Quote Originally Posted by denkimi View Post
It is certainly true.

Say you have one million dollar to develop the car. You could build a new revolutionary engine that will make your car 1s/km faster, or you could further develop shocks that will give you a 0,1s advantage. What do you think they would choose?

Group b was a time of revolution, not of evolution. Nobody cared about perfecting the existing technology if by the next year it was already obsolete. Instead of perfecting handling and winning a little time, they just put a bigger turbo on it and won a lot of time.
Sure, everything else also improved, but the revolutions made the cars suddenly so much faster that evolution could't keep up.

So what you had where always new, very fast, but very imperfect cars.

Nowadays there are no more revolutions possible, so teams put their effort in small changes. They perfect the cars, trying to make driving as easy as possible.
No, it's not true. This "power over everything" idea is represented mainly by the Audi approach but that didn't come from the engineers thinking that more power and more aero is a cure for everything. They knew very well that the handling of the car was shitty and that the main reason was the wrong engine location and orientation but the company management insisted on it for marketing reasons. In the same time Audi engineers were secretly working on their own "engineering solution" with smaller mid-engine car but that never made it behind the prototype phase due to the historical events.

But Audi was not alone. Lancia long time stayed with a nimble small and light RWD. Peugeot introduced a mid-engine lightweight and small car which was much less powerful than the Audi yet it was faster. Ford came with a concept with switchable 4WD/RWD to improve handling on different surfaces etc. They were well aware that the power was not everything even though it definitely played far bigger role than in the restrictor era which was about to come later.