My point is that it costs the same to maintain and okay car as a superb one - so by dropping the levels is just an expense that is restrictive of those with less money. - making it harder for them to improve to a higher level. - those already with this level (achieved before the changes) need only to maintain rather than improve. So these changes hurt the lower teams more than the top on a financial level. I thought the purpose of this change was to stop those at the top from maintaining this easily? Solution - only have the drop implemented on superb rated parts not all levels. This is all I'm worried about - for other teams as I feel I'm doing alright with the budget I have
This is something that is just not going to work in the long run as i will explain.
Frank has said-
"There were concerns from several people that it was too easy to stay ahead of the rest in the development race once you reached a high level in one of your plans. These concerns were correct, and this has now been tweaked by applying a constant reduction to development plans and produced parts".
Great idea with the parts losing their rating, especially as they get older, which should happen anyway, but the people who found it easy to stay ahead will always be ahead since now we are all losing our development rating, as the rest of us will never catch up.
Losing your potential rating is stupid as this means you now have to develop a new part, which will be worse than the current part & there is just not enough time in the season to evolve all this again when you should be now concentrating on next seasons parts. There are also teams that don't have the designers to reach the other teams anyway.
Idea-
Go back to the way it was with developing parts, but make it so that you can no longer carry current plans into next season. Therefore everybody has to develop brand new parts for every season & use that season to evolve. This would make the first few rounds of every season interesting. Then the development race would actually be a race.
As i understand it the higher the part rating the more it will drop. So what i think that means is a part which is 8-10 may drop two rating during the season whilst lower parts may only lose 1.
the potential dropping as well is correct though. A part(x) having say the best potential (10) at the time of creation is only correct until in theory someone else creates a new part with new ideas which has the potential to be better than part (x). So this means part(x) potential will/has now dropped.
I agree with Luke in a way, a Front Wing with Superb potential in Week 1 is not going to still have Superb potential come week 8 as new innovations would have come along.
However i believe that instead of having to design a brand new Front Wing to get the potential up it should be possible to base a design on the current part but focus on potential more rather than other elements. This may well have already been implemented by Frank and we may find the potential of a part goes up when we produce designs based on it.
Im willing to see how things go next season, i have some ideas on how i will approach it although they may be wrong so will be cool to see what direction everybody heads in!
Example my rear wing = okay aero + okay grip (potential) Current = okay aero + unsure grip.
While i was just developing my grip on the rear wing to bring it up to okay, the potential dropped from okay to unsure before i even got the chance to max out the rating. Great system.
Basically what this system does is only lets you have superb parts for x amount of weeks before being reduced. I do see the logic, but think an end of season drop would be better than mid season constant dropping, it's hard enough as it is to develop good parts and keep up with a fixed end result, let alone a goal that moves!
A rear wing is created with Superb potential in F1 and after 2 months it's unlikely its potential will still be at that level. Another rear wing design from any team (even your own) will likely have superseded it with a higher potential and thus the original design sees that level drop.
Don't forget that everything is sped up in Pitwall, we have many races over the course of a few months and then the season is over. It's no big surprise to see part levels dropping over a season it just perhaps is a bit of a shock as it appears too quick while in reality its not.
The only way to ensure you are at the forefront of technology is to have a big team with lot's of facilities and lots of staff.... e.g. Mercedes or Ferrari. Pretty realistic wouldn't we say?
