Same as race cars, the engineers don't drive like a professional driver does and I bet he doesn't need a double blind test to tell him which suspension/tire/gear combination is right for that track in that weather condition.
I hope no drivers, team owners or their shop crews see this post.
Coming from Charlotte, NC, most of the NASCAR teams are based right north of me, in/around Mooresville and Concord, NC. Guess who builds all their cars? Guys and gals hired who graduated the motorsports engineering major at the Univ of North Carolina. They are some seriously fanactical mechanical engineers, and there's no guesswork involved in what they do, except for happy accidents that teach them something they never would have thought of on their own.
Naturally the driver has input. But there are scientific reasons why things work for them, and they don't leave it to chance. The car has to be perfect so that the driver just has to show up and do his part.
And did you know your speedometer perform a calculus operation? It takes the angular position of the axle, which (when the tire diameter is considered) indicates position. The the speedometer circuit takes the derivative of the position information fed to it and indicates your velocity (miles per hour, or change of position for a unit change of time). You and I don't care that it's calculus, but the first person to figure it out sure cared.
Of course you can hear and feel a difference with different parts. I do too. But I'm coming around more to FYL's mindset to make sure that psychology doesn't trick me into thinking something is better. That's because I bought into the hype and marketing when I was starting out and didn't know better, and have since seen that some of it was right, some wrong, and some outright lie. There's a lot of bogus stuff out there when it comes to guitars, amps and audio.
I guess the best statement of how I feel about this stuff is that science, engineering and math is present all the time, even if one chooses to ignore it. But quantifying and calculating allows you to arrive at a workable solution faster that blind experiment. The key is to still retain some feeling of the artistic, so that when you have a solution given through calculation, you listen to it and can tell if it sounds like crap. And when it does, the science will inform your decision about how to change it to make it better.
