Ferraripilot wrote:xpensive wrote:The W03 will without a doubt be something sensational.
I believe W02 was a very solid car with some minor fundamental issues which required sorting. If W03 is simply an evolution of that then they will be in good shape...
I think you're quite right that if W03 is an evolution it will be good.
Newey always talks about Evolution rather than Revolution. And I think there really is something
to that more than being just a catchy soundbite. Being a statistical engineer myself, I've had far far more success through evolving old models than creating new ones from scratch - believe me, it can be /incredibly/ tempting to wipe with a clean slate and work from the bottom up.
I think it's a rather subtle point as to the reason why. The way I like to think about it is to imagine a model with, say, 100 components - maybe 10% of those components work far better than expected, 50% work exactly as expected, 30% work slightly more poorly than expected, and 10% are working in a very bad way. This is called 'model error' and is usual when using a simulation environment to design things. But the interesting thing is the 10%-components exceeding expectations in an unintentional way - a redesign can eliminate these 'super-components' and (perhaps) replace them with a different 10%, whereas an evolution style of development is usually focussed on converting the bottom set of extremely-bad components to either neutral or positive performance. So an evolution mode of development tends to improve performance by fixing bad parts whilst protecting the good parts, and especially the super-good parts whose good performance you can't fully understand. Sorry if this is off-topic.