I had been away too long

As noted in the GPL thread, I bought F1 2020 yesterday morning and then proceeded to play it all day haha. I started off by running time trials/hotlapping at the A-1 Ring, or whatever it is called these days. I decided to see if I could make it work well enough with a controller. Yeah I know, but it's so much more convenient than setting up and removing my bulky wheel and pedals every time I want to drive. I still may go that route, but for now at least I am trying to get on with the controller. I had watched a few videos and those using controllers looked surprisingly steady. Matter of fact I could not tell just by watching which of the drivers was using the controller and which was using the wheel in a split screen comparison video.

It's not ideal, and for now anyway I'll need to use some assists since the level of granularity means it lacks fine control, especially with the throttle. A little TC helps me keep it all in check. What I really need is manual gear change, which I find challenging on the controller and I miss my wheel's paddles. Total control requires manual shifting, but for now I have it set to auto.

So I proceeded to turn some laps in the various marks in the current F1 season, starting with Racing Point. It took some time to feel comfortable, and many visits to the calibration page to mess around with linearity and saturation settings, looking for the right ones for me. In the end I got it to where I'm pretty decent and can run consistent laps.

Then spent some time orienting at various tracks, and then Australia, since that would probably be where any season or career I would run would kick off. My plan was to spend a week or two learning or re-learning all of the tracks and honing my skills while I acclimate to the game. But I accomplished enough of that in one day lol and by the end of the day I had begun a championship season in Formula 2. I'm such a sucker for these modes. I won the very first feature race, but that only shows I need to bump the AI to where it's at my level. I started on 40, but was a couple seconds better on my fastest laps.

Speaking of modes, F1 2020 is amazing. It has a bunch, including career, season, historical season and the new My Team mode, where you start a team from scratch and control everything, like facilities, liveries, sponsorships, car development and the whole works err, works . It's like that Motorsport Manager game I really liked a couple years ago and had a thread about, but where you can actually drive the cars. This is for me! But first I'll start small and get a F2 season under my belt while I improve my skills and learn car setup, pit strategies and that sort of thing, so that when I do start a career I'll be ready for it. Codemasters has the full F1 license and it's quite slick in presentation. I remember driving one of their first F1 offerings and not being completely impressed, but that has changed.

I've really taken a shine to it. The sim looks fantastic, and runs like absolute butta on my rig in DX12. The sounds are fantastic, the graphics and overlays, all of the info displayed. I'm a die-hard cockpit-view sort of racer. But I tried the TV pod view which is just above and behind the driver's helmet and really liked it and this is how I am playing at the mo. If the camera were even a few more inches higher I might not like it, but the way it is is really good for me. With the modern halo on the cars this offers an unobstructed view and for now it's fine. I think maybe I could remove the halo from view as one of the options and I will continue to experiment to find my ideal settings. All of this is customizable anyway, FOV, camera heights and offsets and so on. Getting back down in to the seat is probably where I will end up eventually.

So yeah, I have been bitten and smitten by this sim. Over time any faults it has will become evident, but my first day was magical as I return to the sim racing wold.

This video shows both the cockpit and TV pod camera views to compare during a lap around the principality




Oh yeah, and another thing I wanted to mention is F1 2020 has split-screen. So many cool sims I have and my son watches and wants to to play. So I slide aside while he takes over and has a bash. Since he has a console and I have a PC, we've never found a cross-platform sim to play. But with this, we were having a blast together for the first time really, while both playing at the same time. And that's hard to beat.

Codemasters KNOWS how to make an entertaining and realistic racing sim. It has tons of immersion to draw you in while you are OUTSIDE of the cockpit and when you are inside the cockpit, the realism is well done enough to challenge even hardcore racing simmers.


I've played other racing sims in the recent past that quite frankly put me to sleep because they had zero immersion. Assetto Corsa was one of those.

Good point, I also have AC and know just what you mean.

I've barely scratched the surface with this one, just time trials and the opening weekend of a single F2 season. I think your point will really show in the My Team mode. I linked to the thread I had a couple years ago about Motorsport Manager and then re-read that thread. This was one comment I made at the time

"Think about it, all of these great racing sims over the years, none of them have any more depth than chassis tweaks and liveries. Of course, my finger is no longer on the pulse, but if we go back just a few years, I've raced them all. All of the Papyrus sims, GTR, rFactor, and on and on. My first was the original Indy Car way back when.

And in none of them do you hire crew, sign supplier contracts, manage sponsors or even have performance engineering. Well I think it's about time to bring racing sims in to the new century. I want to be owner/driver"

And that's exactly what this is, in My Team mode. Seems designed for me. I've read a few things that make it seem like it's not quite there, such as very limited livery options and that sort of thing. But that is no big deal, as long as I can design one that appeals. But I just eat this sort of stuff up, and it's just the sort of thing I've wanted for years, both a racing sim and a management sim in one as the quote above attests. I can see sinking a lot of time in to F1 2020. I'll spend some time getting up to speed and learning the tracks I've not seen before like Hanoi and then dive in and create my team. Gotta come up with a good name.

There's a few sims that do that.
A NASCAR 2013 had you signing and managing sponsors, some R&D and merchandising. Dirt Rally you had to manually hire your pit crew.
Granted, they were all very bare bones.

This F! games sure does look good though. I'll have to pick it up when it goes on sale.

I haven’t bought 2020 yet since I’m still working on and enjoying F1 2019. I’m still playing my second solo career and I’m in the middle of a multiplayer league season. So for me 2019 is far from exhausted. I’ve played all of the Codemasters F1 sims since the first one in 2010.

I totally get it PM

F1 2020 is like a lot of games, the ones that have a yearly edition. Madden, FIFA, Football Manager and so on down the line. I'm a huge FM addict, but even still I usually skip every other year. Partly it's due to the absence of anything groundbreaking or compelling. And partly it's due to the very long saves/careers I get going. So by the time the next one rolls around a year later, I'm just 15 years in to my 30-year save. And since there is rarely anything ground breaking, or must-have, I don't feel compelled to shell out the ducats, simply for more of the updated same. I'm completely content with what I already have, and things like updated rosters or schedules aren't important enough to me to make the move.

That said, I think even if I was still playing F1 2019, the My Team addition would have been all it would have taken to make the move. For me this is the sort of evolutionary step that would compel me to purchase, but I must also say that I place more importance on this than others might. Some won't care a bit about My Team. Football Manager 2008 was awesome but I bought 2009 since they added the 3D match engine. And My Team is the same sort of thing, an addition so groundbreaking that I need to get it. And just like the 3D match engine, I hope it continues to see refinement each season. Who knows if I'll feel compelled to grab F1 2021. But if I end up liking this mode as much as I think I will, I just might do.

I started over in the F2 championship. AI strength at 40 is way too low. So I set it 60, and as I've improved as I get used to the sim, I'm STILL 2 seconds faster at least on hotlaps. It's a moving target as I get better and my understanding of chassis setup evolves. At this rate it will be a while until I get a career going. With so many options it's hard to find that perfect balance, but it's still early days. It seems that for every notch of the AI slider it means a change of about a tenth of a second per lap. So maybe 80 will be better, but by the time I get there maybe not. That would pick up the AI pace by another two seconds or so anyway.

F1 2020 is not the first racing game to have dynamic weather of course, but I really like how it's done here. I'd like to see a meteorological page though to get a better feel for what it's about to do and when. So far I've raced at Australia and Shanghai. Shanghai is a fantastic track, really like it. Practice was in the rain and it was a lot of fun, though the race and qually were dry/overcast. F2 is an interesting competition, with the dual-races and the fact that no setup changes can be made after entering the track. In a F1 thread recently here I said I wanted this for real-life F1. I like requiring the same setup for qualifying and race trim. Makes the strategy a little more interesting than having so much leeway for each session like in F1.

I think the fundamental problem with these licensed sports games is that the publisher/developer has to release a new version every year just so they can pay the exorbitant licensing fees and still make a profit!

Not just that, I imagine they are contractually obligated to release one each year too.


The thing I'm running is the Formula 2 World Tour mode, which is a 10-track schedule.

Had my first experience with the Hanoi track, which seems at the top of most players' least-favorite tracks lists. I didn't hate it, matter of fact I actually liked it. I've never been too keen on street courses, mostly because by nature they are a compromise since they need to be cut from existing streets which weren't designed to also be a race circuit. And as a result often seem artificial with little flow and some lame sections. But despite the community's disdain I actually liked driving there.

I had mentioned how much I like the weather in F1 2020. But so far my only experience with the wet had been in Friday practice. But the Hanoi sprint race was in a veritable monsoon. I can't say enough about how well it's done. Because the sprint race uses an inverted top-eight grid in Formula 2, I started seventh having finished second in the feature race. I was grinning ear to ear when the race started. The way grip is modeled and the way visibility fell to nil heading for turn 1 due to the collective spray from the cars in front, the droplets of water on my visor. The way the dry (er) groove forms over the course of the race. I was really impressed. I managed to finish fifth, but it was a struggle and I can't imagine how poorly I would have done had I not been using TC. I've raced a lot of sims through the years, but for me F1 2020 has the best wet weather representation I've seen and by some margin.

The race before Hanoi was Montreal. I qualified well, grabbed pole and got a decent start, but was muscled out of position going in to turn two by Anthoine Hubert and he slipped past on the inside. I kept right on his exhaust for a number of laps, before a mistake with a few laps to go saw me drop back nearly two seconds behind. I then pushed as hard as I could and caught him on the final long straight. Through the final chicane and then coming out I engaged DRS and slid alongside, barely gaining and won the race by one one-hundredth of a second. I took a cool screenshot of the finish. I could drive a few hundred more races and not have a finish so close. Just awesome. The only reason I could catch him is the way DRS works in F2. It can only be engaged once the race director allows it, and then only when the car in front is within one second. Since there is no car in front of a leader, I could use DRS but Hubert could not, and that was enough to grab the win by the slimmest of margins.

