Ramifications and speculation around TD045 and how it affects team operations

[AR3-GP]

Verstappen is driving the Aston Martin Valkyrie in a tunnel: https://imgur.com/a/XGSfhdE

This must be RB's plan to circumvent the summer shutdown and the budget cap all at once. It must be stopped!

[mzso]

The teams aren’t charities and the name of the game these days is profitability.

It’s pretty easy to police an engineering firm that claims to have zero revenue and millions of dollars of sunk costs, and they would have to disclose where their funding is coming from. This all has to be reported for tax reasons anyway.

I see people talking, but clearly with zero experience in any kind of corporate accounting what-so-ever.

So? It's engineer training. They design F1 concepts that they don't send to the team. Then they go back to the team and re-design the best working concepts.
As for money the top 4 spenders have hundreds of millions of money they can't spend.

[mzso]

TD45 is about one thing only: if you bring something concrete/tangible (including data) into F1 from the outside, it must be accounted under the cost cap off you wish to bring it into the factory. As long as anything you produce, which can be considered intellectual property, stays out of the F1 factory, it doesn't fall under the TD, and it's fair game.

That doesn't stop the teams setting hundreds of people designing F1 car concepts "outside" F1, even using data from the official F1 project. Then bringing them back and doing it again from experience and memory.

And it isn't intended to do that, because it's not a problem, and for several reasons:

1) human memory is still limited
2) you still have to redo all the work in the F1 factory.
3) people can freely move to competitors and take that knowledge with them
4) F1 moves fast, and having to recreate the work from scratch is gonna put you behind
5) any time spent outside of F1 isn't being spent helping the team. So you'll essentially be moving part of your talent pool outside of F1 to do inefficient work.

This is not the secret advantage people make it out to be. In fact, i think it's a waste of money.

1. Not all that relevant
2. But you know know exactly what to do. It's actually a fraction of the work.
3. Not if they have a contract...
4. Would conflict with your third point if it were true. But it's still not from scratch.
5. Until you back with all the knowledge and experience. Also you don't even need to go back to help. Just say that this and that concept sucks keep away.

And the big team have a lot of money to throw at things.

[mzso]

You need to show the history of all your paper/CAD designs to the FIA.

A highly refined design that does not need multiple iterations (in CFD/wind tunnel) would raise suspicion.

That somebody drew something good on CAD or a drawing board in the first place because they are experienced however, hardly seems like a reasonable thing to penalise.

Precisely. They'd go straight to the concept they know is working best. And also with a good understanding of how it works and how to make it work ideally.

[mzso]

Yes, but F1 is an entirely different development race. So i don't consider your examples comparable.

In F1, you are chasing the very smallest margins, and even the tiniest details matter. Some (or rather, most) teams don't even understand their current car and its aerodynamic behavior properly, and doing work outside the factory isn't gonna help them do that compared to doing work inside that factory. That simply isn't gonna work in practice because of how everything on the car is connected, and how the cars are developed and improved.

You put forth no compelling arguments for this belief of yours. Knowledge gained is highly valuable the way I see it.

And I don't think you're even right about innovation. It's just more subtle and most of it is within aerodynamics.
Just now (based on the news) the teams have begun copying RB-s DRS system, even though it was right in their faces since the beginning of last year. And whether it is a large part of their advantage, they did manage to put a sizeable and lasting gap to all the others.

[organic]

Verstappen is driving the Aston Martin Valkyrie in a tunnel: https://imgur.com/a/XGSfhdE

This must be RB's plan to circumvent the summer shutdown and the budget cap all at once. It must be stopped!

As long as it's not this tunnel

[organic]

Yes, but F1 is an entirely different development race. So i don't consider your examples comparable.

In F1, you are chasing the very smallest margins, and even the tiniest details matter. Some (or rather, most) teams don't even understand their current car and its aerodynamic behavior properly, and doing work outside the factory isn't gonna help them do that compared to doing work inside that factory. That simply isn't gonna work in practice because of how everything on the car is connected, and how the cars are developed and improved.

You put forth no compelling arguments for this belief of yours. Knowledge gained is highly valuable the way I see it.

And I don't think you're even right about innovation. It's just more subtle and most of it is within aerodynamics.
Just now (based on the news) the teams have begun copying RB-s DRS system, even though it was right in their faces since the beginning of last year. And whether it is a large part of their advantage, they did manage to put a sizeable and lasting gap to all the others.

Ferrari have had a comparably effective drs for a while and it's done little to erode the gap. Go back and watch Baku 2022 telemetry for instance. People will go on and on about it but there is no "trick". Even the % efficiency values of their DRS are only slightly above Haas this year for the low downforce wing, for instance.

Maybe there's something more to rb's drs than I'm seeing but people are overblowing it IMO. But I think people ignore that they can set their car up to have easy overtaking because they have advantages elsewhere in laptime and able to make compromises other teams can't afford to

[TFSA]

1. Not all that relevant
2. But you know know exactly what to do. It's actually a fraction of the work.
3. Not if they have a contract...
4. Would conflict with your third point if it were true. But it's still not from scratch.
5. Until you back with all the knowledge and experience. Also you don't even need to go back to help. Just say that this and that concept sucks keep away.

And the big team have a lot of money to throw at things.

1. The impact of an advantage is an argument towards whether it should be regulated or not. So why isn't that relevant again? Of course it's relevant.

2. But you don't know exactly what to do, because you don't know how it will affect the actual car. F1 design is very specific.

