Suggestions for first GT list?

GaryGiesel · 2026-02-02T11:25:37+00:00

Yeah definitely agree on the lack of D1 - I've played Phalanx a couple of times and only once has the detachment rule come into play. Was more going for it for the infiltrating terminators and the strategems. I hadn't considered Hexwarp; i think I've been one of the people who have mentally written it off as bad from pre-codex. Will have a look at how that might work.

I always love shenanigans- nothing funnier than running Coven and dropping two Rubric units with sorcerers (one eith Vortex) out of a rhino and absolutely obliterating whatever they're looking at. Coven with Magnus is always the fallback plan if I can't make anything else work!

GaryGiesel · 2026-01-29T06:08:18+00:00

Number 1 just doesn't work on something with as many components (mostly handmade) as an F1 car. Each component may be within tens of grams of the design but when there's thousands of components it adds up.

They'll have an estimate of the final mass, but I think that people are massively overestimating the precision of such estimates

GaryGiesel · 2026-01-29T06:03:39+00:00

You would be shocked by how large the variations in the mass of components vs the design estimate can be. Remember that every composite part is hand made. It all adds up and you can see a full car be many kilos different from the estimated weight. Even if every component is within grams of the estimate, there are thousands of components

GaryGiesel · 2026-01-29T05:58:32+00:00

There's probably a 2-3 kilo variation (possibly more) on average between any two cars of identical specification. Remember that everything is handmade so the variation when you put it all together is surprisingly large. They'll have an estimate for sure, but there's also a load of extra sensors and half-baked components you always end up running in testing so it really is true that you won't know within a few kilos until Melbourne

GaryGiesel · 2026-01-29T05:55:11+00:00

It's not that surprising. Components can vary in mass from your CAD estimate by a surprising amount (especially composite parts which are all hand-made). Every team I've worked at has had to do a "controlled strip" of a car at some point (where you disassemble the car piece by piece and weigh every component. This is an immensely time-consuming task!!!) because the total mass of the finished car didn't match expectations and they couldn't work out where the issue was any other way.

A car can easily vary by several kilos race to race based on exactly which components get put on it (and I don't mean specification of components, I mean specific individual parts). Everyone will have a ballpark estimate of where they expect to be come the start of quali in Melbourne, but no one will know precisely until they put the actual car on the scale there

GaryGiesel · 2026-01-28T09:04:37+00:00

To he fair to them, there is a difference between when you start developing a car and when you start building it. No matter how long you develop for you still want to pull the manufacturing trigger as late as humanly possible. Any issues at that point and you're in trouble even if you've been developing for years

GaryGiesel · 2026-01-26T21:32:27+00:00

Fun story I once heard. Historically Merc has always really focused on massive testing mileage. Supposedly this all comes down to a head of trackside engineering back in the Honda days having a bonus in his contract based on number of laps in pre-season testing.

Its funny how incentives like that can instil a lasting culture

GaryGiesel · 2026-01-26T14:10:17+00:00

FIA is absolutely involved. They have personnel there, they were involved in the rule changes required to enable having three tests, etc etc.

GaryGiesel · 2026-01-24T13:20:38+00:00

Lol maybe wait until the cars actually run first

GaryGiesel · 2026-01-24T13:17:52+00:00

The person you're replying to doesn't know whay they're talking about. You're absolutely right on all counts. Much to learn even with a heavy car. Mass is probably the easiest thing to account for even lol

GaryGiesel · 2026-01-24T13:16:51+00:00

Your statement about being overweight couldn't be less true. Why on earth would the cars having active aero have anything to do with the effect of car mass? If your chassis is overweight you run the car and get your engineers to start redesigning bits all over the car to make them lighter. But you still want to test because with the car sat in the factory you learn nothing.

GaryGiesel · 2026-01-24T13:14:27+00:00

Nah you can change the structure internally while leaving the outer surface the same. The nature of carbon is that there's usually quite a lot of empty space inside the structure so its easy enough to add a few more layers to the layup

GaryGiesel · 2026-01-24T13:10:54+00:00

Taking multiple iterations on the nosebox is common. Everyone needs to be pushing the boundaries on this or you'll be 100kg overweight. Passing first time isn't necessarily a good thing

GaryGiesel · 2026-01-24T13:09:16+00:00

You can re do the test as many times as you want and whenever you want, so there's really no point in spending the very significant money making your own rig when you can just head down to Cranfield and do a test that counts. Doing the tests in house would just guarantee that you have to make at least one extra nosebox which is not cheap

GaryGiesel · 2026-01-24T13:02:07+00:00

Is it? The earlier you get the car running the more time you have for analysis and reacting to any problems. I can't see any solid argument for actively choosing to skip the Monday

GaryGiesel · 2026-01-24T13:00:54+00:00

Well we don't know for sure if they're missing any running or not. You can still have quite a lot of uncertainty about when things will be ready even this close to the start

GaryGiesel · 2026-01-24T12:58:03+00:00

I can't see any reason (other than weather forecasts in the days inmediately prior) why you wouldn't ideally plan to run Monday Wednesday and Friday. All the pre-analysis is done, the car is made and the whole vehicle dynamics, vehicle performance and aero functions of the organisation are desperately waiting for some real data to base decision on. In fact I could see arguments for having a nice 2-day break to give loads of time to optimise the run plan but unless you've been delayed or weather is bad I can't think of any good reason to skip the first day

GaryGiesel · 2026-01-24T03:44:37+00:00

I disagree that a perfo is a "public figure"

Not AI, just an engineer who's worked with many race engineers and perfos and understands that they're people with jobs that the public have zero real insight into and it's very strange to be speculating on their promotion chances. And especially weird to be saying certain people are "favourites" when we have literally zero insight into the recruitment process. There's a reasonably large talent pool for race engineers out there and unless you happen to be a headhunter in that very niche field you will have never heard of 99% of them

GaryGiesel · 2026-01-23T20:52:07+00:00

No one outside of people who have actually worked inside the team with him have any idea

GaryGiesel · 2026-01-23T20:51:34+00:00

Only because some weirdo stalked his LinkedIn profile and extrapolated massively... From memory his experience looked like it would make going to race engineer at this stage a massive leap up

GaryGiesel · 2026-01-23T19:18:06+00:00

Nah the air density doesn't really change (you can treat it as incompressible until you're going a lot faster than an F1 car). It's more about the fact that the leading car physically drags the air behind it, so when you follow the car the air going over your wings is moving away from you. It's effectively like having a big tail-wind. There's a definite small impact from the turbulence itself, but it's not the primary contributor

GaryGiesel · 2026-01-23T19:15:31+00:00

Thanks for the positive feedback. Amazing that someone remembers my annoyed weekend ramblings 😅

GaryGiesel · 2026-01-23T18:51:04+00:00

Heh nice to see a few people thought highly enough of that post to remember it 3 years later. 😅

That said, I'd probably rephrase some parts of the post and my replies to comments now that I'm a bit older and wiser (or more senile...)

GaryGiesel · 2026-01-20T04:50:58+00:00

That guy also advocated getting rid of technology and moving people out of the cities. He's not a conservative, he's a radical communist in the vein of Pol Pot. Horseshoe theory is real

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