[apalrd]

There's absolutely nothing wrong with setting your minds on a type of drivetrain construction. You can decide pre-season you would rather build out of sheet metal or welded box tube or plate or whatever else you want, and get your process in order (e.g. methods for manufacturing, communication with sponsors as necessary, etc.).

I would also argue that it's better to have a full design set on your design shelf pre-season rather than just ideas. Even with game changes, modifying something that is already done is easy, and no game in the past few years (except Lunacy which we won't talk about) which requires more than optimization of ground clearance, long/wide/square aspect ratio, number of wheels, and especially gear ratio.

We calculate out the optimum gear ratio from COTS parts every year, we talk about long/wide (or this year square), ground clearance requirements, if we should taper the ends, etc. but it's not hard to built fundamentally the same thing (same wheel axle module, same wheel or wheel size, etc.) with changes in specifics. In fact, once you've nailed the design elements like that, it's trivial to design a wide version of a long chassis, or a square version, or an 8wd vs 6wd, or anything like that. It's still the same chassis design, adapted to the game.

The years that we did less game element/chassis integration and more design-shelf utilization, we performed better because we finished earlier and had more testing time. Sure, maybe we could have optimized a bit more out of it, but finishing a few days earlier is way more important.