And people also said the Wright Brothers would never fly.... just keep reading those papers Norm.....
Just think if NASCAR engineers just did everything by looking at what is on paper...
There is a sign up at nasa, that sez.......'one test is worth a thousand opinions'. It's still up.
On a non car related subject, I use mechanical software to design sw hf antenna's for myself, and primarily other fellows. So far so good, it factors in ice and wind loads, gusts, differences in material used etc, etc. Then I discover it doesn't factor in the weight of the various fasteners used, which of course throws the calculated sag data...out the window. Some designs use software designed TQ compensator's. Great, except it places the tq comp in the wrong place, by almost a ft, which means I have to manually shift it's position, which in turn throws the entire design outa whack.. and the fix for that mess is for me to trial and error the design tweak. It's being re-written as we speak.
I also design HV DC power supplies for specific applications. I use software from the UK..it's used world wide. Been tearing my hair out the last 4-5 months as data results are goofy and obscured, unreliable, and dubious, but only under certain constrained conditions. I contact the fellow in the UK, send him a 1/2 doz files of my results. He concurs, then proceeds to explain how he found the limitations of his software. We both came up with a temp work around, which is a major pita. So version 3 is currently under development. Why the anomaly's were never discovered b4 is beyond me. Actual tests and measurements by myself and a few others, confirmed the software glitchs.
The last electronics eng book I bought, peer reviewed to boot, I found 38 mistakes in it, mostly silly typo stuff, the rest are tech in nature. But the damage is done, and lotsa design flaws have since resulted from the various errors. There are 2-3 more software design programs I use on a regular basis, that also have limitations, but I have managed to find a work around for them, and know what to do, to fool the software, to get around the various issues.
So I get a bit leery when computer simulations are run. Some of the mech software I have been using since 1991 was touted as the ultimate thing since sliced bread. Fast forward, and 9 revisions later,
they almost have it right. Then I found more stuff, where the formulae was wrong, stuff that was squared, that shoulda been cubed. You get the picture. It's a real piss off, esp with > 400 hrs wasted
over the last 4-5 months.