codetower wrote: ↑11 Jul 2024, 18:30
I"m not a car developer so I wont pretend to know how these things are done, but all I hear is how car development can follow a certain drivers "style". Didn't Carlos's camp say that this car will be more suited towards his driving style? And didn't Mercedes move the cockpit forward a little to suit Lewis style? I would imagine if Verstappen prefers a stiffer rear suspension that RB would develop with a goal more towards a stiffer rear. Again, not trying to argue, just trying to understand what all the talk about "building a car to suit Lewis" means.
Regarding the updates, I agree that they need/should keep the new upgrades, I was wondering why they would go back to the old spec at a track where the data for the new spec would absolutely help them fixing the issues. Is it just lack of time to try anything out on that track? If they aren't developing for the old spec anymore, then I say keep pushing with the new one. I doubt they'll end up higher than P6 with the old spec at Spa, so I would keep testing/developing the new spec.
Teams will of course accommodate drivers when they think it's possible to(ie when it doesn't compromise the overall design ambitions), but that's about it. Teams do not design a car around a driver, because the differences between driver preferences are so small on the grand scheme of things, and no team is good enough to truly nail down a car's entire performance characteristics down to such small details with any kind of great reliability 6, 8, 10 months or whatever before the car is even a real physical thing, let alone something they can test on a track.
If designers and tools were
that good, then we'd never have bad F1 cars. lol
If Sainz says something like the new car being more suited to his driving style, that's probably after giving it a go in the simulator, and just discovering the car is better for him rather than anything the team went out of their way to build-in for him specifically. And that's just the simulator. Obviously that's not at all infallible, given Ferrari's current issues which do not seem to be showing up in any simulator.
Something like Verstappen preferring a stiffer rear suspension would generally be something you address within the scope of the setup change window. But that's not really a great example anyways, cuz drivers have
performance characteristics preferences, but there's often many ways to skin a cat. Drivers dont really care what the hardware is doing, they just know they want the car as a whole to perform a certain way. And an engineer isn't gonna
design an ultra stiff rear suspension if they feel it's ultimately going to harm the car's overall performance level. They will find some other way to give the performance characteristics he's after.
