Thank you once more for the very interesting insights in your active time. For me it is quite interesting to see that most things you mention, I pretty much experienced the same way in my active time, especially during the '08 season when we had the most succesful year one could think of.
We also had this incredible team spirit. When I joined the team in September '07, I felt welcome from the beginning. For everybody in the team the goal was clear, it was about winning competitions. That's were we had a different approach. We never really had plans for multiple years, we only tried to make sure that we don't live on the cost of the next year. That means that the next team should have a heritage they can still properly work with (workshop, sponsors, relation to uni etc.), but in general our plan was made for only that year.
Where your text could be written about our team was the part about being focused and team oriented. It was clear for everyone that the succes of the team is more important than interests of single team members. We only followed concept approaches we were convinced they would help us to gain performance and if something didn't work as desired there were no hard feelings when the decision was made that we won't running at competition. Very often I have the impression that teams have gadgets on the car which aren't working properly (yet), but run it anyway because someone put so much effort in it.
We also did a lot of social events together, in summer we had bbq every evening at the shop, went kart racing etc. And in the end our participation at the Aus comp were propably the best two weeks in my life.
For me the most important thing to make workin in a team succesful and enjoyable is that in the very beginning you commit yourself to what your goals are and how the whole thing is supposed to work. If you decide that the project is about giving people the opportunity to build crazy gadgets and whatever, you won't ever win a competition. If everyone is ok with that - no problem, but this has to be clear from the beginning. If team members are following different approaches to achieve different goals, no one will reach his goal and the result will be frustration and anger within the team.