What is the purpose of inferior brands?

I'm now at a point where I'm changing engine/fuel/tyre suppliers and I was wondering what the purpose of the in between brands are, we start with the weakest by default, but what be the purpose of not choosing the brand with the most customers/highest rating numbers/the best?

I have signed with Tifosi as an engine supplier but I have since learned that Murk has higher levels on all the engine attributes, I thought there would be some give and take? Will the attributes ever change between seasons?

They don't change at the moment - I beleive this will change in future though. It's a very basic system for now.

and not to mention almost everyone uses seashells fuels... little do they know ;)

Little do they know what Eton?? ;)

There's certainly something to be said about the economy of some of the mid-performance brands. I use a lot of them because I know I'm not fully ready to compete in my league until I get KERS at least, so I try to save money where I can while not using the starter brands and being a boat anchor.

Good idea mate!

and I thought we just lean the carb back to improve fuel milliage.  I peronaly coast between yellow flags to save fuel.

I went through and looked at all the lesser brands and they all came up with much weaker stats. I just turned around and dumped them for the higher leveled products. But I had to see if I was missing out on anything..Maybe it was just me, but I didnt see any advantages by looking at the stats.  You can see for yourself, at worst I think you lose 100k per partner when breaking the contract. Atleast I did.

Suppliers stats have/will change in the Q2 update, as above says u only lose 100k + they dislike you a bit, so perhaps it should be more expensive ie remainder of contract + they request a lot more cash if u try to resign them

I would be suggesting that they set suppliers of Engine, Tire and Fuel into 3 tiers of pricing and performance. Renault, Mercedes and Ferrari being tier 3 and the most expensive, Cosworth being Tier 1 being cheapest.

From Q2, I think each brand of engine's stats should be locked the entire season for the league you're in, but they can change in between, and independant of each other, so 2 engines could possibly end up with identical stats etc. This of course means that the best engine(s) won't be the same for all leagues at the same time.
I think the relationships aspect of the game will become more valuable as a side effect of this.

ps On very rare occasion (1 in 30 seasons formed), maybe the Cosurworthit could be the top engine, or get freak stats for that one season?

This was an idea I'd had wanted to suggest myself, locking the stats for the league over the season, but mine wasn't as nuanced as this. I was going to suggest a pseudo-random change to the suppliers every 1/2/3 months, but in the sense that at each interval, the attributes only change by a maximum of 2, and only in rare cases. I imagine it like a dice roll.

For each attribute, generate two random variables, one a binary true/false, the other an integer from 1 to 10 or something.
[list]
[*]If the binary comes back true, increase the value. If it comes back false, decrease the value.
[*]If the integer comes back any number from 1 to 9, change the value by 1. If it comes back 10, change the value by 2.
[/list]
Obviously you can play with the possible results to change the probabilities of different changes. This system means that, ideally, at each interval the attributes can't change too much, and would simulate the waxing and waning of suppliers over time, but not change so much that the best engine suddenly becomes the worst, but more drawing the pack closer together, or one supplier pulling further ahead.

For simplicity and user experience, you might want to set it so the values only change between seasons, but then from a technical standpoint you get into "how do you save the data for each league?" and "what happens to users who switch leagues mid-season?" and that gets complicated very quickly.