dans79 wrote:I think it, because i have seen it several times in various engineering related fields. No teams budget is infinite, and neither is the time table it has to work with, or the expertise of it's employees. The budget has to be spent wisely, and investigating every avenue is not a wise way of spend money. Some avenues will be dead ends, some will have long lead times, and some will conflict with other avenues.
Right, this is all very true, but if you can afford to follow 10 avenues, and another team can afford to follow 1, it's far more likely that the team following 10 avenues will find the one (or multiple) that have good benefits. More likely, the one following 10 avenues will find significant gains in all 10 avenues they investigate, and each of them will be equivalent to the gain one team found.
This has played out over several decades in the aero-space industry. Take the Boeing x-32 vs the Lockheed Martin x-35 for example. Boeing lost out to the much smaller Lockheed, because it followed the wrong avenues.
This is no where near the disparity found in F1 teams (if any disparity at all). Boeing's revenue is only double that of Lockheed Martin's. More so, Boeing is a company that does many more things than Lockheed does, all of it's revenues are not spent on designing military equipment. Instead, large amounts (the majority in fact) is spent on commercial jets. It's actually extremely likely that Lockheed Martin spent more on the X-35 than Boeing spent on the X-32 (although we'll never know the exact figures).
Meanwhile, Ferrari can afford to spend literally 10 times as much developing an F1 car as Manor F1 can. Simply put, your example isn't actually an example of the scenario we're looking at in F1.
