At last years Barcelona test McLaren did many more laps than Red Bull, sometimes double on a given day. Look how that panned out.Pup wrote:Well, one can't be a McLaren fan for long before admitting that the team invariably seems a bit optimistic about what can be accomplished at a field test. Whether that's because they are indeed optimistic or because they're terrible at organizing their testing or a little of each one can't say with any certainty. But it's unfortunately true that they rarely accomplish what they've set out to do. You only have to look at the testing kms to confirm that. There's no team with McLaren's resources who say, year after year, "we're only going to do half of our allotted testing, just because."
It isn't just about the sheer number of laps, it's about the quality of the data you collect with them. If you make a small setup change you don't need to run a full race simulation before you know if it's having the desired effect. Likewise if you're still effectively shaking the car down and gathering data for processing back in the lab then you don't need to be pounding round, instead you set up your tests, run as many laps as required, and then reset for the next test.
