Those restrictions on computing power (25 TFLOPS of CPU) for your CFD simulation cluster seem rather esoteric when it comes to racing cars...those hundreds of pages of regulations must be ridiculous to comply with.
In CAD they manifest themselves as a bunch of boxes in which you are allowed to put your shapes, so it's not overly taxing for the engineers to follow. However there is a risk that the 'box' layer is not done correctly at the beginning of the season and you end up missing something important.
The limit on computing power encourages you to think more carefully about what a certain component is interacting with the rest of the car. A few years ago I remember a CFD engineer running a massive DoE with hundreds of cases to get his stats up for the week when there was spare capacity in the cluster. If the limit were removed I doubt there would be any increase in innovation, just way more carpet bombing with parametric designs.
Yeah, the 25 TFLOPS thing is so weird. Is this just to ultimately force a trade off between simulation fidelity and cycle time for analyzing new designs? Can you not run multiple simulations on separate 25 TFLOPS clusters?
Also, how would regulators be able to verify how many simulations were run on how many designs?
It's an R&D spending cap, to keep the sport more competitive. Much like many pro sports leagues impose a salary cap, so the richest teams can't simply spend their way to victory.
