The teams are enlighting every part to its absolutely minimum. Really to extremes. And they don't pursue that dollar-burning race for nothing. They have to if they want to be competitive. The cars format is totally wrong and that's something the FIA or rather stubbornhead Mosley doesn't want to acknowledge.
In 1993 the rear tyres (slicks) went back to 380 mm which was actually too small for the cars. However the cars had a quite natural balance in that format. That totally changed in 1998, when grooves were added and the track became 200 mm smaller. This led Bridgestone to widen the front tires in order to get some more rubber down. Balance was absolutely nowhere and the rear was totally disturbed with the even more overpowered tyres. To solve this the designers needed to get more weight to the front in a low position. Everything aft of the CoM became their biggest enemy. That's where the freak race towards the smallest and lightest engines, suspensions, diffs etc comes from. Lighter parts result in severe vibration problems and an dangerously raise of the dynamic loads. This means extremely rapid shortening of a parts lifespan if these vibrations aren't controlled. Most problems are just recognized when a crash already has occured. Something that is very dangerous for the drivers. That's something the FIA should have acknowledged and acted accordingly to prevent safety margins needed on the cars being threatened by the designer goals. They did not and the list of severe crashing cars because of malfunctioning parts is ten times longer than the ones initiated by driver error (Burti, Hakkinen this GP, but the list is endless). Continuing this way allowing the teams to get their anorectic cars as light as possible is equal to 22 timebombs ticking.
So the question is this: F1 seems to be in despair for a solution but no-one has come up with something yet. What do you think will solve this?
Regards,
Dino
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