Reynard always wins first time out they said!Just_a_fan wrote: ↑31 Jul 2023, 17:59They have to have identical liveries on each car (barring driver numbers, name, etc.). Came to prominence in 1999 with BAR running the two cars with different liveries and the FIA getting all bent up about it.
BAR should probably have spent more effort on the car and less on the livery - they only had 2 double-car finishes all season. Awful set of results.
This does raise, however, a problem with spec series and pseudo spec series. Where a wealthy team like a Team Penske may purchase seven Dallara chassis and select the two or three lightest ones for best performance (and do the same for every other "spec" component), whereas a poorer team may not be able to do so.
If I recall correctly, there was quite the discussion around the Dallara DW12 having significant manufacturing variance from tub to tub when that model was first introduced with teams (rumoured) to be unhappy about this. It was rumoured that Team Penske purchased many more tubs than needed, in order to be able to select the required number of "good" ones.
We have to trust that parts are within an acceptable level of tolerance. E.g., when Porsche are dyno testing engines for the Carrera Cup, they may choose to identify and exclude particular strong and particularly weak engines from those that are sealed and made available for Carrera Cup (either in sold race cars or as racing spare parts)? So engines that are 460 ± 3 hp are acceptable, but those that are particularly powerful (466hp) or particularly weak (455hp) are excluded.
Will that "acceptable" 6hp difference between having a good Carrera Cup engine and not so good (yet "identical") one make a difference to lap time (be it measurable for this type of variance on this type or part, or perhaps not measurable, <0.00009s/lap, for variances on other types of parts)? Of course it will. But it's just not practical to manufacture and assemble combustion engines (or electric motors or shock absorbers or anything else) that are truly 100.000000% identical.
[I don't know if they actually do, this is just an example. They may just be the standard 911 GT3 RS part number from the ordinary Porsche parts inventory, I have no idea!]
On this topic, there are often rumours of "weak" engines and "strong" engines in F2!
You can imagine in the F1 case, the "particularly powerful" engines are not excluded -- rather they go straight to Ferrari or Red Bull or Mercedes GP as applicable as the "race engines" -- while the average ones get distributed to customer teams (hopefully truly at random). While the least good ones are perhaps designated for use in pre-season testing?
The rumours of "sabotage" often come from the faction (be it sponsors, press, driver manager) of the "unfavoured" driver.
In Williams' 2019 case there supposedly was a significant difference in tub weight, but with Williams being a poor/small Grand Prix team they simply could not afford to manufacture sufficient "good" ones -- with the updated manufacturing technique -- in the timeframe needed to supply Kubica one to start the season. [Actually they must have had a spare, yet I recall Kubica being in the original car that was used for pre-season testing. If they had TWO heavy cars, perhaps in the interests of fairness both drivers should have used those, instead of one driver using the updated lighter version?]
IIRC, to ease these complaints they eventually swapped Kubica into the lighter chassis and Russell over to the heavier one, until sufficient updated monocoques became available later in the season?
Whereas I have no doubt that, where financially able to do so, Team Penske sought to find sufficient "good" Dallara DW12s for all their drivers and not to "sabotage" one of the drivers with an overweight tub so as to make them look bad!
