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Originally Posted by chillibowl
assumption on my part, but the top teams probably dont feel this is necessary so focus on building a front running car and as they sell more parts/concepts to the smaller teams and/or those smaller teams copy the design philosophies of the top teams, you get what we have now, a filtering down of a design ethos where everyone is, intentionally or not, building towards the goal of having a front running car?
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I think I made my point above poorly. The cars are not running in time trails in which they just run solo. Even if you have a quick car, given the regulations (required tire changes push you down in the order even if temporarily) or you might have poor qualifying. So you are likely to be following other cars at some point. You don't want to be stuck behind a slow car as your car is incapable running in a pack of cars. Sometimes that happens. Haven't we seen Hamilton get stuck behind slower cars a few time this and last season?
So all teams should expect to not optimize for a single scenario (such as running solo in clean air). Now all scenarios are not equal. If you are a top team like Red Bull, you will not think "we are going to be mid-pack all the time, so we should prioritize our aero concepts to ensure we can run well in a pack of cars". They will anticipate (hope) they are leaders vs. followers and will spend more time in clean air that others. But regardless they will have to make some compromises.
A perfect example of this is when you hear teams comment on them making compromises for qualifying (qualifying is like a time trail as they are mostly running solo) but their aero setup might come alive in the race and then result in a much better race pace than someone who optimized for a qualifying setup (or even overall design)
Quote:
Originally Posted by chillibowl
add in the budget cap and one wonders how much can be spent on running your wind tunnel and or using CFD time on the effects of running mid pack/optimizing for a wider ranger of scenarios.
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I expect all teams try to do this. But they either get it wrong, or run out of cash is trying to do this via brute force. Case in point, I think I have read articles that say McLaren's problems have their root in a combination of their tooling (older tunnels) and how they approach the problem (outdated).
Quote:
Originally Posted by chillibowl
although, i think the more straightforward answer is that if this wasn't true, then why are so many of the new rule changes (from DRS to new rear wing configurations brought in by FOM) aimed squarely at moving the teams into building cars that are easier to follow?
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You lost me somewhere in this (regarding the "if this wasn't true" part).
Quote:
Originally Posted by chillibowl
rather, what is the incentive for any team in F1, even a back marker team to designing a car that is easier to follow unless they are forced to?
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I think... broadly this is true. That if you can get overall speed, teams will focus on that. And prior regulations allowed for teams to move in an aero direction that created significant wake behind the cars.
So yes, if the rules create a negative scenario, the teams will not fix that on their own if there remains an incentive (performance capability) to continue on that path. So what has been done is less about "forcing the teams to build cars that are easier to follow", but rather "removing the tools from the teams that they used to build cars that were difficult to follow". It's a slight but important distinction between the two. Even today the teams will do what they can to make their cars faster even if that means creating wake issues that are contrary to the goals of the new regulations.
There is now articles calling out this issue. Drivers saying that as the cars continue to develop that improvements are both making the car quicker, but also making them harder to follow. Teams are finding solutions that improve performance but degrade the ability to follow. Teams have no incentive to prevent this from happening.
https://racingnews365.com/sainz-beli...rder-to-follow
https://www.grandprix247.com/2023/05...der-to-follow/
Quote:
Originally Posted by chillibowl
for me DRS strikes at the heart of this problem by trying to eliminate, perhaps even unfairly, the advantage by design the car out front has.
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Who knows who is right in this argument/discussion. My perspective is that they solutions have become so optimized and with aero solutions that have relatively small operating windows that they have been forced to inject some level of unpredictability to disrupt the order. That is a combination of things such as lack of longevity in some tire compounds, forced to run two compounds during a race and lastly DRS.
Richard