AR3-GP wrote: ↑06 Dec 2022, 21:30
LM10 wrote: ↑06 Dec 2022, 14:47
Isn't it a give and take? Why would they build their car with overweight, if it was not for performance reasons?
You're thinking far too deterministically.
Teams never intended to build overweight cars. It's always a bit of a guessing game as to where you will end up. The car is going to need X amount of parts on board and even when you are designing to the best of your ability at the time, it doesn't mean in a deterministic way that every car can be built to that min weight. As it would turn out, 9 out of 10 teams showed up with overweight cars. It was not intentional. They were caught off guard with how difficult it was to hit the weight target.
It wasn't a matter of "oh we'll make this engine cover a little bit wider and take the weight penalty because the aero gain is worth it". It was more a case of, the only way we are hitting this weight limit right now is if we remove the gearbox....
The RB18 has several failed attempts at a lighter DRS actuator. They were on the limit of design and had failures. Removing the DRS actuator in it's entirety would have brought them closer, but that's not practical...
Good post!
One has to remember nobody knew the exact loads on the car. The 22 cars are bound to have some safety margins built in. And not all can just be upgraded out. Either because they are homologated or because the implications are too big on adjacent parts.
For instance; if you understand the load on the rear suspension better, making it lighter might mean a redesign of the gearbox shell, bodywork, floor, and brakes and linkages.
That would mean New crash tests for the rear crash structure and possibly reworking all rear wings and exhaust.
That might not only be too big for an upgrade -especially the cost-, also the timeline may be such that you can just have it for the last few races. Also, mitigating collateral on other parts means a suboptimal solution. Better to design completely new for the next year.