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Originally Posted by Richard C
I can't remember which team/driver this type of thing happened with in recent past. I remember that someone was complaining about weird issues and the team swapped out a new chassis to try to track down if it was a chassis issue. And I know sometimes even if a driver has access to more than one "equal" chassis that a driver may prefer one over another with the implication that they "feel" the performance may better in one vs the other. How much of that is real vs. a favorite chassis is superstition (i.e."lucky underwear") I don't know. I expect you can find examples of both being true.
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Like you I can't recall which driver / team said similar things most recently (Have a feeling it was Lewis but not 100%) but it's not unusual and as you say, sometimes a driver just prefers the intangible feel of one chassis over another. Ultimately the chassis are hand made & subtle, immeasurable differences can occur & give a driver better or worse feel & confidence, even though both chassis have the same torsional rigidity etc.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Richard C
What I think is interesting is that RB said they had an extra chassis in the works. That this was not being built just for Ricciardo. How many chassis might a team expect to create for a season? Two minimum of course, three for a single spare, four if you want two spares, more if you are introducing revisions (such as weight reduction). My point is... Is RB in the same boat at Williams in that they are racing with just two chassis? If they had a spare today and it was viewed as equal quality why not just swap Ricciardo over into the spare now vs. waiting for a new chassis in China?
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Possible that Williams isn't the only team in pit lane right now that is racing with only two chassis - hard to tell from RB's statement. Typically, teams do build multiple chassis through the course of the year - used to be around the 6-9 mark, as newer, ever-so-slighlty-stiffer chassis tend to be a little quicker, or smoothed production saves a little bit of weight, or there are subtle changes to the design to work better. How many they build in this cost-cap era I don't know.