I think it's a nice touch that Codemasters included Anthoine Hubert in the sim. A nice tribute.

Interesting post DBond! As for me, I don't know if I'll bother with the F2 career. It's like when I never bothered driving the Busch Series back when I was playing the Nascar games by Papyrus. When you can already drive the top tier division why bother with the downgrade?

That's the way I always approach these things, if they allow it. I start at the bottom, or close to it. It's like Football Manager or that Motorsport Manager game I talked about. I'm a Liverpool supporter but I've never actually managed them in FM (or maybe once I did). I'd much rather start in League 2 with Port Vale and work my way up than start with an established top-flight club. That sort of thing has a lot of appeal to me.

Turns out there is a weather forecast page, I just hadn't stumbled on to it yet (or I just failed to notice).

I ran the first seven races of the F2 World Tour before stopping. AI set to 60 is again way too low, but at least doing it this way has allowed me to gradually build up while running at or near the front in most races. After those seven races I had double the points of the second-placed driver and that's no good. So I started a Driver Career (not My Team) and of course chose to start in F2. The game tells you that your performance in F2 will affect which teams offer you a contract when you move up, but some things I've read say it doesn't actually work this way and there's no difference whether you run at the front or the back. A little disappointing if true. I won't want to go straight to a top team anyway. Maybe a season or three in a mid-pack car and then off to Red Bull or whatever.

So now I'm running the AI at 80, which is still a bit weak, but more in line with my skills and pace at this point. I can set the pace at most tracks, but I also make more mistakes than the AI so I need a little pace advantage to keep contact and have a chance to score and be a factor in the championship.

I've run a few more tracks and Singapore is clearly my least favorite so far. Another street circuit and such a chore to run. I scored zero points there over the weekend. I also ran Japan (Suzuka) and love it (have driven this one in a number of sims over the years the first being in Grand Prix 2 in 1996). It has great flow and is a great test, constantly turning, little chance to take a break, use the radio or make in-car adjustments. It has straights of course, but only two and the rest of the track is quite bendy with some fun rhythm sections. I also ran Bahrain under the lights and it just looks fantastic. That's another track I really like. Nice blend of turn types a and good racing track. I had driven here before too.

I bumped race length from 25% to 50% and now have worked pitstops and race strategies in to the mix. I'm getting there. And having great time doing it. I'm saving My Team for when I am up to speed literally and figuratively. It's no good to be running at the back all the time, or the front all the time, so I need to plateau and then I'll give it a go. I've read up on it quite a bit and from what I've seen most players like it, but they say that after just three or four seasons you have the best car in the division, and so it looks to lack the struggle and long improvement curve I was hoping to see. I'll know when I get there, but I was hoping for a progression similar to what I saw in Motorsport Manager where I started in the third tier. It took five seasons to earn promotion, and then four more in the second tier before promotion to F1. I believe these F1 2020 careers are only ten seasons anyway, but having the best car three seasons in seems a bit too quick,

My friend and I always do 25% race length for our online career races. It's mostly due to time constraints since doing the practice sessions, qualifying and then a 25% race usually means about 1.5 to 2.0 hours of racing. With the ever-present possibility of interruptions it's just not feasible for us to try a full race or even a 50% race length.

Yeah that makes sense, but at least for my offline I want to have to pit, run different compounds, have a stint strategy, as that's all a big part of the sport. But for online I can see how long all of this could take.

Do you run against the AI online? Is it a 'season' with a set schedule and the game tracks points standings? If with the AI, what strength are they set to? Do you use assists?

Oh yeah, offline is a completely different story because you can just hit ESC and pause the race if you get interrupted.


Yes, we race against the AI and I think we have them set on 45 for the skill slider. Admittedly we can bump it up a bit more since we always beat the AI in qualifying and in the race so for our next season we will probably put the AI on 55 or 60.

Concerning the season, all points and standings are saved and tracked for both the drivers and manufacturers and we do use some assists like traction control and auto-shifting. Maybe one of these days I'll make the effort to learn how to do my own shifting but for now I'm having fun.

Cool, thanks PM. Are you using a wheel?

If you ever make the move to 2020 I'll join you if there's an open slot on the grid.

I've been using a wheel since the mid 90's when I bought my first Logitech MOMO wheel! Yeah, we would definitely love for you to join us for an online season in 2020. I will most definitely be making the move to 2020 once I'm done playing 2019. I'll most likely buy 2020 when it goes on the inevitable holiday sale on Steam.

OK cool, I have some Momo's too, red ones. I've gotten pretty good with the controller, but hard to say how much that's due to the assists. At some point I'll be hooking the wheel back up I reckon.

So I mentioned Grand Prix 2 earlier, and just had to Google it to waltz down memory lane. What a great sim this was. Part of that golden age we always refer to, the late 90s. Oh man I turned so many laps, and seeing it again after all this time brings it all back. Who played this?

No one eh?

I completed the short F2 season and ended up signing with Racing Point in Formula One. Each team has expectations and Racing Point is "Push for Podiums". I think I might crack a few at certain tracks but we will see. I took Lance Stroll's seat and Perez is my teammate. Drivers can move between teams, retire and be promoted from Formula 2. Maybe if I perform I'll move up. I'd like to drive for Red Bull alongside Max, but of course there's no guarantee he'd be there by then.

I'm playing Career, not My team, so a few differences but a lot alike as well. No team or corporate responsibilities, but I am in charge of selecting which R & D projects we do. Things like wing improvements, gearbox reliability, engine power and fuel efficiency. Just like Motorsport Manager, you select the project and wait for it to finish, with a chance of failure. Two of my first four projects failed which isn't good and rather sets me back I reckon. To stand still is to regress, so I have to be sure we improve at least at the same pace as our rivals.The other teams will be conducting their own development and if I am to get those podiums I'll need to keep up on the technical side.

As a driver I also have media responsibilities, and the answers I give to the questions have a knock-on effect in the team and career. I could gain (or lose?) acclaim, which is my reputation and affects things like contract negotiations and sponsors. Praise one of your departments and they can get a boost. At Racing Point our Aero is the weakest, so I praised them in the first interview hoping that will give a boost and help us catch up. That's gaming the game really, as it is actually the least praise-worthy, but I can see how it all works. The currency is Resource Points, which are generated weekly depending on the quality of your facilities which you have no control over in Career, but do in My Team. You can also earn these points by completing programmes in practice sessions. These might be things like testing fuel efficiency, tire wear, qualifying or running hotlaps through virtual gates. There is a minimum target score, and if you meet it the team engineers get 'data' and therefore more points to spend in the R & D.

A F1 race weekend has three practice sessions and so far I'm finding these practice programmes challenging, helpful and fun. A little game within the game. As I'm quite keen to keep pace or outstrip my closest rivals in car development I welcome the opportunity to play a role in this. It gives me some agency and makes it feel like I'm doing my part within the team. A nice touch. Time will tell if I still feel that way three seasons in. Racing Point begins the career with a car dead-even with both Renault and McLaren with Alpha Tauri just behind, and these have to be considered my direct rivals. If Racing Point is to achieve the 'best of the rest' after the top-three we need to gain some advantage over these teams so that it shows in the standings come season's end.

So far I'm digging the whole setup with Driver Career. It's a bit simple really, but I didn't expect it to be much more. But it has enough depth to keep me engaged I think, and anyway is deeper than any other sim driver career I've done before. My Team should prove even better once I give that a go.

Never played any of the Grand Prix series but I did play IndyCar Racing (both 1 and 2) by Papyrus. My very first PC racing sim was "World Circuit" by Microprose way back in 1992. It was essentially an unlicensed Formula 1 sim since the name of all of the drivers and tracks were made up.

My first was the first Indy Car. I started on keyboard, then moved to a very rudimentary gamepad, and finally to a joystick, a Wingman by Logitech if I recall. I broke them constantly using them for racing. Eventually I moved on to a wheel, but that was a few years later. Then I went to the Papy NASCAR sims, and Indy Car 2, then Grand Prix 2 and later Grand Prix Legends. I can recall being stoked to discover the -hires switch in DOS, which I think made the Papyrus sims high-def, 640x480! Ah, those were the days

That gamepad was the Gravis gamepad lol Remember these?

This will take you back. Papy's Indy Car Racing

I went directly from a joystick to a wheel. I used a joystick for "World Circuit" but I bought my first wheel in 1994 and I have never looked back! I'm pretty sure my first force feedback wheel was the Logitech MOMO which I bought around 2007 or so.

edit: That video for IndyCar Racing immediately reminded me of my youthful college days when Bill was POTUS, the X-Files was a hot new show and grunge music was cool.

First race in my fledgling Formula One career is in the books. I seemed to have found just the right level for the AI. I have it set on 80, and running a pure lap managed to put my Racing Point 8th on the grid, at 1:30-flat. That's right where I would expect to be given the strength of my car, as it's early and I've not managed to complete many technical improvements yet. The opening race is at Bahrain, which is a magnificent, purpose-built facility. Race was under the lights, in clear, dry weather.

I spent several hours working on my setup, learning the effects of the various tweaks and settings, dialing out the bad and making it better suited to the track and to my style. You run a few laps, and check three things mainly -- corner entry behavior, corner exit behavior and top speed. Come back in and make a change or two, never too many at once, and then test it again over a few laps trying to dial it in. In the end I felt it was good, stable with just a touch of entry oversteer like I like, but sure-footed enough on exit to keep it under control. Velocity in the speed trap was in-line with the top cars so I felt good about my setup.

50% race length is 29 laps at Bahrain. Deciding on a strategy was difficult. One stop or two? I don't have the requisite experience yet to properly judge tire wear and fuel loads, so I played conservatively and went with two stops, which cost me in the end. I broke it down as 8 laps on softs, 9 laps on softs and 12 laps on mediums, as you are required to run both compounds per league rules.

