- 22 Mar 10, 16:13#191056I'll give A a stab to.
Obviously you need to have top engineers who can design the fastest car and the fastest drivers to drive them. But it's not as simple as that. I'd say fundamentally what you want is a experienced team boss who knows whats what.
First off, you need finances, you can't survive or go anywhere without them. I think the majority of this comes from Sponsors. Obviously winning titles generates a lot of cash but a team would be foolish to rely on this for survival money. F1 is a perilous fast changing sport, so a team needs consistency above all. Sponsors are generally the best way to earn. And to attract sponsors a team has gotta have some sort of brand image, so famous drivers - or ones who are really popular in their home country are useful here. However the commercial demands of f1 must be balanced, this is where a good team boss comes in - they need to be able to woo enough sponsors so that their confident enough to say no to a driver who is useless but brings in large sponsorship.
For your engineers and drivers its not just about technical excellence, they need to be good team players. You need drivers who can identify problems, evaluate new parts in detail and communicate all the characteristics of the car and what they want to improve accurately. The driver has to know what they want, and be specific on how to achieve this - obviously make the car go faster won't be much help to the designers.
This translate into the smaller scale which covers a race weekend, a good driver knows how to set up their car, they know how the car feels under various fuel loads and with the tires available (two options). This means that when it comes down to race stragety, the driver has an advantage. They will know at what stage its best for them to pit and come out driving quickly. Adaptability is also important here, no team is able to have a perfect car all the time, it changes from course to course, corner to corner and at different points during the race and qualifying session. Obviously an experienced driver who knows his car well will be able, to some extent, to pre-empt these changes and have the car setup accordingly. But when problems do occur, a great driver will not only give feedback on how to improve but be able to manage with these problems whilst they last. Not letting the issue affect them physiologically into being more cautious than necessary for example.
The team needs to have good management, management that properly understands what it takes to be quick and succeed in f1. It's of a big advantage if the manager has some sort of f1 background. The management needs to direct all the various elements and try to combine them in the most effective way, this means deciding things such as whether to give each driver equal treatment in equipment, how much the team as a whole should focus on improving the current car and how much the team should focus on designing a car for the next season.
I can throw in examples for the stuff I mentioned if you want.
