raymondu999 wrote:bill shoe wrote:ESPImperium wrote:
Williams are a team that are doing the same as well, in the past few seasons as well, especially. 2009 when they started to run out of aero development money. Im sure 2009 saw McLaren and Ferrari do the same early season before they got their DDDs.
Interesting example. Williams suddenly got faster halfway through last season as a result of some unspecified input from Barichello that made the car more driveable. I'm guessing, but Barichello's input may have been to simply focus on setup rather than aero, or at least to somehow integrate setup improvements with aero steps. He saw how Brawn improved their car during 2009 with little budget and took this knowledge to Williams?
From a financial point of view I'm skeptical that a midfield team should spend on aero development in order to improve their position in the constructors' championship from, say, 8th to 7th. The resulting increase in FOM income surely doesn't equal the development cost. Better to devote scarce resources on (relatively) cheap setup improvements for the current car and on the design of next year's car. But this gets away from the whole realization that aero development may not yield net performance gains in the first place.
I think it was development, still. But the development was focused in a certain way that they KNEW would develop the car. Rubens said that his input was that the car's downforce was good, but the characteristics and the way it had downforce wasn't good
I always think that the mid feild to rear end teams should concentrate on honing their package over the first say 6-8 races, introducing some detail changes to change a couple of small areas that create a big effect on the whole car. This is the way Mike Gascogyne worked with Spyker/Force India and the way he worked with Bennaton/Renault and Toyota to a lesser effect to the other teams due to the Toyota culture. Altho he always introduced a B-Spec chassis whitch are now outlawed.
I think once a team can understand their car fully thats when they should introduce their first major upgrade. For the larger teams this is usually before the first race, but needs some propper race world data as well from more tracks, for the midfeild to the rear this i think is usually from end of round 4 onwards, and this usually means introducing their first major upgrade arround round 5 or 6.
Force India lost the P5 place in the constructors table last year due to lack of investment arround the final asian swing last year, ideally they could have introduced a upgrade arround Singapore/Japan and honed it for the final couple of races. this could have kept the raging Williams behind the, but Tonios crash at Brazil as well as the Williams double score at Brazil ultimatly lost them the P5 posistion.
Moral to the story, the midfeild to rear end teams have to plan their upgrades and also learn on how to use them, have a major upgrade early on, another big (but not major) upgrade arround the Round 10 to Round 12 mark with a small upgrade arround the end season swing. It means they can target specific gains in their package and also give the drivers the best chance posible to race at all rounds. And with what the teams call a Random Event Occurance, who knows what could happen???
If i were hispania id be looking at targeting whoring the hell out the setup of the car first, get the cars foundations strong and then attack with some performance upgrades, and quality updates of that. But like Williams, they need a quality driver, and an experienced driver of that to make the diffrence in setup as well, and if they dont hire Liuzzi for this, they will lack the ultimate half second in pace they could need once it comes down to "squeeky bum time" at the end of the season.