I opted for having a formation lap as it's Formula One after all and I go all in. I was grinning as I was just loving it. It felt so real and that my time had arrived as a driver in the world's top motorsport competition, The sights, the sounds, my teammate, who qualified 9th, right alongside. We came around to the pit straight and took our places on the grid. The lights came on and the engines roared and as they went out the field took off. I managed to hold my position in to and through turn 1 and ran near my limit. I have to to keep pace. I managed a couple of overtakes using a combination of DRS and ERS, and after 8 laps came in for my first stop. "Box Box" the engineer says over the radio

I must have damaged my front wing, which I didn't even realize, maybe I nudged someone under braking, and that change added a couple seconds to the stop. When I came out I was in 18th. Quite a few were on a one-stop strategy it seems. But the combination of them on harder compounds and me on new softs allowed me to work my way through the field to 10th. Second stop came and went, which went smoothly and now on mediums I tried to make my way forward, but was unable to make much headway, despite liberal use of the ERS system which can give the car a big boost.

And that's where I took the checkers, in 10th. Not bad for a first run against AI that hardly makes mistakes and set to a fairly good strength. 10th is the final points position and my teammate Sergio Perez finished in 9th, where he started. So both cars scored, even if we got the fewest points possible. And it's a long way from"Push for Podiums", but some tracks I am better suited for lie ahead, like Monza and the A-1 Ring where I hope to do better. The center sector at Bahrain is tricky and the AI runs it well, so it's difficult to make any headway.

In all though I really had fun on my first weekend in F1. I completed a number of the programs in the practice sessions to obtain data and have more points to spend on R & D, so I hope I can see my car improve relative to the field. My driver acclaim improved after this result and so did my 'value', which will translate to better offers and opportunities in the future. 10th is about where Racing Point is technically at the mo, so I basically kept form, but I hope to improve on that as the season continues. When setting up the career I could choose between a 22-race schedule, or 16 or 10. I chose 16, which allows me to cull some of my least favorite circuits and I did so, but I did retain Monaco, because what is a Formula One season without Monaco?!

Now, on to Hanoi.....

Hanoi was a disaster really. I failed to score and finished 18th. Qualified 4th in the rain, but when the session ended a number of cars were on the track. I guess their laps are then simulated by the program and when the qualifying results popped up I had dropped from 4th to 10th! Not too happy with that, and then the race did not go well, as I was shuffled back. I had added some downforce to get a good qually lap in the wet, but we are using the parc ferme rules (setup locked for qualifying and the race) the race was dry and the other cars just ate me up on the very long back straight. It must be a mile long and I stood no chance. I could hold my own through the rest of the track, but that straight did me in. I would have been better off qualifying a little slower and having that top end pace for the race. Lesson learned and when we come here next season I'll have that knowledge in the bank. Teammate Sergio Perez finished 10th and scored another point for the team.

Next race is Shanghai, which is a good track for me. Qualified 7th, but the race weather is screwing me. It starts dry, begins to rain after three laps and then goes dry later. I completely bottled it as I haven't worked out how to change strategy on the fly. It's all I can do to concentrate on the track at these speeds, and to have to navigate MFD menus while underway is a bit beyond me right now. I thought I had managed to swap to Inters for my first stop, but when I came out I was on slicks again and I'm going to try it again. I must have missed a 'confirm' step when trying to change scheduled tire type.

I can hang with the top cars here, and if the race were dry start to finish I think I'd score well. But this shifting weather is doing me in.

I have two 'major' R & D projects underway which should both be complete before the next race at Zandvoort, if they do not fail that is. Barring failure, our car should see a nice boost. Never raced Zandvoort in modern Formula One, but as I said in the GPL thread, Zandy is one of my favorite tracks. Will be interesting to give it a go in these rocketsleds.

Having struggled with adapting to changing race weather in my first attempt, I took a mulligan. My main issue was how to navigate the MFD options while also driving at race pace. But F1 2020 has an option that I have never had in any racing sim before, the ability to talk to your engineer with voice commands. Game. Changer.

So before I returned to Shanghai, I started a practice session at the the A1 Ring and hooked up the headset to test it out. I turned a few laps (setting a new PB as I am improving) and after a few laps I hit the radio button and said out loud "Box this lap". The engineer acknowledged and it felt like a huge leap forward in sim racing. Maybe this has been a thing for a while now, but it's new for me and it's as awesome as it sounds. There is a long list of commands, everything from tire and wing changes to teammate position and championship standings can be handled with voice commands, which frees me to concentrate on the track. Love this.

Armed with this new ability I returned to Shangai to try the race again. Rain drops were falling during the formation lap, their intensity slowly picking up. Starting 7th on the grid I got a good start and passed a couple cars in the long turn 1 + 2. The two Mercedes were in front and my Racing Point in third. The rain kept getting heavier and by the third lap the track was wet, I had lost a lot of grip and was sliding around. "Box this lap" "Set Intermediate". Sure thing mate.

Got a lightning fast stop of 2.4 seconds and when the pits shook out I found myself in second behind Bottas. My pace in the wet was considerably faster than the other cars, and I got by Bottas and opened up a ten-second lead. I reckon I've more downforce than the AI cars and this translated in to superior wet pace. It rained for eight laps and by lap 11 it was over, the track began drying out and the skies brightened. "Box this lap" "Set Hard". More rain was forecast but I gambled that it would hold off until the race was over. If it didn't, a softer compound would have been the right call, with another switch to Inters when the rain fell again. But if it held off, then the hards would allow me to finish without any more stops.

Soon, the sun was shining and the track fully dry. But my dry pace was a little slower than the top AI cars like Ferrari, Red Bull and Mercedes. Not by much, but enough to see the interval tick down each lap. Hamilton had switched to softs, while most went with mediums. Hamilton promptly set fastest lap, but before long his tires faded and he was forced to pit for a third time, and with it his chance for victory was gone. He got a DNF in Vietnam, and is well behind leader and teammate Bottas in the standings.

With about 5 laps to go Bottas caught me. I let him by without defending my position. A win would be great, but finishing as high as possible and not throwing it all away near the end was my goal. Verstappen was also gaining, but even on hards I was able to maintain enough of a gap that I crossed the line under gathering overcast 6 tenths in front to take second place! Sergio Perez finished 8th, for 4 points, while I got 18. Perez has finished 9th, 10th and 8th, scoring in each race so far. Our combined 26 points vaults Racing Point to 4th in the Constructors, the best of the rest. But there is a long way to go. Team expectations when I signed with Racing Point were 'Push for Podiums", and I've got my first. Hopefully this will help to be offered a renewal.

This was an awesome experience. Mulligan aside, the combination of dynamic weather and the voice communication with the engineer, not to mention a great team result, left me grinning. Dynamic weather and the need to react to it and choose the right strategies adds so much to sim racing. I am digging this sim.

Unfortunately, returning to headquarters saw one of my two 'major' R & D projects fail. This was a fuel injection improvement that cost a lot of resource points and time. To have it fail was a big blow. The other major project was a front wing redesign which succeeded, so we are making some progress on the technical side. My driver acclaim and value got a nice bump from Shanghai and now it's off to Zandvoort, and my first laps there in 13 years, since my GPL days.

Returning to Zandvoort was a real treat. The track has changed some from 1967, but it still has good flow and is still quite technical. It's as tight as ever and I had a blast racing the AI there.

A few screens to dress this ARR thread up....

This is the HQ screen, where you do your R & D and other team functions. In Driver Career the options are limited, but My Team has more depth. And a good look at the number 9 car, and Racing Point's livery, and you see the warning that parts are wearing out which I'll get to in a bit






Between Shanghai and Zandvoort our team finished a couple minor technical projects, and I took care of the media responsibilities, which is just answering a few questions from a reporter. One of them asked me who I thought of as my rival. Options were McLaren's Sainz, Renault's Ricciardo and I think Verstappen from Red Bull. I chose Sainz. This starts a rivalry and the player scores acclaim points if he outdrives the rival over the various weekends. A neat touch that gives you a parallel narrative as the races tick by.

Like real Formula One, each team has an allotment of parts...turbos, ICEs (engine), electronics, gearbox and more. You need to manage this wear over the season, and if you use them all up you incur a grid penalty when forced to go over. Each part has an estimated number of laps remaining before it fails, and so it was that I arrived at Zandvoort with virtually all of them nearing that point. There would not be enough laps left in them to get through practice and qualifying, and the 36-lap race too. Durability is part of the R & D tree, and I had only done gearbox so far. But I would start both ICE and turbo after this race. I used the degraded parts through the practice sessions, and then swapped all before qualifying. You only get three engines, and I am already replacing one after just three races of a 16-race season. So I need to improve reliability. Degraded parts suffer a loss of power too.

The modern Zandvoort layout





My first laps at Zandvoort after all this time were a lot of fun. It's great track, full of sweeping turns and tight ones too, with a lot of elevation and camber changes, even some banking. It took a number of laps to learn it, especially braking points and which turns could be taken flat out and the practice programs help a lot. And they also generate resource points for R & D plus tire and fuel data which is useful when setting your race strategy. Strategies are vital, but dynamic weather means they often don't survive the race. If it stays dry, or is wet all the way though then yeah, but changing conditions mean the strategies change on the fly. And sure enough, the weather forecast for Zandy was dry with rain in the second half. But with the same experience at Shanghai, I felt more confident I could deal with it.

Here, I overcook the entry to turn one at Zandvoort while learning the track





And the view from the cockpit during the first practice session. The big screen is showing my in-car it seems lol. I have removed the center bar from the halo, one of the graphics options





I made a real good setup, very fast and stable, and managed to nip pole position by two tenths over Bottas. Starting from the front would be awesome, on such a tight track, and as long as I could avoid major mistakes I had a chance to score well. Got a good start but a slight slip early allowed Bottas to get by, but I settled in to a rhythm and kept position through the first stop. I took hards since I didn't know when the rain would start. I didn't want to have to pit for a second set, then have to come in again for wet weather tires once the rain started falling. The rain came about the mid-point and I came in again for inters, using the voice commands which I think is a fantastic feature. It allows me to concentrate on the racing, and at the same time work out a strategy on the fly.

