JPower wrote: ↑03 Mar 2022, 16:56
SmallSoldier wrote: ↑03 Mar 2022, 16:49
The fact that been a customer team means that you can never beat the works team is a myth in today’s F1… If McLaren doesn’t get close to fight Mercedes it won’t have anything to do with the fact that it is a customer team, they simply didn’t build an strong enough car.
It is true that Mercedes has better (more up to date) tools than McLaren at the moment, but
I don’t think that it creates the gap that seems to be implied in this conversation (a gap big enough that it will never catch up).
I never implied that, I said they should be able to catch up in 2-3 years which also the exact timeline Zak Brown gave as well.
You said that you think that they are “fairly far apart at the moment”, I don’t think that the gap is fairly far apart… Just divergent opinions.
Mercedes operated with a budget that was more than twice that of McLaren, so it isn’t surprising that they were ahead in the past… Now with equal conditions in terms of budget, that gap gets reduced dramatically.
I do agree that Mercedes potentially (because I don’t know the details) has more up to date equipment in regards to manufacturing equipment, simulator and wind tunnel which could be newer than McLaren’s, how much of an impact those have in terms of performance is something that I honestly don’t know, but I don’t think they create the gap that we have seeing between the teams in the past.
You also underestimate the impact that additional Wind Tunnel and CFD time can have in terms of performance, according to Toto Wolff the advantage of additional WT time could mean a couple of tenths of on track performance.
As far as McLaren’s tools gap to the likes of Mercedes, RBR and Ferrari, they are now only behind in the simulator (which is really a tuning / setup tool, not a design one) and the Wind Tunnel… I read last year that from a computational power and manufacturing tools, they are up to date now (which were the “cheaper” investments).