3. Most staff do not have contracts that last any long period of time, because teams can't afford it under the cost cap. You never know when you will need to restructure. They will eventually transfer to another team if they wish to.

4. No, you have to do it from scratch. If you design a part outside of the F1 factory, but don't wanna bring it in, you have to redesign it again from bottom up (hence: from scratch). Also, i don't see how it conflicts with my third point?

5. And that's perfectly fine. Knowledge and experience belongs to the person. Teams can learn what concepts suck and what doesn't from many places (including looking at other teams, or poaching people). Trying to police knowledge is pointless, and still not what this TD is about.

You put forth no compelling arguments for this belief of yours. Knowledge gained is highly valuable the way I see it.

And I don't think you're even right about innovation. It's just more subtle and most of it is within aerodynamics.
Just now (based on the news) the teams have begun copying RB-s DRS system, even though it was right in their faces since the beginning of last year. And whether it is a large part of their advantage, they did manage to put a sizeable and lasting gap to all the others.

There's a difference between realising that a certain technology applied in one field can be useful if introduced in another (which was the example the person i was originally quoting brought forward), and doing optimization on specific aero shapes and dynamics in order to find an optimum that brings out the best performance under specific constrictions (in this case, the constrictions being the F1 Technical Regulations).

As someone else pointed out, Red Bull doesn't have a specific "DRS system". Their DRS is the most powerful, but it's only marginally ahead of some teams who are very close behind - so it's not like they have some "big secret" there. And the teams are now simply chasing a certain design philosophy that turns out to be the most effective.

So to use your own words, you've put forth no compelling arguments for this being tied to work Red Bull Advanced Technologies do, or this technical directive at all. All you see is that they have a very effective design philosophy which makes them the lead car, and then you're drawing up the connection between that and this topic out of the blue.

[Hoffman900]

The teams aren’t charities and the name of the game these days is profitability.

It’s pretty easy to police an engineering firm that claims to have zero revenue and millions of dollars of sunk costs, and they would have to disclose where their funding is coming from. This all has to be reported for tax reasons anyway.

I see people talking, but clearly with zero experience in any kind of corporate accounting what-so-ever.

So? It's engineer training. They design F1 concepts that they don't send to the team. Then they go back to the team and re-design the best working concepts.
As for money the top 4 spenders have hundreds of millions of money they can't spend.

Not really.

[mzso]

Not really what? For money, they could afford hundreds of millions more, they could still afford it. And there a bunch they didn't spend already last year.

[Hoffman900]

Not really what? For money, they could afford hundreds of millions more, they could still afford it. And there a bunch they didn't spend already last year.

Corporations are for profit. They’re interested in profit. The teams are for profit. This sport exists to make those involved in it money.

The teams and the manufacturers have stated multiple times they are looking to make a profit from this and with the cost cap they are. If they don’t have to spend it, they won’t, and will use that money to enrich the board and themselves, and based on Toto Wolff’s “increase in net worth”, they are.

[mzso]

Not really what? For money, they could afford hundreds of millions more, they could still afford it. And there a bunch they didn't spend already last year.

Corporations are for profit. They’re interested in profit. The teams are for profit. This sport exists to make those involved in it money.

The teams and the manufacturers have stated multiple times they are looking to make a profit from this and with the cost cap they are. If they don’t have to spend it, they won’t, and will use that money to enrich the board and themselves, and based on Toto Wolff’s “increase in net worth”, they are.

And it didn't stop them from spending hundreds of millions more, so it must have been profitable.

[basti313]

Not really what? For money, they could afford hundreds of millions more, they could still afford it. And there a bunch they didn't spend already last year.

Corporations are for profit. They’re interested in profit. The teams are for profit. This sport exists to make those involved in it money.

The teams and the manufacturers have stated multiple times they are looking to make a profit from this and with the cost cap they are. If they don’t have to spend it, they won’t, and will use that money to enrich the board and themselves, and based on Toto Wolff’s “increase in net worth”, they are.

The interesting factor is that they seem to work differently. Just looking at this weekend in Monza...a Monza spec is always very inefficient...you run the wing for max 2 races of which one is often wet.
Now Ferrari and RedBull battle at the front with proper Monza spec packages/wings. As far as I remember only RedBull used the wing at Spa, Ferrari only at Monza? But does not matter...
On the other hand two efficiency driven teams Merc and Haas do not do anything special, just cut a piece of an existing wing.
Especially for Haas I would thing they must have the CFD and windtunnel time to do an easy run for the points at Monza...but they do not because there is not enough profit in winning a point or two. Better not spend the money...

[Hoffman900]

Not really what? For money, they could afford hundreds of millions more, they could still afford it. And there a bunch they didn't spend already last year.

Corporations are for profit. They’re interested in profit. The teams are for profit. This sport exists to make those involved in it money.

The teams and the manufacturers have stated multiple times they are looking to make a profit from this and with the cost cap they are. If they don’t have to spend it, they won’t, and will use that money to enrich the board and themselves, and based on Toto Wolff’s “increase in net worth”, they are.

And it didn't stop them from spending hundreds of millions more, so it must have been profitable.

It wasn’t. That’s why teams came and went and they needed the cost cap to begin with. Just about every team save for Mercedes and Ferrari were like “we can’t keep doing this or we’re going to have to pull out of the championship”.

[AR3-GP]

Apparently Mclaren built a ground effects track car

It's called the Mclaren Solus. It was debuted at the '23 Goodwood.