Came out of the second stop still in second, with Bottas having flown past down the start-finish straight while I was exiting my stall. But again my wet pace was good and I hauled him down, but with the tires wearing, I had to settle to remain about 2 seconds back. I never did get much closer, although the two of us were running away from the trailing pack. Codemasters is Czech I think, but you'd think they were Finns based on how Bottas has performed so far this season. I was happy with second again though and that's how it finished. Perez grabbed a fantastic 4th and Racing Point is now third in the Constructors'. A great team result once again. I don't think we'd be doing as well if not for the weather, but I will take it. I also scored an acclaim bonus for having bested rival Sainz over the weekend and grabbed my second podium which should help me retain my seat.


The race results. I was pushing hard over the last two laps and got within a half second of Bottas as we made our way through the backmarkers, but that's as close as I got (look at the number of cars lapped)








Next up, Catalunya, another circuit I know well. But I don't expect any rain

Great screenshots DBond!

Thanks Panzer.

I ran the Spanish Grand Prix at Catalunya. As mentioned I've experience here, but I was struggling for pace early in practice, but that was due mainly to trying to squeeze as many laps as possible out of my worn parts to preserve the new ones. Once I swapped in the good ones my pace picked up. I was wrong in my no rain prediction, I guess Catalunya is on the Spain plain

I qualified 4th, and the race began dry, but it started raining just about the time the first stops were due. Some AI teams made the mistake of pitting a lap or two too early, taking dry-weather tires, then being forced to come in soon after for wets. Hamilton for example had four stops, while I had two and a few AI drivers only stopped once. Hamilton has been a mess this season, rarely a factor and seemingly always making the wrong strategy calls. In stark contrast, his teammate Bottas has won all five races so far and has a huge lead in the championship.

I ran a good race without really doing much. Just solid and consistent and finished in 4th, where I started, right behind Verstappen, who has struggled so far this season, but a good result here. Red Bull managed second and third, and with my teammate Perez finishing out of the points in Spain, Red Bull moved ahead of Racing Point in to third in the Constructors'.

Next up Monaco! I stand no chance really of scoring. I'm capable of a good lap, but to string together 30+ over the race is going to be beyond me I think. Too many walls, too close to the track, if collision doesn't get me first. Racing Point is ahead of schedule really to this stage, so a lost weekend won't hurt too much and maybe Perez can score.

Monaco was a disaster, then it wasn't. I was unable to establish consistency in practice. I could turn the odd competitive lap, but I hit a wall or barrier more often than I ran clean, and even my best lap was well off the AI's pace. I qualified 20th, dead last. Not keen to spend an hour crashing and running last, I decided to simulate the race, figuring my driver would finish 15th or something,but unfortunately I finished 7th. From last. Not sure how that happens at a track like Monaco and those are some cheap points and I wasn't too happy with this result. I did not deserve to score, but I did and there's no reloading, so I was forced to accept it. Perez finished 8th so a decent team result even if it was fully undeserved.

Then on to Canada, which is like the anti-Monaco. Very high speed, with several challenging turns, especially the final chicane which catches me out constantly under detection during hotlaps. Such an important turn for laptime,and I want to exit as perfectly as possible, which leads to ever-so-slightly cutting the kerb and invalidating the lap. It's much more forgiving in the race however.

Practice went well, completed all of the practice programs and did tire tests for softs and mediums. Race was to be dry throughout, so setting a good strategy prior to the race would be important. Ran a good qualifying lap, fast enough for third on the grid behind the two Mercedes with Bottas on pole. Perez was also in the top ten so another shot at a good team result. Starting third means I am on the inside for the first turn, but outside for turn two, and even though I got a good start, I had to let Hamilton through and I settled in between the two Mercedes and the two Ferraris. Bottas and Hamilton checked out, but I was able to stay ahead of the Ferraris. I set a two-stop strategy, soft-medium-soft and ran a clean race, no real mistakes.

A few scenes from Montreal. Here, the field heads out for the formation lap, with my Racing Point and Verstappen's Red Bull sandwiched between the Mercedes and the Fezzes, with my teammate Sergio Perez in 7th




A cool shot showing my car blurred by the heat from Hamilton's exhaust as the cars exit turn two. One of the safety crew seems to have lost his head?




Soon after my second stop Bottas retired with a mechanical issue. That brought me back up to third, Leclerc having gotten by during my stop somehow and that's how it finished, with Hamilton winning. He also won at Monaco, so back to back wins for him, and with Bottas' retirement the race at the top of the table has tightened a bit, though Bottas still holds a big lead. His retirement allowed Magnussen to finish 10th, earning Haas their first point of the season, leaving Williams as the only team to fail to score so far.

A shot of the hairpin during the first stint. Here, I hold off Leclerc with Vettel behind. The Mercedes have checked out and you can't even see them up the back straight





The Driver's and Constructor's standings after seven races. It's gone better than I had hoped so far, and Racing Point is solidly in 4th position






I am really having a great time running this Driver Career. There is so much to like. I enjoy the off-track stuff like rivalries, R & D, managing my parts and that sort of thing. The voice communication with the engineer and dynamic weather are awesome, and the entire race event is fun start to finish. Practice programs add so much to what could easily become a mundane slog to get through until the race. A race weekend with my settings consists of three practice sessions of 45 minutes, 45 minutes and 30 minutes. There is an 18 minute qualifying and the races are run at 50% length. And because of the necessity to be mindful of parts wear and tear, there's a bit of a strategical element to the whole affair. There is much to be gained by turning a lot of laps, but that has to be balanced against excessive use.

I have worked out a practice session routine that I follow each weekend. In Practice 1 I conduct the programs for ERS, Fuel, Tire Wear along with the track acclimatisation. In Practice 2 I run the Race Strategy Program, and in Practice 3 I run the Qualifying program. I try to run just enough laps to complete these with no wasted effort and resulting wear on my parts. All of this fosters the sense that my role is important beyond just running a race, and that I am doing my bit as part of the team. Good stuff.

If there was one thing I would single out as a disappointment, it's the fact there is no chaos. I am eight races in, and I've not seen a single incident. No turn-one mishaps, unless I cause it. I don't see AI drivers making mistakes, aside from locking their brakes when I am pressuring them. No one seems to run wide, and no accidents at all. There may be a bump here and there, but nothing race-altering. Formula One is often chaotic in real-life, but there is too much of a perfect computer element to the action in this sim. I'd love to see more variability and random events. At most there may be one retirement per race, due to mechanical issues. Of course I cannot see the entire race and I might be missing some things, but even if so it's minor and rare.

Next up, Austria at the A1 Ring, or Österreichring or whatever it might be called these days. This is a very simple track, but a joy to race, and one of my best. If I am to win a race in this first season, this is probably my best chance. Racing Point have made great strides in the technical department and we have closed the performance gap with the top three to a degree. Hoping for a great result.

Red Bull Ring I guess is what it is called now. Interestingly, the sim does not refer to it as such.

This race event triggers an internal debate. I dominated the weekend, winning pole, setting fastest lap and won the race, for my first victory in F1. But the debate is whether I am just good here, if I need to bump the AI, or perhaps, the AI ability varies from track to track. There are a few threads on the official boards that go in to a lot of details about the latter, to where many players alter the AI strength from race to race to compensate for the AI's up and down performance. Not sure what the right answer is, I want a sim that pushes me and I want even AI performance. It is difficult to separate what could be my strengths and weaknesses from the AI's perhaps fluctuating ability. This is the sort of thing that would take a number of seasons to get a feel for really. On the whole, the setting I have chosen has been good for me, a competitive level that requires consistently fast performance to score. But it's also true I have improved through the season and maybe a little bump for the AI would be good. This is further muddled by the fact that my car has improved, closing the gap and even surpassing Red Bull and Ferrari on the performance chart. Mercedes is still in a class of its own, but how much of this is down to the car, the AI or my ability (or lack thereof) is hard to say.

Following my victory in Austria, where Perez finished fourth, I ran the British Grand Prix at Silverstone. The layout seems different than i remember, but it's an exhilarating track. It's not my favorite to watch a race, but it is a blast to drive. It seems like you're constantly on the edge and wide open. It has just one slow speed turn. Dead-flat tracks generally don't light my fire, but I really enjoyed this event, finishing in third, or fourth, I forget lol. As Racing Point's home track it was important for the sponsors and the team to get a good result and we did. Good fun.

At this stage I am debating shelving this season and starting the My Team mode, which is the thing that really interests me. This first season has allowed me to learn the tracks, chassis setup, fuel and tires, pit strategies, research and development, rivalries and all the finer points of the sim. In My Team, you start with the weakest car and corporate setup, so I didn't want to dive straight in before getting some experience under my belt. In My team, I'll add to my responsibilities, signing sponsorship deals, choosing an engine supplier, improving the facilities and many things that you don't need to worry about in Driver Career. Plus I get to paint my own livery and come up with a team name. And one of the most important things is to hire a second driver. All of this is limited by your bank balance, so that if you opt for the best and most expensive engine, there's less money for the second driver and that sort of thing. Opportunity cost is a compelling aspect of gaming, and I always enjoy these sorts of decisions.

So I'll decide over whether I want to make this switch now, or finish out the current season. I'm disappointed a thread like this gets so little attention, aside from Panzer (thanks mate). It's disheartening to make what I feel are quality posts, well-written and full of detail about a great sim, and have no one bothered to comment. I see others lamenting the fact there is little sim content at this site, and a thread about lemons on sandwiches somehow gets 60+ replies, while this gets none. I've written quite a few AARs here at SimHQ over the years and it's not like this should surprise me.

If I do start My Team I think it will be interesting and worthy of continuing with my posts, as even if the members here are uninterested, I can see that some non members are reading it at least.

