WRC main class in 2025

[Mirek]

So what are these 98 %?

The most expensive thing is development and testing cost and the funny thing about it is that this cost doesn't depend on materials used. You can make the whole car from wood but the development and testing cost will be most likely same or even higher (because of lack of know-how related to the said material).

Just think about what is behind a part like let's say a rear wing. There are hundreds of hours of well paid engineer. The engineer needs expensive hardware, software and an office. After that he needs to order various prototypes which are multiple-times more expensive than the final part. Maybe he would need to rent an aerodynamic tunnel. Than you need another more junior engineer to design the wing attachment. He also needs hardware, software and an office and also some prototypes. You need mechanics to put that together. Than you need to take the car a well paid driver, some race engineer(s) and mechanics for a test. You destroy some parts during the testing and wear-out others. You spend thousands of litres of race fuel and wear-out dozens of tyres. And all the time you pay a manager overlooking the development. When you get to the final part you can count all cost which you already spent on it and divide it by the expected number of produced parts. How many wings can a WRC team use during one season? Few dozens I guess? It means that in a price of each wing you have thousands of Euros of development cost and even if you make the wing of paper it will still cost thousands of Euros.