Something unexpected can always happen, but this can even become an opportunity, if teams are flexible enough to react quickly
Top motorsport classes are often associated with an environment where the quest for pure performance is the heart of every decision, both on track and out of the circuit. Indeed, the main goal of a racecar is to perform better than its competition.
Winning races is not ‘just’ this though. In the past, with less advanced tools at engineers’ disposal, reliability was a crucial factor, and the really good drivers knew they had to be kind to their hardware during a race to avoid a retirement.
Nowadays, retirements because of reliability issues are much less frequent than they once were, but there are still important aspects that transcend pure performance and can make a big difference on race and championship results. Among the most important ones is how a team handles race preparation and strategy.
The aim is to reduce the risk of having to work in emergency mode, while facing something unexpected
Being prepared for a race is important in class, and every team that is serious about winning invests time and resources into pre-event work. This can be trying to anticipate how a weekend could evolve and analysing possible scenarios, in order to have all the required information once at the track. The aim is to reduce the risk of having to work in emergency mode, while facing something unexpected, and needing to diverge resources to solve problems that could have been analysed at the factory. Of course, something unexpected can happen, but this canteams are flexible enough to react quickly.