I think the most difficult part of starting My Team will be deciding on the team name I have in mind Kaliber Racing, but I am open to suggestions, so if you have a cool sounding F1 team name let me know. Setting it all up will take some time as I need to paint my car and that will take forever before I am satisfied, and then piece together the driver suit and all the other small details involved. My Team adds an eleventh team to the grid for 22 cars. I remember the days when the grid had 30+, but adding two, even if we are the backmarkers, will be interesting. But starting at the bottom and struggling to improve to the top is highly appealing and I'm looking forward to it.

Without stepping on any toes, all I can really say is that the posting traffic on this site has probably dropped about 50% compared to what it was about 5 years ago. It's a combination of both the ownership change that occurred and also the decline of forum-based sites in favor of social media.

You may be right, and I don't want to dwell on it. It is what it is. I said my piece about the lack of enthusiasm. Perhaps my posts are not as good as I think they are. Maybe the subject has little appeal. But the general apathy is discouraging. I can see in the post histories of many here that folks only come for PWEC and CH. Simming may have brought many here, but it is no longer what keeps them here. I don't want to turn this thread in to a discussion about this, but at the same time there's an element of why bother about it all. Honestly the best thing about making these AAR-style threads like I do is how much I enjoy reading them again a few years down the line, when the real appeal should be the interest and discussion it generates among the members. I make the type of threads and posts I would want to read myself, and if this had been done by someone else I would engage and join the discussion.

OK, back to Formula One...... Kaliber Racing? It sounds cool, with a ballistic element but the K gives it a Euro flair No?

Coming up with a name is always something I agonize over lol.

The allure of My Team mode proved too strong to resist. This was why I picked this sim up, having commented before about wanting a sim that allowed me to be owner/driver. The F2 and F1 careers were preparation for it, a chance to work out the finer points so that when I did tackle this mode I'd be able to progress smoothly. A racing sim and a management sim in one. The management side is rather simple, it's not Football Manager with a racing simulation. But it's the first of its kind for me and straight up my alley.

The first thing I needed to do was set my team up. And for that I needed a name. I had invented Kaliber Racing, which sounds cool to me, but I discovered there were no good images in the sim to use as a badge. No 'KR' or even 'K' or other things I would feel appropriate. But there is a 'R'. So Riccochet Racing (with two Cs, actually three but you know what I mean) was born.Then the livery needed to be created. You don't get a free hand, but can choose from a number of templates and then paint the primary, secondary and tertiary colors. Next, an engine supplier needs to be selected. The engine power and durability must be weighed against the cost, and I chose Honda, the cheapest of the four (Renault, Mercedes, Ferrari). I reasoned my first season we wouldn't be too competitive, and by saving money on the motor package more would be left to sign a teammate and for improving facilities. I can always choose another engine supplier next season, when we have more money, presumably. For second driver I plucked the Italian Luca Ghiotto out of F2 and signed him for 1.5m. He's pretty bad as far as F1 drivers go, about Giovinazzi's level, but again, the economics were the main factor in this choice. These moves left 1.1m in the bank and that would be turned in to an upgrade to the Aero department in a few weeks. Then a main sponsor is chosen, which gives the team cash up front, a weekly income and a team goal, which if met nets a bonus. I chose a fictional company called Shark, whose requirements were an easily reachable 'Score 5 championship points'. Lastly, our driver suits and helmets were done, with colors to match the team scheme.

The number 9 Riccochet Racing Formula One car





Between races there is much more to do in My Team mode. Daily activities are assigned, things like promotional tours, merchandise sales, simulator time and so on. All of these add some boost like acclaim, cash or improved stats for the teammate. You can set the schedule or have the sim auto-fill it. As the coffers fill you can also upgrade the facilities, the aero, powertrain, chassis and durability and corporate departments. These are expensive upgrades, in the millions. But they are vital for the R&D side, affecting things like build time, failure chance and so on.

With my team set up I was ready for the season. I opted for the shorter 16-race season, and this allows me some leeway with the schedule. I removed all street circuits like Hanoi and Monaco and replaced them with others I will have more fun racing on. I set the AI strength to 90, faster than my driver career. I want to be challenged and feel we are truly starting at the bottom. Race length was set to 50%.

First event was Bahrain under the lights. I worked on my setup, making it a little stiffer than my first race here, more responsive to quick changes in direction, and it paid off with a great lap, good enough for 14th on the grid. That's a bit higher than I wanted to be for the first race as a new team. Ghiotto was well off the pace and I suspect that will be a season-long refrain. I can attempt to sign a better driver next season if the funds allow it. I need the second driver to score resource points for R&D so his performances matter. The race was under the lights and dry throughout. I ran a good race, and using a one-stop strategy outfoxed most of the AI teams to finish 6th! That's eight points and I hit the sponsor goal in the first race lol. Verstappen won and Ghiotto finished next to last. The only reason he wasn't dead last is Hamilton retired with a mechanical issue. Ghiotto also ran one-stop and still finished at the back.

The view before the formation lap from the TV Pod camera





The number 9 Riccochet in the early stages of the race





After the post-race interview it's back to HQ, starting more R&D projects with the points gained over the race weekend, setting the daily schedule and other management activities. At this point we were able to sign a second sponsor for a small boost in weekly income. With our facilities at the lowest level our R&D failure chance is high and several of the projects have already failed, setbacks all. But we got in to Formula One for the long haul and this first season I am not too concerned with results, just with building a good base to push on down the line.

A cool shot showing the cockpit under the Bahrain lights




Second race was at China. Another dry race but some rain during practice. As always I followed my practice program routines to generate resource points. Managed to qualify in 11th, but had to run a two-stop strategy and finished 10th. Another championship point and Ghiotto finished next to last, because Bottas retired, with Hamilton winning. Nine points is a great haul at this stage.

The first season of the My Team career is in the books. It was run with AI set to 90, 50% race length, with short qualifying (18 minutes). As it turned out, AI at 90 is probably a little low. As a new team on the grid, I'd expect to be much further down the table, and not challenging for podiums. But going in I couldn't be sure what to set it to, and anyway it's fun to not be running at the back all the time. Our development of the car went well, and that contributed to the results, as we were mid-pack on the performance charts.

At the start of the season I signed Luca Ghiotto from F2 as my second driver. He was poor, not even a sniff of a point and I replaced him half-way through the season with Mick Schumacher, Michael's son. But not for results, as he was no better really, but for economic reasons as despite Ghiotto's poor results, his acclaim went up and so did his value, meaning he cost more, and Schumacher was cheaper. He scored zero points too.

Here you see the season results. Purple square shows fastest lap. Bottas won the WDC and I finished 6th, level on points with Vettel and Riccochet Racing finished 5th in the Constructors, behind Racing Point and the big three. I won two races, at France and Brazil. The win in France was a result of the AI caught in two minds over tires during shifting weather. It rained, with varying intensity, light, then heavy, then light again. I stuck to my inters during the heaviest rain, but the AI kept coming in to fit appropriate tires. So most AI drivers ended up pitting five times, while I just pitted twice, and as a result cruised to victory for my first win. At Brazil though I was fast, earning pole. Verstappen should have won, he was leading the race with just a few to go with me in second, but he blew up on the start-finish straight with five to go and I won the race, setting fastest lap as well. Interlagos is my favorite track in F1 2020 and a great result. Just three podiums for the season, but two wins, with one being very lucky. It's quite possible I would have finished out of the points if it had been a dry race in France. Brazil though was a good performance and the points were legit. Sainz has just been signed, more on this in a bit, and scored those 26 points for McLaren. This table reflects drivers changing teams and not necessarily season one teams. Perez for example drove for Racing Point and not Alpha Tauri.




I've mentioned the weather a couple times already and I want to praise it again. I love the way it's done in this sim, the unpredictability of it all and the profound effect it has on the racing. Not only that, but the way it is graphically, with gathering storm clouds, or the sun peeking through as it promises to improve. The spray in traffic and the effect it has on grip. The way it throws strategies in to chaos. Easily the best weather system I've seen in racing sims in all my years. It adds so much to sim racing and I love it.

A couple shots of the sim in wet weather at Silverstone. Screenshots don't really do it justice, but it gives a sense of how the rain affects your visibility, which at these speeds is no small matter!







Throughout the season in My Team the player must deal with a variety of off-track stuff, like signing sponsors, R&D, conducting interviews and running the daily activities of the team. As cash and resource points are gathered, it's spent on variety of things. The main things are technical development and facilities. It's important to try and keep pace here so that you don't fall behind. For the first season I wasn't too concerned with results on the track, but I was keen to do a good job with infrastructure and car development. I expect it all to snowball through the seasons leading to what is hopefully a WDC and Constructor's title down the line. Toward the end of the season the game threw a curveball at me as 'regulation changes' were announced for the following season. What this means in effect is that one or more of your development departments (powertrain, aero, durability, chassis) will see all of your technical improvements nullified, essentially forcing you to start over. You do have a couple of weeks to make those parts 'conform' by spending resource points, but you're unlikely to have enough saved up to cover it all. In my season, this affected both aero and durability, and I was able to save some, but not all and as a result we head in to season two a little worse off than we finished season one.

That will be countered by our improving facilities which generate more resource points, and hopefully by better results as well. As this was my first attempt at a My Team career, I didn't know quite what to expect at season's end, but I did begin to stockpile points and cash as the season wound down. The points helped to save some technical progress as mentioned, and the cash would be used to sign a better driver and a new engine supplier. The Honda did fine, but I wanted whichever engine screamed the most, which by testing them in Time Trial mode, I decided was Ferrari.

