richard_leeds wrote:
That's odd. I thought Brawn won because it was one of the few cars with the DDD?
Christian Horner is a team principal, not the owner. You'll find that most the principals are very technical, for example Whitmarsh, Brawn, Domenicali, Head, Williams, Boulier .. etc...
You're correct on the Horner principal issue, I had him confused with what's his name. You're not exactly right on the second part of that statement. You can hardly point to Brawn to support that argument, he never intended to have the job. Dennis was a mechanic, Williams has no technical background that I'm aware of, and Head bought in to the team fairly recently in its history. At any rate, I also said F1 is unique in how much engineering talent it does have in management, as most teams are run by nitwits.
But what are Horners qualifications? I can't remember his name ever coming up prior to his current post.
If the performance of the Brawn had been down to the DDD then Williams would have been in 2nd place. The team made a decision 1/2 way through '08 to focus everything on '09, and when they were forced to "restructure" they clearly made the decision to gamble everything they had left on the '09 car.
Kers was a disaster in '09. The teams that ran it clearly did so to gain a future advantage, and Brawn was staring at the very real possibility of not having a future. There was no good reason to throw money and development time at a project that had no immediate utility.
I would say Kers is less of a disadvantage this year then '09, but I would hardly conclude that it's clearly superior. And claiming that Kers is why Massa was able to stay ahead is just silly. If both cars have kers then it's irrelevant, and so far every single race where kers has run the cars with no kers onboard have shown markedly superior handling. We've seen hundreds of faster cars held up indefinitely by slower cars, you can NOT make any intelligent claim that Button would have easily passed Massa had the Ferrari only been without kars.
