Questionhi adam thankyou for your definative answer of my previous question from 'karting to single seaters' and it has been of great advice to me, since then after following the blistering opening stages of the 2008 formula one season i have thought of a second question - what is the winning formula inside an f1 team that achieves its consistant and winning status ? before i thought it was all down to the financal resources and that was why most privately owned teams such as super aguri, toro rosso and new force india are hard done by in starting and finishing positions as they are not big car manufactures like scuderia ferrari and mclaren-mercedes , then i remembered that toyota is the biggest car firm in the world and their f1 team is still only achieving mid-field positions so there must be even more special qualitys to the winning teams than the profit and bugdet amount of them , what do you think makes a winning formula one team?
AnswerThank you for your question. What you say is right, Toyota have spent huge for little return.
The answer is complex, but not so complex. A winning F1 team needs the blend of a great race driver, test driver, engine, chassis, aerodynamic package, reliability, innovative, a car that works its tyres well, good strategy and team organisation, a responsive team (to changes in track conditions) etc etc.
If you look back through F1 history, a leap forward has been achieved at different times by such as a great engine, great driver, great tyre, novel design, great chassis. This tends to happen much less in modern F1, partly as the rules are so restrictive, partly due to the huge amount of testing, partly due to all the computer simulation and also because of the engineering excellence all teams now have.
Toyota have had a huge budget, but have failed. There are a number of reasons suggested such as the team management, the drivers, the German base, the lack of a top designer and the Toyota powerplant. No doubt the truth is in there somewhere. To counter this though, teams running on a shoestring have periodically embarrassed the teams on a bigger budget, famously such as Senna and Bellof (Toleman and Tyrrell 1984), Sutil (Force India Monaco 2008), Damon Hill's Arrows at Hungary 1997, Panis' Ligier (Monaco 1996), Hunt's Hesketh, Scheckter's Wolf....
Most of these underdog performances though are one-offs, due either to weather, attrition, circuit knowledge, a demon tyre etc. On only a few occasions has an underbudgeted team been really able to compete with the big boys. Some examples of this are Shadow (1975), Ligier (1976), Tyrrell (1982, 1984), Jordan (1999) and Sauber 2001.
Pretty much in all cases it was an innovative design that gave the performance advantage, recently such as the infamous mass dampers that gave Renault such an advantage and whose removal led to Renault's performance being advantage wiped out.
It's interesting looking back over F1 that some teams rise and fall away frequently , such as Williams, Ferrari and McLaren who have all done this, one year winning everything, then barely scraping into the points afterwards. As in football, F1 seems a bit more predictable now than before, the big teams stay big and the money and enormous manpower no doubt contribute. It's difficult to see a Ferrari or a McLaren struggling to qualify in 2008, but a bad design, a poor choice of drivers, the wrong tyre choice - all could lead to a dramatic falling away of form. It isn't so long ago that the top table of F1 was filled by Brabham, Lotus and Williams...
