importancia de la informacion de otro equipo segun P.Sydmons,G. Willis,W.Rampf y M.Al

cuann es importante la informacion tecnica de otro equipo (Mario Almondo (Ferrari), Willy Rampf (BMW Sauber), Pat Symonds (Renault), Geoff Willis (Red Bull)


Q. (Stéphane Barbé – L'Equipe) To all of you, as technical directors who are working very hard to get performance from the car how high would you rate in terms of cheating the fact that a team could have obtained technical information from another team?
GW: I suppose I have the advantage of having looked from the outside… (This is) a very difficult question to answer. When you are designing a car, particularly when you are looking at your competitors, it is certainly one of those things that you want to know – where is the other person's advantage – is the aerodynamics better, or is the car lighter or is the centre of gravity lower or is the engine more powerful.
So, in some ways, knowing that information or some of it helps you to focus a bit more on where you develop the car and in the absence of that information all the teams are doing a lot of competitor comparison analysis to try to focus on exactly where their shortcomings are. We do that all the time.
If you were to take the extreme condition of having detailed information about somebody else's car, in some cases it would be a huge advantage and in other cases it would just be enabling you to produce what that team had already produced and therefore you would always be playing catch-up, however good your manufacturing and design and operations loop is, it is going to take you four to six weeks to get those sort of components on a car and fundamentally what you want is an understanding of why you have come up with those engineering solutions and not what those solutions are…
So, for me, if an engineer comes to me from another team, I am not interested in his specific technical knowledge about that car, because it should already be out of date. I am interested in how he arrives at that design and what made the car go fast. So, ignoring all issues about the morality and legality of it, I am not sure how much use in certain cases some information is. In other cases, it is a lot of use.


PS: I agree very much with Geoff. What makes a car go fast is reasonably well known and reasonably easy to simulate and therefore the way in which we approach our development is weighted with respect to the lap time improvement one can get in different areas.
In other words, we all know that good aerodynamics makes a Formula One car go very fast, so we put a lot of effort into that. We know at the moment, there is very little we can do with the engines, so that effort is scaled down. Even when it was free, we know that for each million Euros you spent on the engine, you produced less performance than a million Euros spent on aerodynamic development.
We all understand where we should be spending our money and putting our effort in and in what proportion and we are trying to do that as much as we can in the budgets that we have and the personnel that we have. So, information from another team doesn't really help you in that respect and equally neither does detail.
And that is where I agree with Geoff – what's important in a team are the people and the way people approach things and to have even a complete set of drawings of a car, if you don't understand the concept of how it works, then it is not terribly interesting.


WR: The performance of the car is an overall part of a complex system, so if you bring in one engineer from another team and maybe he has some ideas, but overall on the long term I don't think that you would make a big step forward as long as he is not working well in the team or integrated in the team.
Sometimes I think it is over-estimated what input can be made to another team. It is like increasing a team when the whole team has to work well and all with a lot of trust together to make a quick car. So it is not one thing that makes a car go quicker but a huge amount of small details and all the philosophy that has developed in a team over years.


MA: if you get a lot of technical data of another car it is not a matter of single details that you would like or not of the other car, trying to imitate what the other team did, but it is a matter of knowing references… If I know the weight distribution of another car, the efficiency, how powerful is the engine and so on, then I know my references and know exactly where to put our resources.
So I have a higher possibility of arriving at the same result if I am behind or even a better result if I am quicker and with less energy spent, less money and in a quicker time, so for sure it is an advantage to just know things and how the other works because it is a sort of technical gift in this respect.


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