Every year, Formula 1's teams have to make the decision when to end focus on the current season and pour all of its engineering resources into designing the next car. It's an important thing to time correctly, and F1 is littered with examples of teams who either kept developing too late and started the next year badly, or diverted course too early and sacrificed success in the immediate term for little pay-off.
On the cusp of a new ruleset, it's even more important to get that timing right; the big teams can't afford to phone it in for a year, but equally do not have the cost cap allowance nor the quantity of personnel to go all out across two projects. They'll have to split their time effectively to fight on two fronts: the present and the future.
