The Return of Customer Cars

[John S]

Let Boeing or Bombardier supply a chassis to someone willing to run it.  They have no interest in running an F1 team, but that would be a great halo project for a team of engineers, and would be more meaningful than just slapping their name on the side of a Williams.

I think by requiring F1 cars to be designed by full time F1 designers is limiting innovation.

They can already if they so choose Jeri.    They can only supply one team though.

No where in the FIA rules does it say that a chassis must be designed by a full time F1 designer, I'm sure some of the bought in chassis from Dallara, et al, over the years have not been penned by traditional full time F1 people.   

The problem is more about performance, it just makes more sense to have people dedicated to an F1 project as the discipline is complicated by tight and changeable tech regs plus the extreme speed of development by rivals.

Innovations a plenty have come from smaller F1 teams, not only from the designers but other parts of the teams as well. However third parties and subcontractors have little motivation to push far beyond the spec they are set - who would pay for any flights of fancy like the ones F1 teams take on a regular basis?

 

[lkjohnson1950]

Remember when the grid at Indy had McLarens, Lotus', Eagles, Watsons, Lolas, Lightnings, Penskes, well you get the idea. But when the Penske didn't perform, Roger bought Marches, when the latest Eagles didn't perform, teams went elsewhere, along with the money for the next generation. Now we have a spec series. 

[Scott]

Lonny, that's the best argument I've heard yet to support customer cars.  If Renault comes in with a sick engine, or Mclaren comes in with a poorly designed car, they can right away buy what they need from someone else and still compete for points. 

[John S]

Lonny, that's the best argument I've heard yet to support customer cars.  If Renault comes in with a sick engine, or Mclaren comes in with a poorly designed car, they can right away buy what they need from someone else and still compete for points.

Trouble with that scenario Scott, IMHO, is that Renault and any other engine maker who falls behind (or chassis supplier a year or two down the line) definitely would have to pack their bags and leave, no customers means no business.

Now how many OEM's leaving does it require before F1 ends up with one engine and probably at best 2 or 3 chassis builders? Spec series by anyone's standards.

 

[lkjohnson1950]

That's the point I was trying to make John. No business, no next gen.

[Irisado]

I'm proposing a scenario where each team must have a unique chassis.  I like that aspect of the sport (though quite frankly I think unique engines would be even better).  Just that they don't have to have in house expertise to do it.

Okay, so each customer chassis could only be supplied to one team?  Fair enough, however, it hasn't worked for a great many years now.  The outsourcing of chassis design away from the Formula 1 team tends to result in indifferent or poor chassis designs.  Let's take a look at some examples:

Fomet1: Designed chassis externally for the old Osella team after it was taken over by the late Gabriele Rumi's Fondmetal organisation at the start of 1991.  The chassis rarely performed well, and the car failed to get onto the grid for more than half the races.  Fondmetal abandoned this route of chassis design and moved everything in house for 1992, producing a much better car (in terms of performance) as a result.

Lola: Produced chassis for Larrousse from 1987-1991 and for Scuderia Italia in 1993.  The 1990 chassis was very good, but otherwise the chassis ranged from mediocre to very poor.

Dallara: Produced chassis for Scuderia Italia from 1988-1992, and for Hispania in 2010.  Their record was pretty much the same as Lola's.

Reynard: Their aborted F1 chassis ended up being used by Pacific in 1994, and was atrocious.  Pacific's management were aghast at just how bad it was, and couldn't wait to get rid of it come the end of the season.

Looking at these independent chassis designers, it seems to me that while they had some good results at times, the majority of teams produced superior cars when they designed them in house, so why try to reinvent the wheel?

[lkjohnson1950]

I was always puzzled by the Reynard fiasco. They were very good in every other open wheel class they tried.

[Alianora La Canta]

Let Boeing or Bombardier supply a chassis to someone willing to run it.  They have no interest in running an F1 team, but that would be a great halo project for a team of engineers, and would be more meaningful than just slapping their name on the side of a Williams.

I think by requiring F1 cars to be designed by full time F1 designers is limiting innovation.

They can already if they so choose Jeri.    They can only supply one team though.

Technically one company could supply every chassis on the grid, provided all their R&D teams were demonstrably separate and a different holding company owned the intellectual property rights for each chassis.

They don't, because it doesn't pay anyone to try that.