Redragon wrote: ↑28 Jul 2017, 00:11
I am sorry but you don't start a business spending and investing I big amounts of staff and resources if you don't know the right path, it is bound to be a failure or suicide from the beginning. All businesses start small and invest along as things are needed on the way, step by step. That's why the project is a 10 years plan. The mistake they did was to start too cocky promising wins on year 1 when everybody knew was impossible.
I'd say that a LOT of people believed Honda would be good in the first year. Everywhere i looked and read the sentiment was that Honda were great, had pedigree and would do great. Sky's thing was hyping it up all 2013 and a hell of a lot of fans believed even after preseason testing that Honda would be competitive by the summer. Very few people were calling it a disaster in the making.
Also where Merc had basically 4 seasons to a new regulation period they planned to hit hard so sensibly built up year by year, Honda were rushing in with only 18 months development, they didn't have the option to build up a program slowly at all, they had to hit it full strength straight away. They needed people working on different design options asap to have any chance of finding the right thing. If they wanted a slow build up(which is absolutely the optimum way to do it) they absolutely had to, I mean had to say no to Mclaren's deal and say they want 2.5-3.5 years of development, 18 months was absolutely crazy and once they agreed to that they gave up any dream of building up slowly and sensibly. 18 months and they wanted to catch up to Merc who would be at 4.5 years or so of big budget development by the time they entered.
Even then throwing money isn't the best solution in many circumstances with only 18 months of development time it was the only outside chance they had of hitting 2015 running.
