myurr wrote:
Again why? Why would you want to mask your pace? If you're out front and winning then you can back off, but otherwise there's no point trying to be too clever about it. You'll just trip over yourself.
The more pace you show the more you'll push your competitors into having to take large risks to bridge the gap - some of those gambles may pay off for them but equally there's a chance they end up going down a blind alley and getting it wrong, wasting time and resources. All the while you can continue to steadily bring upgrades to the car moving it forward bit by bit.
Two reasons: increased reliability from not stressing the car, and also the political reason. If you are too dominant, there is a risk the regulations will be urgently changed to eliminate your advantage: cf. 2011 EBD.
There's no reason why you need to win every race 40 seconds in front of your competitors when 5 seconds in front of them will do.
Regarding your second point, I don't agree with you. When there is massive performance deficit, a different kind of thinking emerges from a development perspective: you switch from the conservative normal mode of operation to a deep investigation scruntinizing even simple things that you would normally take for granted.
A good example that knowing the reference point is important for meeting targets is the 2009 McLaren, where the team achieved their target downforce levels through winter development and therefore rested on their laurels, I believe if they had the more realistic target they would probably have been closer to the Brawn when testing began. This might seem counterintuitive if you think humans always work at 100% capacity, but the reality is they don't and benchmarks really do matter.