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> but not driver salaries, travel or marketing

I assume someone is already offering an extremely high-fidelity CFD simulator (or a wind tunnel) to help companies shoot awesome videos of their cars, for purposes of including them in TV spots, of course.

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CFD simulations came at around 2010. Redbull had the best of them, that's why they took over from Mercedes-McLaren those years.

I worked on engine and powertrain simulations, and my compiler was used for vehicle and driver simulations. This was built for Honda, but Honda left, bought by Mercedes, and won them several championships.

In fact there is a very specific cap on CFD simulations beyond the normal cost cap, to prevent an HPC arm race. Used to be an actual flop cap, but of course teams found way around it, now it is more complicated.

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