It's easy in a sense to complain about this team because they promise so much, from the frankly stunning line-up of engineers/drivers, but underperform persistently.
But we should recognise something about this team which I think is a good quality: they try to be different. We are forever howling at Merc for being too slow to copy features up and down the pit lane: they were the last to introduce EBD, and now they are the last to introduce Coanda exhaust. They seem to develop in a direction completely different from the majority of other teams, e.g. SWB (W02), mid-sidepod exhaust exit (W02), DDRS (W03), cascade-less FW (W03), rear-wing endplate actuated DRS (W02+W03), lack of coanda (W03), dropping aero focus for tyre handling (W03), ..
But I think there is a method to the madness, in that they are trying to find an edge which is different and competitive. It is certainly intuitive that merely just looking up and down the pitlane and copying is just a way to be as fast as your competitors were 8 weeks ago.
They haven't been successful in this modus operandi, but I don't think they should drop completely this approach. As with all things in life it is about a balance, and so I hope that with the lotus-copied DDRS and the mclaren-copied coanda their attitude is starting to change. It is surely damaging to a team's ego to have to copy other car's features, but if it brings speed who cares. Finally, this team has to speed up its rate of adaption. McLaren famously instituted a mechanism in their early 2009 woes called "don't put down", where parts were defined as critical and if any team member had that part in their hands they do not put it down until their job is finished and they hand off the part to the next person in the chain. Pat Fry, I think, recognised this as a principal reason as to how they managed to turn their season around so quickly.
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