When the season was over we went straight to the driver negotiation phase. I had hoped this would come after prize money and sponsor goals were paid out, but for whatever reason it happens before that. So it was that I had 12m saved up. The game requires you to identify drivers you may want to sign during the season and set them to 'watched'. Not sure what this does, but I chose three, one top driver (Leclerc), one mid-pack (Sainz) and one near the bottom (Russell). It's done as a fast-paced bidding process, where you and any other team interested in that driver bid a contract, and then attempt to continue to out-bid these rivals until one emerges the winner. I started with Leclerc who I really wanted, but I was quickly out-priced by Ferrari and he resigned with them. I moved on to Sainz and managed to outbid two teams for his services, and he is now Riccochet Racing's second driver. He is a massive upgrade over the F2-level drivers I had in season one. Hopefully this will pay dividends and he will score points. I expect that he will if I can give him a good car. His addition will also improve our resource point generation to speed up our technical development. My acclaim could suffer, as I stand to now be outdriven by my teammate, but I will gladly trade that for better team results.

After this I was looking to run the rule over a better main sponsor, and change engine suppliers. But I completely missed it. There is no prompt and as it turns out I needed to click the team details button which is shown in the shot below. I didn't realize this and thought team details was just a way to change my team name or whatever. But that was my only shot at making these changes and now it will need to wait until next year, and we will be Honda-powered for a second season. It's the worst engine, though a little cheaper too, but I have plenty of money now and would have wanted to improve here as well as get the screamingest engine on the grid At least I know now how to do it so can make these changes for next season. Since I missed main sponsor too I am also missing out on money. Not the end of the world and I suspect in the long term it will actually be a good thing, as it serves to retard our progress to a degree, and make it so it takes a little longer to reach the top.

Riccochet Racing. the number 9 car, along with me on the left and new signing Carlos Sainz. Now on to the second season and hopefully become the best of the rest and moving past Racing Point in the table.

I have not posted, but I have been following this thread.

I've got F1 2018, but have yet to make a commitment on starting a season. And this thread is really making me want to give it a try. I've got a new controller pad this week, and am again seriously considering a play. Part of the indecision seems to be related to the scalable difficulty options. With me using a controller, where do I want to put the difficulty? Racing games make me pretty tense (something I don't need right now), so am I happy to play this more in the "arcade style" settings to just enjoy a season experience?

I'm about to look at this again today, after some time away.

I have several racing sims in my Steam account, gotten through sales etc., that I've never installed but will some day when I have a wheel. I just can't play racing sims without a wheel. But I do have an interest!

Thanks to both of you for the replies.




I've always used a wheel but for this I decided to see if I could get on with a controller. I didn't think I'd like it but in the end it's been great, far better than I thought it would be. That said I am using a number of aids, and you see in the wet weather shots the racing line too. But ya know, I've paid my dues over the years, and anyone who reads the GPL thread can't accuse me of avoiding full-real

I don't have F1 2018, but I'm sure it's nearly identical, and I'm sure you can set a level you are comfortable with. Camera view, racing aids, AI level and so forth is highly customizable so I'm sure you can get it where you want it. It just takes some testing to find where that is. I ran a Formula 2 season and another in Driver Career which gave me a good base to set up the My Team career, even if I maybe went a bit soft on the AI level in the end. All of this can be adjusted between races or throughout the race weekend though so you can alter it on the fly. The one thing it cannot account for though is the AI's uneven performance from track to track. What F1 2018 does not have is My Team, but other than that I reckon it's nearly the same.




I hope you give one a go. I'd certainly recommend F1 2020, but there are a lot of really good racing sims out there. Before this sim I would have agreed with you about not being able to play without a wheel, but I'm proof the transition can be made, even for old dudes

I think a lot more people than you think read your threads DBond. I have been reading from the start, but just didn't have the time to comment. Of course though, I tried this game on the free weekend on Steam last week because of this thread and of course ended up buying it. We will see if I even have time to play...lol

Hey Wolverine, how's things? Thanks for the comment. Reading that someone gets the game because of my posts is great. Well, hopefully you can work out some seat time and turn some laps.

I started season 2, and the regulation changes seems to have shaken the field a bit, and narrowed it too. Pretty interesting results so far with the top of the expected order mixed up to a degree. With a few driver changes and some shake up in running order it gives the sim that sense of variability that makes it compelling. With how robot-like the AI runs the races, and the lack of chaos I talked about earlier, this shake up is great. It may settle out moving forward, but the early results are interesting.

It's a huge shift too, to have a teammate that is capable of getting the most out of the car. With the crap drivers I employed in season one I could never be sure of my car's real capability. But with Sainz behind the wheel it shows we are in good shape. He had a poor result in Bahrain, finishing 15th, while I crossed 8th. but I could see by his pace over the weekend that we will both be scoring points this season. It's a lot of fun rooting for the AI teammate to come good. He also is able to complete more of the practice programs than the season one drivers, and generates more resource points as a result. Combined with the improvement to our facilities I've bought, our technical progress in season 2 should be much better. The tightening of the field due to the regulation changes and our improved R&D capability should see us moving up the performance charts as the season progresses.

Using a control pad is pretty good for me.

I completed two Grand Prix events, and with full damage settings, at least I kept the car in one piece each time. Finished mid-field both events, overall a nice warmup toward an eventual season play.

Nicely done adlabs. I am using the reduced damage setting. A bump is enough to need a new front wing, but it takes a lot to be knocked out. An occasional retirement would be good, so maybe I should mix up the settings at some point.

I did make one change for season two in my My Team career. I changed qualifying from short (18 minutes) to one-shot. It doesn't affect me really, as even before I was only running one lap. But the AI has fewer chances to get a fast one with one-shot. So if they happen to run their hot lap and get behind a slower car it shows in the grid order and they don't have a second chance to make a flyer. This has served to mix it up a bit and shuffle the order and season two so far is much more interesting and Mercedes is not nearly so dominant thus far. Red Bull actually is leading the Constructors through about five races, and the table is much more congested. More drivers are scoring points and it's all more interesting rather than having the same cars up front all the time (like the real thing).

It would be great if Codemasters released a 2020 season DLC with the tracks being run in real Formula One that aren't in the game like Mugello, Imola and Nurburgring. I'd like to have a much longer track list to use to set my season schedule and mix it up from year to year. Running the 16-race schedule allows some flexibility but the list isn't long enough to have much leeway, especially since I am avoiding street circuits. It would be great to have 30 or 40 tracks to choose from. Maybe add other tracks like Laguna Seca, Indianapolis, Sebring, Hockenheim, Le Mans, Magny-Cours, Sepang, Estoril and a zillion more I could mention.

In my career, new teammate Sainz has already scored in three of the five races so far and as a result Riccochet Racing is a factor in the Constructors race. During season one you won't have enough money to hire an established F1 driver. But it's smart I think to be sure and save up your cash toward the end of the first season so you can afford to upgrade the second driver with someone good for season two. I got Sainz on a 8.5m contract and I think to get someone good you'll want to have at least 10m in the bank when the first season comes to a close. Team acclaim and facility tech level are also factors in which teams top drivers will sign for, so don't neglect this through the first season.

I know it's a long shot but I think it would be great if we could start a SimHQ League for F1 2020. The nice thing about the way the leagues work is that you can show up for the races you want to with no obligation to do them all. I'll be buying 2020 when it goes on sale again.

I'd be in for sure PM. I ran our GPL leagues all those years ago so have some experience running this sort of thing, not that I'm appointing myself, but would be willing. As long as we are generous with the aids allowed I think we might attract some drivers to the grid. Concept and execution are not the same however and I know that the difference between expressing interest and actually showing up each week often reveals a disconnect. Recently we were supposed to hook up to play some PGA Tour 2K21 and I thought it was all set, I even listed which days of the week I am available and nothing happened at all, despite the stated interest. This is my experience in most MP things that get bandied about, after all you and I still haven't played Borderlands lol. j/k

But a SimHQ Formula One League is a great idea and I'd be all over it, and would be happy to take care of all the administration and organization if there were several drivers who were committed to it. So when you do get F1 2020 let me know and maybe we can drum up some interest.

Believe it or not, my friend and I just very recently finished all of the DLC's for BL 3 so for now we are done with our level 65 characters. When we're ready to do another playthrough of BL 3 with new characters I'll be sure to let you know. With the Borderlands games, the fun factor increases exponentially with each human player you add.


As for F1 2020, I'm expecting it to go on sale for Thanksgiving so that's when I'll get it.

A few shots from the French Grand Prix. I qualified on mediums as I had good pace in practice, which meant I could run the race on one stop. But it began raining with about 10 to go and I came in early for inters. Everyone else stayed out and my slower pace saw me drop to 12th. But as the track got wetter, my relative pace picked up, the AI drivers began coming in for tires and I finished third. Hamilton won his second in a row. Mercedes is still the class of the division, but this season not quite so far in front. Red Bull have a shot and so does my team, but I think it's a season or two too early. Ferrari are off the pace, they did not seem to deal with the regulation changes as well as some other teams have. Renault and McLaren have improved, Racing Point seemed to have regressed slightly and as a result of all of this the title chases are more wide open this season.

Kimi retired after season one, and two F2 drivers were promoted to fill his seat and the one vacated by Sainz when he signed for Riccochet. Those drivers are Ghiotto and Mick Schumacher, the two drivers I had employed in season one. They are each running at the tail end (Haas and Williams), neither has scored so far, but they've got their feet in the door.

The start

Nice screens Dbond.

So yesterday I did something for the first time in any F1 game. I played on a public "ranked" server.

It was fun at times BUT there was one guy who refused to mute his microphone so I got to hear him blabber in Portuguese the whole time to what seemed to be other people in his house. There were also some really reckless drivers who didn't care if they barreled into you on turn 1 after a race start.


I have been fully vindicated in my decision to only play MP games with people I know.

Thanks, yeah it's a great looking sim, and it runs beautifully. Everything's on ultra and it's like glass at all times, which is important in a racing sim. My rig is rather modest but it runs great. Have had no crashes (of the computer kind) or instability either.

I'm surprised you joined a pick up race. But points for giving it a go. Pick ups have never worked out well for me in sim racing, so I avoid them. Honestly the only ones I do anymore are in GTAO, and there as you'd expect it's a fuster cluck, but with a different mindset I'm able to shrug it off. In GTA it just seems normal to have so many d-bags around. In Formula One I wouldn't be able to accept it if someone were participating with the goal of wrecking everyone.

