The politics was always there, yes, but the technical rules being free was fun, when I started it was 3 or 4 A5 pages in the FIA yellow book, more and more restrictions have appeared.
Back when I started there wasn’t enough resource, either people or cash, to follow up every idea and you won by concentrating on what mattered most, and plenty of people got that wrong with clever optimisation of things which didn’t matter (like the Tyrrell active rear suspension geometry…)
Now there are literally hundreds of engineers and every little thing can be “optimised” at vast cost even those which make a negligible difference because there is huge resource but little freedom.
Frank, as you are well aware, you started the generation before me and by all accounts that was a great time for you to be doing what you did.
My approach has always been to mathematically model something before you decided whether it was good or bad. If engineers do it in their head, then they need a lot of experience (ideally of something similar) and or be lucky! So I joined right at the beginning of the development of complex simulations, which was good for me.
When I started at McLaren in 1990 there were 200 employees and older team members could not believe that we needed 200 people to go racing (we didn’t of curse, but if you want to win, then at that time you did).
Before the cost ca Mercedes F1 had 1200 employees on the Brackley site… And even now that the budget cap is in place they still have a lot more employees than when I left in 2014 (500 employees). The clever use of the budget ca rules for suppliers to other teams and the employment of financial engineers has enabled them to run rings around the rules and just made them financially more efficient at delivery. Difficult to see this as progress really.
The tools that my teams have developed over the years have been used to optimise minute to big lap time gains, as you have described. And yet there is large scope to improve these predictive systems and deliver a more integrated vehicle performance development toolset and process. The grid is pretty clueless in this area. The question that the team owners and team principals should be asking is how can teams like Williams and Renault produce cars that are 2 seconds a lap slower aerodynamically than cars with the same engine (Mercedes F1 and McLaren in 2020). With all teams having the same time in the wind tunnel or CFD and aero being the big performance differentiator, the grid after all this time should be very close. It all seems to come down to the Technical director and their senior team not wanting to risk changing processes that they think work and yet clearly do not!
I still find it funny / sad that the biggest area of vehicle performance development is so badly done at pretty much all the teams on the grid.
As a person always more fascinated by what improves a car’s performance than anything else I am disappointed, but at least I am not a young bloke with just shite cars to look forward too
In a more open set of rules, and using the toolset that I started to get developed at Sauber (but failed due to a new Technical Director who did not want to understand vehicle performance) then any engineer would be able to test ideas and have a very good idea as to whether the idea would work. The engineer’s creativity would be the limitation.
