My thoughts:
1) If you "under-engineer" a car to save money, you end up replacing a lot of parts on warranty, thereby paying for 2 or 3 of the original parts + labor for exchange, rather than a 20% premiun for an upgraded part from the begining that can tolerate the abuse. This gives a rationale to make the car durable in the first place.
2) As the end user, if you modify an under-engineered car and it breaks repeatedly, they say you broke it from abusing it, denying warranty and you have to pay for replacement parts repeatedly.
3) If you under-engineer a track oriented car and it breaks repeadedly, it gets a bad reputation and people stop buying it even after you fix the defective parts in upcoming model years because there are other cars on the market that are cheaper to purchase and maintain under race conditions.
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