What IS annoying is nobody bothered to test this "rain mode" (or whatever setting it was that they removed between the aborted formation lap and actual race start) prior to racing in Sepang on the cusp of monsoon season.
Every GP is a slightly different car running bleeding edge tech and code.
Williams even rolled out completely new chassis (with full homologation/crash) mid-season this year because the first design couldn't come down to minimum weight.
Wind tunnel time and aerodynamics simulator time are included in the cost cap, as are car parts and most staff (but not driver salaries, travel or marketing)
Drivers can spend all the time they want in standard consumer sim racing rigs, practising the tracks. But when it's the type of extra-high-fidelity simulator that lets you make the car better - that's subject to the cost cap.
I assume someone is already offering an extremely high-fidelity CFD simulator (or a wind tunnel) to help companies shoot awesome videos of their cars, for purposes of including them in TV spots, of course.
I worked on engine and powertrain simulations, and my compiler was used for vehicle and driver simulations. This was built for Honda, but Honda left, bought by Mercedes, and won them several championships.
That's... not how it works at all, though. There are no prizes for individual races and the championship money is also pennies to the teams.
Mercedes's Kimi Antonelli is going to win the WDC anyway for sure at this point, given the points difference.
> Isn't that the entire point of a simulator to learn things that are too expensive to learn in the real world?
You're right but this is not those expensive things. Track time is extremely limited, so the primary role of the sim is to develop the car and how it feels to the drivers, mainly so the setup feels perfect to them.
System-level bugs etc must have their own testing but sim is mainly for driver-engineer testing. Many drivers also don't like using the sim at all like Hamilton.
The constructors championship money is absolutely a massive impact for the teams. Last place (11th) is estimated at ~$50 million, 5th place is estimated ~$100 million, and 1st place ~$140 million. For a team like Williams or Haas, every position they move up the ranking makes a substantial budget impact (both of those have estimated total budgets ~$230 million). Even for one of the big 4, with budgets in the $400 million range, the $40 million swing from 4th to 1st is not insignificant.
Heck, Otmar had to pay his staff out of his own pocket back in the day (I don't remember what cost-cap was in place back then - I think that was during his time at Force India). Those lower teams are more stable now that 20 years ago, but still struggle to get enough sponsor money to compete.
Ah, a student of the old masters....
(For the uninitiated, or those who wish to relive the memory: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html )
What they probably could do yesterday, on top of checking a ton of telemetry, is understand which inputs were weird and put those into a simulator and get some hints for the FIA to work with. If you’re not aware, the FIA provides the ECU to all teams so that the telemetry used to check compliances and power modes are fair across all teams, and things like traction control are not there. This is why the FIA had to provide the firmware update.
Sometimes we bring down whole services with "just" config (looking at you, DNS).
These cars are in a perpetual Q&A state, they are getting modified between races. That's true for the "big teams", small teams don't have the resources, they're just "happy to be there". That's why it's possible to see stories like Brawn GP[^1]. That's what makes the sport fascinating, because the overtakes are not as much as one would hope for a ~2-3 hours race. But every little thing counts. In the last race 1st and 2nd had ~103ms diff or something like that for example, which is something that didn't happen for 15-20 years (maybe more).
This isn't really the case anymore. There's a budget cap, and all of the teams are financially sound most of the time. While the poorer teams might bring fewer upgrades in a year, they still bring upgrades all year long, and R&D is a continuous process in every F1 factory these days. Smaller teams also get additional R&D, compute, and testing time compared to the big teams.
Two important informations are buried like „now smaller teams take podium 5% of time instead of of 10%” and „cost cap administration is a burden” and they there are no clear guidelines on what is in the cap and what not.
Not really. The budget cap does not include the salaries of active drivers and the three highest paid non-driver employees, as well as some other odds and ends.
In most major league sports in the US, there is some form of salary cap, but it really only applies to players. Organizations can spend money on other things as they wish. That applies to coaching, front office, facilities, etc.
In motorsport and in Formula 1 not so much. If a team has a dominant car, let's say half a second faster than the second best, the championship is an internal matter between its drivers. Any second tier driver sitting in one of those two cars can be world champion. The only opponent is the team mate. So most of the money goes into the car.
The Formula 1 cost cap applies to all expenses with few exceptions. Most notably drivers and the (3?) highest paid employees. Of course you must keep the bosses happy, right? Drivers could become subject to the cap in one of the next years. They won't be happy but what can they do? Furthermore teams will always find somebody to drive their cars even at one tenth of what they are paying now.
I've watched F1 for more than 2 decades, from the paragraph above I realize this year's F1 is basically comparable to AI slop...
F1 has been unsatisfying since the move to hybrid power trains.
Lewis vs Nico was at least crazy entertaining. Then there was a Vettel threat one year, then there was the Max vs. Lewis era...
The real issue is the cars are just too big and heavy. There was a point in time when you could pass someone even in Monaco.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_cheating_during...
The initial formation lap was aborted due to the glitch (caused drivers to slow to a crawl or stop). The cars all went back to the pits. Then there was a long delay while FIA/teams/ECU provider figured out what was wrong. And eventually fixed it via a software update.
Restarting in Hamilton's case "fixed" it because it removed the condition it was in, if he would have done the lap again, it would have happened again.
[1] https://gigamonkeys.com/book/lather-rinse-repeat-a-tour-of-t... (the last paragraph, search for "remote debugging" in the page)
But maybe that's the difference between shipping a controller for F1 versus shipping one for an industrial or consumer product? shrug.