If the SimHQ Formula One Racing League ever gets off the ground that would be a great experience.

My second season in the My Team career continues. About six races to go in the season. Due to technical progress and driver perks my parts have lasted longer in season two. I was replacing the engine after just three races in season one. But now I'm on my third with 10 races down. So I got about five races out of each of the first two engine packages. I have been doing some swapping, that is using the worn parts for P1 and P2, then swapping them to newer ones for the business end of the race weekend.

Everything about my approach at each event has become a measured routine. I run the practice programs in a specific order and sessions, using specific sets of tires for each. I want to get the most data and resource points with the least wear on the parts, while conserving tires as best as I can. Weather, unexpected and poor results, and parts swapping all factor in as well, so not every weekend plays out precisely the same. But it's all very methodical.

The way it plays out is cool, as my pace builds over the course of the practice sessions, culminating in what I hope is my fastest lap of the weekend in qualifying. So there's some drama there about whether I will find the pace by the time it counts. The weather is a wildcard of course and you need to react well to it and change your practice routine at times to account for it. The AI seems to run rich mix a lot in practice, which masks to an extent my relative pace. I only use rich in the qualifying sim program and qualification proper.

I did give the AI strength a mid-season bump of five more points. It had gotten to the point where I felt I was a bit too strong for this point in the My Team career. But the real issue is that I've done so well with the technical/ R&D side that the Riccochet Racing car is now even with Mercedes in the performance charts. I believe I generate significantly more resource points than the AI teams due to how thorough I am with the practice programs. I also prioritized resource point generation when upgrading my facilities and selecting driver perks. Hiring Sainz has been a massive boost as well as he gets far more each weekend than the two scrubs from season one did.

You might think I could just keep bumping the AI to compensate, but doing this also bumps my teammate. It becomes harder for me, but Sainz gets faster right along with the others. What this all means is that a Constructor's title is in the near future for us, but for me to outdrive my teammate becomes much harder and I reckon next season he will be favorite to win the WDC. If I am smart and stockpile resource points over the remaining weekends I will be able to counter any regulation changes in store, meaning come the start of next season Riccochet will be the best car on the grid, and then it's only down to driver performance whether we win any silverware.

This sort of progress is far too fast, and if I were to play another I think some house rules are in order, to slow my progress on the technical side of things.

I managed to start a driver career in F2 with the 6 race season with the one shot qualifying. Used the casual settings, but I may eventually have to up the difficulty. Have taken every pole and led every lap so far in three races...lol.

I might be into a SimHQ race season. I have a little more time in the winter usually.

Finding the right level took a while for me. Deciding on which aids I would allow and then finding an AI level that was right needed some trial and error. I don't want to run up front all the time, or at the back all the time. I want to find the right level for the car I am in. I began with F2, like you, and set the AI to 40. Of course that was too low, so I then bumped it to 60. Each point of AI strength seems to make about a one-tenth of a second difference in their laptimes. So bumping it by 20 speeds them up around 2 seconds per lap. I then went to 80, then 90, and mid-way through this current season to 95. Based on my settings and skill level this is just about right. If I run a clean lap near my limit I'll be within a few tenths either way of the best AI cars.

Part of the equation too is the fact that there is little deviance from the AI cars. They make few mistakes. I'd be fine with faster AI if they had some variability to their laptimes, a mistake here or there costing them a second or two. Without that though any mistake I make stands out more with no chance an AI car might match it at some point during the race. I'm happy to have it set where even if I run a great, mistake-free, clean race near my limit I finish 6th or 8th, or out of the points altogether even.

At the same time I am improving, getting better all the time, and as I learn the car setup I can find a few more tenths here and there with some chassis adjustment. And in My Team, my car is continually improving too. So it's a moving target. I think a great way to arrive at the proper level is to turn laps in the best car in a Driver Career practice session, say a Mercedes and set the AI where Hamilton or Bottas matches your personal best. Then, if you aren't driving the best car in your career, the difference in laptimes will be because of the car, not driver skill. And that feels right.

For years I've been a simhead realism junkie. Always running these games with no aids, always in cockpit view with as little HUD stuff as I can get away with. But with this sim I've sort of ditched that approach. By allowing aids I am better and more consistent and it imparts the feeling I have mastered it. I'm not fighting wheelspin or locking my brakes. The dynamic racing line is key to running near the edge at all times. In essence, these aids allow me to drive like the AI, and if I find the correct AI strength it results in sublime racing. It removes the rubber-banding you would otherwise get if you set the AI a little slow in order to allow you a chance to make up ground after you make a mistake, or the continual falling back you would get if the AI were set too strong and never making mistakes. At these settings the racing feels more real, ironically enough, as I can drive like one of the world's best due to the aids I am allowing. Combined with high AI pace it means I must run a great race to score. If I DO make a mistake it is punished. But the likelihood is lower and a clean run will net a good result in most cases.

I've also gotten a good feel for how and when strategy can pay off. The tracks and circumstances when running a certain pit strategy and tire combination will net me gain. One of the interesting rules is that drivers qualifying in the top ten must start the race on those same tires. From 11th on the grid and back you can choose to start on any tire. So the top-ten are always going to pit early. And there are some tracks, such as Mexico for example, where there are too many laps left to switch to a harder compound and finish the race on one stop. These top-ten drivers will need to stop twice, and at such a track I can exploit this by either qualifying on mediums and hope I get in the top ten, or qualifying outside of the top ten so I have full freedom with strategy. In some ways, qualifying 11th is better than qualifying 8th on softs. But other tracks will allow a soft start and one stop, so it takes some time to learn these nuances and be able to take advantage.

Pit strategies add so much to F1 2020. For this reason I'd suggest always running career modes at least 50% race length. At 25% pitting isn't needed, but it cuts too much out of the experience. Combine this with the dynamic weather and it all adds up to a fantastic race-day experience for me. I am really digging it. And don't forget that this sim has voice-recognition to communicate with Jeff, the engineer. It's a life saver when you need to alter strategy during the race.

Thanks Panzer. Yes, I used a number of aids, TC, anti-lock brakes, dynamic driving line (corners only), reduced damage and assisted race start. AI is set to 95, up from 90 at the mid-point of the season. I talked a little about this in the previous post.

The second season of this My Team career was a good one. As mentioned, Riccochet Racing made greats strides in the technical department, ending the season with a car that was a match for any, even Mercedes. Teammate Carlos Sainz finished the season strong, winning the final race of the year at Abu Dhabi. I scored in every race, but failed to win any. Brazil was my best shot, I was clearly the fastest in practice. But a misjudged attempt at passing Stroll in to turn one saw me run up his ass end and damage my front wing, which killed enough pace that a win was out.

Hamilton won six races and the WDC, and Mercedes won the Constructors, although with fewer points than the year before as the field was narrowed by technical development and regulation changes. Ferrari had a nightmare of a season, and especially so Leclerc, who finished 12th in the standings, and that isn't good enough for Ferrari. Their cars seemed well off the pace all season, mirroring real life. Ferrari is the best engine, but they failed to make it work. Vettel retired at season's end to be replaced by F2 driver Matsushita for season three. Racing Point fell off a cliff. They looked to be ready to challenge for the top but failed to make an impression. McLaren and Renault continued to improve, and Gasly especially was impressive. Red Bull is strong, and Verstappen had a good season with three wins, but they need a better driver than Albon in the second seat if they are to be a factor in the title chase. Alfa Romeo, Haas and Williams scored zero points for the season.


Riccochet Racing had a great season, finishing strongly as the car came along. I failed to score any wins, but was close on a number of occasions, with eight podiums. We ended the season as the best car by a slim margin in the performance charts and I expect that to continue as we develop the car through season three. I expect we will be in the conversation for the title. Of course this is too fast, to be challenging for the top in season three, but it is what it is.



The race results reflect the mid-season bump to the AI. I scored several fastest laps (purple box) in the first half of the season, but you can see none after making the change following the race in Austria





At the start of season three I remembered to check the team details screen and was able to change my main sponsor, from Shark to Pacifico. The sponsor goal is an easily reachable score 25 championship points and will net about 6 million more over the course of the season. We also reached team acclaim level 20 which unlocked the fourth secondary sponsor, so all looks good on the commercial front.

I was planning to switch to Ferrari as the engine supplier, but ended up going with Mercedes. Each engine has a performance and durability rating. Ferrari is 100/100. Mercedes is 100/97 and the Honda I was using is 95/95. Not a big difference, but any edge can make a difference. It could mean the few tenths per lap that decide the title. With the money coming in for the league position and sponsor goal I invested heavily in our facilities, further reducing failure chance and development time for our R&D projects. Reaching tech level 3 with our HQ unlocked some new technical projects and I expect we will push on and maintain our position at the top of the performance charts. I re-signed Carlos Sainz, although his success meant he wanted more money, but I'm happy to do it and have plenty of cash to cover it. I'd rate Sainz as the WDC favorite this season. Mercedes and maybe Red Bull will have something to say about that. Their driver lineups have not changed. There were no regulation changes for season three.

At Mexico, Bottas won the race, but having two Riccochet Racing drivers on the podium is a sign of how far we have come since the start of this career.






So on to season three. Riccochet Racing are not clear favorites, but we have to be considered strong contenders. If our results can match our performance I expect we will be in with a shout.

A cool shot of my number 9 car during the pre-season car reveal

Congrats DBond! What skill level did you have the AI set at? Did you use any driving aids at all?

I answered that in the previous post, since I edited it to add commentary, so the answer precedes the question!

Ah ok, I found it! Thanks.

I suppose if all I played were racing sims then I would play F1 with no aids at all and bump up the AI to a much higher skill level. The bottom line is that I'm really a casual racing simmer.

