Customer Cars

[AJS-]

I don't see the problem with it, even if it did result in 3 or 4 major constructors. It's not like there's very much variety between cars anyway at the moment, just very marginal and (from a spectators point of view) abstract differences that make some cars faster than others. If anything having a mix-and-match of different chassis, engines and (why not?) tyres might produce a bit more variability between cars, and would undoubtedly save the smaller teams millions in development costs.

[Jungles]

They could make it similar to the RBR and STR arrangement prior to 2009: RBR would supply the chassis plans, STR would build the car themselves, package their engine and other components within the chassis, and get delayed updates (updates to the STR version were usually delayed by two or three races).

In that way, the customer team's car will always be a bit slower than the vendor team, and there will be marginal differences due to packaging. For example, the STR3 had delayed aero updates, different components, and different rear bodywork (due to having different engines) to the RB4 vendor car.

Edited by Jungles on Tuesday 29th October 06:40

[rubystone]

Jungles said:

They could make it similar to the RBR and STR arrangement prior to 2009: RBR would supply the chassis plans, STR would build the car themselves, package their engine and other components within the chassis, and get delayed updates (updates to the STR version were usually delayed by two or three races).

In that way, the customer team's car will always be a bit slower than the vendor team, and there will be marginal differences due to packaging. For example, the STR3 had delayed aero updates, different components, and different rear bodywork (due to having different engines) to the RB4 vendor car.

Edited by Jungles on Tuesday 29th October 06:40

Surely the point with customer cars is that they make it cheaper to go racing; the team has no need for big build teams. Giving a team plans for a car defeats that. They still need to build the car. Under the structure outlined above, they will still be looking to develop the car with their own aero etc.

If we must have customer cars then it seems to make sense to allow teams to elect what they buy from others. If we look at what Super Aguri did with the Arrows A23, we can see that it is possible to take a base design and develop it and perform creditably.

So a team could elect to buy the basic tub with hard points for engine already there and to invest their money in developing it. At the other extreme, a team could elect to take the whole car and as Jungles says, to accept the fact that they will inevitably be behind the curve.