vorticism wrote: ↑07 Mar 2022, 00:15
How interchangeable is the staff in any championship winning team? Including the driver...
Williams-Renault has the answer of course. You can still win with a 'lesser' driver like Damon Hill instead of Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost or Nigel Mansell, it just takes more attempts. Whereas top-quality drivers like Alain Prost and Nigel Mansell were swapped by Sir Frank Williams more or less interchangeably with no issues.
Similarly, chief designer Frank Dernie who went to Lotus was swapped for chief designer Adrian Newey, and as long as both designers are very competent which they are, that was no great issue either.
The only component Sir Frank Williams had difficulty swapping in was the Judd engine, which was not up to it, however the Honda and Renault were seemingly more or less equivalent, and eventually the Renault better than the Honda.
Heck Sir Frank Williams even took swapping to the level of swapping ICI and Camel onto the same yellow background to avoid redesigning the livery, similarly Elf seamlessly replaced Mobil on the Williams livery.
Just_a_fan wrote: ↑07 Mar 2022, 01:20
The team is pyramidal in structure - the higher up towards the narrow end you get, the more difficult to easily manage the loss of a member of the team. It's a not a pyramid with a point, however, as at the top there are several key people who are all roughly equally key. Any of them can be replaced, but not always as successfully as others.
Didn't McLaren try a matrix structure with multiple chief designers which didn't work that well?
JonoNic wrote: ↑07 Mar 2022, 01:40
Apologies if I digress from the subject, but think the driver/rider would play a bigger role in MotoGP than in F1. As the body placement of a rider plays a major role in how the bike performs.
There was definitely more than one rider who can handle the Ducati (e.g., Stoner and Dovisioso) and more than one rider who can handle the Honda (e.g., Stoner and Marquez). Even if not all the riders can handle either bike.
Obviously for Ducati assuming Rossi and then Lorenzo would be an 'equivalent' replacement to Stoner was a hiding to nothing and didn't work out. But then they did stumble upon Dovisioso who could ride the Ducati correctly, so go figure!
