You need to make the step forward Throughout a racing season there is constant, relentless pressure on the designer to keep making design improvements. But there is a limit to what can be achieved with any car design, before a jump has to be made to basically a new design, an innovation. As Gordon Murray says, ‘Given the situation and the pressure at any one time, you do get to the brick wall...I mean you're doing all these normal modifications, you know you can't go any quicker, you need to make the step forward.’ In the midst of the pressure, the fervour, the panic, he ‘used to get breakthroughs, I mean I used to get like suddenly a mental block's lifted.’ Gordon Murray, Winning by Design: The Methods of Gordon Murray The Structure of Scientific RevolutionsMediocratopia progress
Drawing the bits That's what is great about race car design, because even though you've had the big idea - the “light bulb” thing, which is fun - the real fun is actually taking these individual things, that nobody's every done before, and in no time at all try and think of a way of designing them. And not only think of a way of doing them, but drawing the bits, having them made and testing them. Gordon Murray, Winning by Design: The Methods of Gordon Murray
Repair Within the larger language, it is impossible for any act not to help repair the larger whole. It is impossible for any act of building to remain an isolated act: it always becomes a portion of the flux of acts which is helping to maintain the whole. Even the laying of a brick, to mend a wall, will not only be used to mend that wall, but will be used to help repair the seat, the terrace, or the fireplace which that wall helps to form. Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building 104. Site Repair repair