Farnborough wrote: ↑01 Nov 2024, 13:54
Would he be the only one driving at some considerable level in historic cars (as well as some when contemporary) too ?
Most likely. The main difference between Newey and someone like Byrne, Brawn, Symonds, etc. on one end - compared to most TDs today and yesterday like Allison, Binotto, Cardille, Key, Wache, etc. is that those guys had to fully understand the whole car back in the day. The number of engineers working on the car was probably smaller than a single department today, tools were less advanced and you had to know what you were doing to be competitive.
This required full understanding of what the car does at all times on track and some reasonable intuition to make up for known tool deficiencies. Engineers today are mostly specialists and they are absolute masters of their own area. But when it comes to understanding 100% what the car does at all times, I doubt most of them would be able to completely accurately describe and articulate it. It's an extremely complex subject of course, but obviously it's a key aspect of car design
Jdn1327 wrote: ↑01 Nov 2024, 14:05
I dont know if this is arrogant of me or not but surely they've all have access to the same research material and literature on underfloor aero etc...how can one man get it so right and others get it so wrong?
I'm almost certain it has nothing to do with internal knowledge-base, fundamental background scientific research or anything like that. I wrote multiple times it seems like they are too focused on raw performance in a limited number of specific cases of attitudes, cornering speeds and/or ride heights. In other words, I'm certain they are fully capable of reaching their targets, but the leadership setting does targets isn't doing a very good job at all, focusing on performance rather than driveability and performance stability. This is, among other things, why I'm critical of those individuals