taking into account the prodigious horsepower that Toyota clearly had, I'd have to assume that they were not shy of trying to go as fast as they possibly could. problem for them is that the full package is many, many times more complex to get right than might be imagined. Every single team would go all out for performance, and then work on the reliabilty as a secondary issue. Ron Dennis does in fact often come out with this comment - it's muc easier to make a quick car reliable than to make a reliable car quick - because the reasons that are car is not quick are usually fundamental to the design, whereas reliability issues are more to do with detail changes - "bite-sized" problems to fix.

Toyota, or any new team, canot just say "ok, lets be quick and worry about reliability later", because they haven't learnt how to be quick in the first place. They face a defecit of decades over the other teams in experience in the art and science of building a quick car. For this reason I don't believe Toyota could beat, say, Jordan or even Arrows (let us pray that they are both still with us in Melbourne) this year.

[neilap]

Toyota did some things right last year and some were just behind. I don't think they went conservative; I think they did the best they could. Most importantly they wanted to finish races and gain experience. They have now laid a foundation to build on. BAR have had too many political issues in their past so it was almost impossible to make any real strides.
Honda took a big chance and look where it landed them! In 2000 when they returned they had one of the better motors on the grid. In 2001 they built a dud!! So for 2002 they tried something radical... Renault did the same, with similar results in 2001.
The best way to make changes is in small and singular increments. This way it is easier to measure where mistakes are being made. Honda's F1 program is run mostly by their R&D dept. while for Toyota it is more a business venture, thus the different approaches.