Yes, you got the Zen right and then missed the whole point of that Zen. If moving to harder springs makes the car slower, is it then the harder springs, OR would it be possible to build a faster setup by starting to change other parameters taking harder springs as the base? That's what I meant by taking different starting points and trying to find an optimal setup from there.
As to Jilles, no he doesn't test with harder springs very often, but every now and then he does, just to confirm that he cannot find a better setup that way. Sofar he has not. That does not mean there is no way to do that, what it means is that we did not find it. Maybe Teamgp will (or has). That's not what interest me in his posts. It is the information on what each change did to the car under what circumstances. And his thoughts on why the car behaved that way, sometimes completely differently from what you had expected
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It wasn't too long ago that in rubber tyre racing all the top drivers were convinced you had to run a front one-way possibly in combination with a one-way pulley to be fast. First people started to remove the one-way pulley, and nowadays more often then not we run a spool. Since there are obviously some basic truths that allways work I assume the top drivers are on the wrong road here? If one-ways were fastest before, they must be fastest now right? Well, apparantly not. Not in the least because the cars have changed. What worked on an FK'04 will not necessarily work well on an FK'05.
Don't get me wrong, I do see your point and agree with it to some extent. The problem with books however is allways that they focus on the basics that hold true under most circumstances. In many cases these basics are not sufficient to find a good setup. Do we help less experienced drivers more by telling them the basics, or helping them think through what the car is doing, what the effect of a certain change was and why it had this effect? True, a more ambitious proposition, but one that I personally feel has much more value as it explains the "dark art" of setting up a car. For the basics, read the books...
BTW, no harm in having some good discussions and taking differing points of view. That's where progress starts
