The world's best racing cars

If not a full-size, room-occupying elephant, there is a paradox at the heart of motorsport. We idolise the fastest, raciest drivers, and marvel when a team gets its shizzle so thoroughly together that no one else gets a look in. But then we get bored when they win, weekend after weekend, race after race. What fickle beings we are.

Formula One, and the world endurance and rally championships go through cycles, and it's easy to forget how quickly things can change. In 2012, for example, seven different drivers won the first seven Grands Prix. Citroen, and Sébastien Loeb in particular, dominated the WRC for most of the 21st century. Currently, Mercedes-Benz is trampling all over the rest of the F1 grid, and Volkswagen is poised to set the longest winning streak in the sport's history, as Loeb's former team-mate Sébastien Ogier defends his world title in the Polo R WRC.

This feature was originally published in the September 2014 issue of Top Gear magazine

Audi, meanwhile, is currently being severely tested by Toyota, and will be tested harder still by Porsche once its teething troubles are sorted. But Le Mans is the WEC race that really matters, and only twice in the past 15 years has Audi failed to win it. They did it again this year, with the remarkable R18 e-tron quattro, despite having to rebuild an entire car after Loïc Duval's colossal crash in practice. Another Audi win may not have given the narrative anyone wanted, but all 263,000 spectators had to hand it to them. It was a stellar performance, carved out of the experience that only comes with 13 victories.

Which raises the obvious question - how does a group of individuals turn their collective effort into an unstoppable winning machine?

Let's use the Merc WO5 Hybrid, arguably the most dominant F1 car since 1988's McLaren MP4/4, as an example. Back in 2012, I visited the team's High Performance Powertrains (HPP) HQ at Brixworth. "There are six departments here," engineering director Andy Cowell told me, "and our aim is simple: what can we do to make a racing car go round a circuit faster? There's a performance engineering division, an electronics one, we have guys who develop new concepts then bring them to life, a reliability group that determines if the product is good enough to leave the factory. Engineers are an unruly bunch who never really want to commit to something when they can keep on being creative. So there's a management group here, whose job it is to get them to commit."

Well, by mid-2012 they'd already committed to the design of the 1.6-litre hybrid turbo, as per the biggest regulation change in a generation, and still this season's biggest talking point. Yet some other advantages were apparent, even then. A couple of years previously, HPP invested heavily in a new KERS system, giving Mercedes a vital head start in terms of harnessing and storing energy, and the control electronics governing it all.The proximity of the team's base in Brackley was also paying dividends, allowing for a near-seamless integration of effort.

Now, of course, we know that HPP had also figured out that splitting the turbo in half, effectively placing the compressor and turbine at opposite ends of the engine and linking them with a shaft, meant lower temperatures on the intake side, which in turn allowed a smaller intercooler. That gave the aero guys freedom to push harder on the packaging, and also allowed the gearbox to be positioned further forward, promoting a lower overall centre of gravity. In other words, one moment of pure inspiration led to numerous other benefits. It was ever thus in F1 (ground effect, active suspension, blown diffusers - the list is long). But does the team's infrastructure promote greater ingenuity? As Ferrari flounders, what voodoo is required to get this bit right?

"We have concept meetings - engineers in Brackley and engineers in Brixworth getting together to discuss things," Cowell told me when I returned to HPP this year. "We brainstorm ideas, then do a ‘bang for the buck' calculation. Sometimes you close things out as too difficult or costly. But sometimes you think, ‘That's a pretty big benefit, let's give it a damned good go.'"

Nor is Mercedes's success down to this one admittedly ingenious innovation, as Cowell is at pains to point out. "The fastest racing car needs an outstanding driver, great vehicle dynamics, great aerodynamics, and a lot of grunt that's always there. And that means lots of specialist teams pulling together, to look after one car. Then it's down to tactics, and reacting to events. I don't think it's down to an individual area."

Audi's Motorsport boss Wolfgang Ullrich, fast becoming a legend to rival the great Norbert Singer, architect of Porsche's string of Seventies and Eighties Le Mans victories, would surely agree. And VW's big sporting cheese, the excellent Jost Capito, definitely knows how to knit the effort together. Can we sum it all up in one word? Yes. People.