Performance - recipe or process

Is higher performance a recipe or process? What is your approach?

For me it has been an iterative process with each new "platform" that has gotten somewhat shorter where experience where common solutions appear (like general suspension tuning has gotten easier to baseline because I've done a bunch of them on a variety of layouts). The 2nd and subsequent cars of the same kind are pure recipe.

So, both.

It's a process. The first 80% is recipe, but you have to develop the last 20%. And that's the highest performance part.

If you're buying parts, it's a recipe. You're cooking according to someone elses recipe.

If you're tuning and adjusting what's there, it's a process. Two steps forward, one step backwards, but only on a good day.

Keith Tanner wrote: It's a process. The first 80% is recipe, but you have to develop the last 20%. And that's the highest performance part.

Unless you dick with Korean junk... then it's 80% process, 20% recipe.

foxtrapper wrote: If you're buying parts, it's a recipe. You're cooking according to someone elses recipe. If you're tuning and adjusting what's there, it's a process. Two steps forward, one step backwards, but only on a good day.

Parts are ingredients, not recipes. If you choose to buy all the ingredients from the same recipe/cookbook, then it's certainly a recipe.

If you mix and match, you're making your own recipe, which takes a process of sorts.

Flash of Genius said: Let's start with the first word, "It." Did Charles Dickens create that word? No. No. What about "was"? Your Honor, is Mr. Kearns gonna go through the whole dictionary? Please, if I could just continue. I do have a point. You may answer the question. No. "The"? No. - "Best"? No. All Charles Dickens did was arrange them into a new pattern, isn't that right? Well, I admit I haven't, thought about it in that way. But Dickens did create something new, didn't he? By using words. The only tools that were available to him. Just as almost all inventors in history have had to use the tools that were available to them.

If you're talking about a MacStrut car, it's stiffness

But yeah it will always be some of both. If you're designing a car from scratch with all the best simulation software it might be 99% recipe and 1% process, but nobody will ever get it as close to perfect as possible in the design phase.

All I can say if it was just recipe... there would be a lot MORE high performance engines then there are...

I suspect if you buy more performance it is likely recipe.

So I suspect you need some recipe to get in the ballpark, but process to reach the next level. Of course with experience/knowledge and some machine tools, you could just do process.

Thoughts?

GameboyRMH wrote: If you're designing a car from scratch with all the best simulation software it might be 99% recipe and 1% process, but nobody will ever get it as close to perfect as possible in the design phase.

If you're only talking about component purchasing and assembly, I suppose so. But if you also count all of the design and redesign phases on every part of the car in that perfect final design scenario, it quickly becomes 1% recipe and 99% process.