Red Bull did not test the constructors' championship-winning RB6 in the first winter testing session of 2010 and suffered early-season problems when Sebastian Vettel lost the lead at the Bahrain Grand Prix because of a spark plug problem, finishing fourth as a result, before retiring in the following race in Australia with a wheelproblem.
Alonso survived 13 laps before he came back to the pits to revert to slicks but a problem with a loose wheel nut saw him trapped in the pits for 18 seconds leaving him short on time to close down Schumacher.
The downside is that the process to arrive there can waste a lot of time and energy in reinventing the wheel, when, depending on the problem a school is trying to solve, the level of freedom it has to solve it, and the type of team it deploys to attack it, there is some predictability to the blended-learning model it is likely to adopt.