New car is worse than previous season

[godsentme]

My next season's starting car's performance is much worse than how I ended in previous season when looking at grid rank and I'm curious as to why this is the case.

First of all, I only did research on chassis, sidepods and front wing as the first 2 had regulation changes. On the end of the season report about car parts expertise it specifically shows only research and regulation changes, doesn't show expertise gained from designing (which I did quite a lot, 1 engineer on intense for Underfloor for example). I assumed that expertise gained from parts designs also carries over to next season's car, is that not the case?

I play as Williams and for new season I switched engines from Mercedes to Ferrari. I assume powertrain switch does not factor in to the performance numbers for aerodynamics, or does it?

Here's the comparison pic the game gave me between the seasons:
https://i.ibb.co/LpxnL7w/car-report2.jpg
High Speed and Low Speed are what I concentrated the most on when designing during first season, yet they are worse in new season; the exact opposite is true for Engine Cooling, I either had it go down or have very small gains, yet it improved by 20%. Why?

And finally here's grid rank comparison report the game gave me before the first race:
https://i.ibb.co/gS7dwpj/car-report.jpg
Previous season ended with me being 1st in High Speed cornering, 3rd in Top Speed and within top 7 for Low and Medium Speed, now I'm 3rd, 9th and not even top 10 for the last 2 respectively. I managed to win a podium position with Albon once, my team got 5th place and reached the long term goal of points contender, so my car 1 was definitely up there. Yet it seems that teams I was in close competition with (Aston Martin, Mercedes and Alpine) got a better starting car than I did and I'm wondering what did I do wrong? Or is this more or less as it would turn out? Board's expectation's risen and based on the first race it's looking rather challening, granted my car's best attribute was not crucial or recommended for the first circuit (got 8th on Albon).

[LouM561]

Did your 2023 car have weight removed during design? Because if you did not design any new parts in 2024 before Bahrain then your car has the default part weight/durability and you'll need to do weight stripping again on each part. I think if you try doing a round of design with weight removed you should get that performance back.

[Drysyn]

I always design 4 of each part per season then research as much as I can after that, sometimes I stop design mid season and switch to research before continuing design later in the season as cars start to catch up, also doing intense design just burns too much money for a small team...

playing as Williams I hired Alonso at 1st season start for 13.5M with a 1M sign on bonus, he gets 250k if he wins(Hasn't done yet but has finished in the top 5) on a 3 season Contract, I have rushed all parts a few times and just after the half way point in the season I am 5th in the championship.

[kingarthur772]

That´s an very good Question. Thats my understanding from the Ingame-Help, Q & A etc.:

1. You have to Design better Parts for the existing Cars [Intensive] and bring all Parts in the Knowledge (Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3 etc.) to 100%. That´s the important Part to make your Car and the Research better.

2. Then wait for the Rule-Changes of Designing-Parts. That Parts get priority and all others Secondary Research.

3. Beginn Researching first in the 2nd Half, in the 1st Half of the Season make Improvements to the existing Parts (I managed to get for the lower Teams Tier 2 in all Parts without Problems and for the faster Design-Parts [like Suspennsion, Sidebox] Tier 3 too).

4. You need for all Parts minumum 1 Research on the existing latest Design Part for the existing Cars. Here the 100% Knowledge and intense Design help a lot to make the Parts for the next Year better [all Parts from the smallest to the biggest].

5. If you have Time and Money left [the Research go to the 31 December of the Year], then use it fully. The Time is mostly not the Problem, you have to look on the Cost-Gap.