Yeah, I'm fine with the aids, as I talked about a couple posts back. Instead of constantly fighting wheelspin, I instead have it 'mastered' and it makes it feel like I am on par with the AI in terms of skill. It translates to better racing, as I am much more consistent as a result. I have the AI tuned at a high pace, and if I were losing a half second here and there as I fight to regain control of the ass end it would mean I would struggle to keep up. So like I said using the aids makes me feel like one of the world's best drivers and on the same level as the robot-like AI. I had planned of course to eliminate these aids once I got accustomed to the sim, but with about 150 hours in to it now I realize this is where I am going to have the best experience, especially using a controller. It's way better to be good against fast AI, than to be worse against slower AI. In the end I could make it so the results are the same just by tweaking AI level. But the way I'm doing it is much smoother and professional, even if the challenge is shifted to a degree from the actual driving, to the pace of the competition.

I had predicted that in season three my teammate Carlos Sainz would be the favorite for WDC. I could see it coming. If our car kept on the same development trajectory, then he would begin to dominate. My car is just as fast, but I'm human, he is less so. And so it is that he won the first three races of the new season. I've done well with a 5th, 2nd and 3rd so far, but Sainz looks to be unstoppable, And having set the AI pace to my limit, I have no real wiggle room to even it out.

My Team is a great mode, especially in a racing sim. Straight up my alley and I am really enjoying it. But there are clearly some balancing issues with car development. To begin as one of the worst cars and flipping it in just a couple of seasons is too fast. I have attempted to play optimally, and some players won't, meaning they'll see slower relative progress. But for players who approach it like I have the top is reached too quickly I think.

There is a limit, at some point I'll have no more R&D projects to pursue, and the technological superiority will fade as the field narrows. Until then though I suspect our team will be odds-on favorites for the Constructors. But how will I crack the WDC? Retirements and pit strategies that don't work out will see Sainz fail to win, but my chance to narrow the gap is slim. If I can continue to improve I can edge him I think, but then it's just our two cars dominating every weekend, which is not compelling gameplay.

Bumping the AI isn't really an answer as what it is really doing is slowing me down, while every other car keeps their position in a relative sense, they just go around the track faster. The only real option is to establish house rules that either limit my resource point gain or spending. I won't bother in this career, it makes sense to keep on this path so I see how it plays out. But if I were to play another I think doing something along these lines would be better. Hiring worse drivers would also have some effect. And actually, this is probably my path to a WDC, that is have the fastest car but not the fastest teammate. If over the next season or two I fail to crack it, then maybe I will hire someone fresh out of F2.

In My Team winning the constructors seems to be the true goal, as it reflects on the entire organization I have built. But personally I wouldn't feel it was a success without some individual glory

I need to check out the "My Team" mode that v2020 includes. Your description kind of reminds me of another title I recall looking at a good while back:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/415200/Motorsport_Manager/

Indeed it does. There are many similarities between the two games. I happened to mention Motorsport Manager in the first post. It's a really fun game, and you can read my thoughts about it here. In some ways, F1 2020 with My Team is the game I had been wishing for when talking abut how I wanted a sim where I could be owner/driver in that thread from three years ago.

Motorsport Manager

I completed seasons three and four of My Team. Season three saw my teammate Carlos Sainz dominate as feared. He won 11 of the 16 races and I won three, meaning the other AI drivers won just two between them (Bottas, Hamilton). Riccochet cruised to the constructors and Sainz the WDC.

Near the end of season three I began preparing for any regulation changes, by stockpiling resource points. With about 5 races to go regulation changes were announced, with both powertrain and chassis departments affected. By planning ahead I was able to save every single part by making it 'conform' to the new regulations. And then when season four began, our car had a massive performance lead. The game uses a line graph to compare the various constructors' performance. The scale goes to 1100, which is a fully-developed car, all upgrades completed and installed. And because the AI did not absorb these changes well, and we did, we began season four at around 1000 on the chart, while the best AI cars were around 800. So that means we are about 20% 'better' and the results simply no longer in doubt. By the mid-point of season four our car was fully developed, all improvements done. It's just too fast.

In order to give myself a shot I sacked newly-crowned World Champion Carlos Sainz and replaced him with F2 driver Nyck de Vries, a Dutchman. He had decent attributes, rated 81 to Sainz's 92. But with our car so much better than the others, even he was nearly unbeatable. The only car that could touch him was mine, and we traded wins through the season, but the constructor's race was a joke, only the tight fight between me and de Vries was interesting. After I won again, this time in Austria, I decided the thrill had gone, that it was not fun to dominate every race. Running mid-pack to finish sixth or something is a lot of fun. Lapping the field is not. So I started a new Driver's Career, basically the same but without the corporate responsibilities and no way to improve facilities and gain a massive edge over the AI in the technical department. I still choose what R&D projects we do, and have some control over how many resource points we earn, but without the ability to improve our facilities, progress is slowed. I signed with Alpha Tauri, taking Kvyat's seat. They're the worst team that isn't Alpha Romeo, Haas or Williams. So a good challenge without starting at the very bottom. I hope to earn a seat on a better team with good results and eventually a WDC. I purposely stopped my My Team career before doing so to save that one achievement for the new career.

So having done it, how do I rate the My Team mode in F1 2020? In a word, highly. It's a great way to play a racing sim, and I enjoy managing the team, R&D, customizing the livery, choosing engine suppliers, signing drivers and so on. Starting at the bottom and building a winning car and organization is very appealing. But the fact is that playing optimally is way too strong. We easily outpaced the AI in generating resource points week after week. This resulted in a meteoric rise up the performance charts, and I had plenty of money to improve headquarters and it all snowballed to a position of dominance that took away the drama.

If I were to do it again I think the obvious solution is simply a few house rules that either limit how many resource points we gain, or how many we spend. Regulation changes are not handled well by the AI, they seem to make little effort to conform parts for the following season. If the player does, it's a big shift in relative performance that allows the player to close the gap and then run away.

As much as I like My Team mode I think Driver Career might be better for long term saves. Start on a weaker team, then work your way up through the years.

DBond, thanks for the link to your Motorsports Manager posting. Something I will certainly consider again someday.

I started my driver career in 2018 today. Signed with Sauber Alfa Romeo, as the #2 team driver.

The practice sessions impressed me more than expected, thanks to the team's "sim programmes". They helped me with technique, and are nicely layered with the research points system.

Overall a good opening in Australia, finishing 11th I just missed getting a point, but I did manage to finish ahead of my teammate by one place, and gained 7 placed over my starting position.

Pretty tense play session, even on my softer easy difficulty. And driving with the control pad (8BitDo SN30) worked well, and kept setup stuff simple. Still much to learn, and I'm looking forward to it at this point.

It's a fun game, quite addictive. Start small and work your way up through the ranks. The politics add a neat touch to it. I got it on sale for like eight bucks and at that price it's a steal. Ended up getting a couple hundred hours out of it.



Great choice. So many people just choose the best teams, but starting with a weaker team and working your way up is the way to go.



Totally agree and I made the same points in this thread. It really is a cool system that makes the practice sessions more interesting. Tying resource points to these programs makes me feel like a part of a team and that I'm doing my bit to help us improve. Not sure if 2020 and 2018 are the same, but I always run them in this order

FP1 is the first four in reverse order. ERS, then fuel on one set of mediums, tires and acclimatisation on the other set of mediums. In FP2 it's the race program on softs and in FP3 the qually sim on softs but occasionally I will run mediums if I am very fast compared to the AI. Since my last AI bump to 95 though this is rare and I qualify on softs pretty much all the time now.. I always do flying lap and then straight to the garage. In this way I turn as few laps as possible in order to save wear on the parts. It's about 10 timed laps in total (plus in and outlaps) unless I have to run something a second time because I was unhappy with the result or the weather improved or something. I will often just use 'retry practice program' if I get a bad result, which turns back time and keeps me from piling up the laps. Hit 'em 'til you're happy as they say in golf


Good luck in your opening season. I saw that F1 2018 was the first one in the series to include the voice recognition. I had been wondering if it had it and apparently it does.

As mentioned I started a Driver Career by signing for Alpha Tauri and went on to have a good season. The car was midfield, and I finished fifth in the standings, the team sixth. Teammate Gasly endured a nightmare season or we would have been higher in the table. Managed a couple of podiums, but generally finished 5th to 8th with a couple non-scoring results, which is good considering the state of the car.

But I really wanted to get a seat driving for Red Bull after spending a year proving myself. I wanted to team up with Max and have battles with Mercedes for the title. Albon just wasn't cutting it at Red Bull. With a good season under my belt for Alpha Tauri, Red Bull saw enough promise to offer me the second seat for season two. Albon then took my vacated seat at Alpha Tauri. Grosjean retired, but Kimi hung around for another go.

At the end of the first season regulation changes were announced for the Aero department. I had seen in the My Team career how poorly the AI teams seemed to deal with this. So what to do? Should I spend my resource points to make the progress we had made over the season conform? At this point I hoped to be on another team come the start of next season. But I couldn't be certain of that move at that stage. So I did spend points to make most of Alpha Tauri's Aero development carry over to season two. But then I signed for Red Bull and arriving at their HQ I saw that they had saved nothing. Not a single Aero improvement had carried over, all reset to zero. That's good info, and if it's the same for every team, then this is the key to keeping a sense of competitiveness as the seasons tick by. I feel like I should just ignore regulation changes so that whichever team I am on suffers from them same as the AI teams. If I don't then we surge too far ahead. I want a tight battle with Mercedes every year if I can achieve it.

And for season two at least that's exactly what I've gotten. Red Bull trail Mercedes a little on the performance charts, but it's close. Results so far in season two have been great, with all four drivers from both teams within just a few points of each other through the first half of the season, and the constructors race is very tight. Verstappen has struggled over the past three races with a DNF (while leading at Austria) and two grid penalties and Mercedes have taken the lead, but still half a season to go. The battles in qualifying and during the race have been fantastic, with fine margins separating the four cars.

And I could see first-hand how much the conforming work I did before departing Alpha Tauri affected their cars. In the first few races, Alpha Tauri were very strong. I reckon they were the only team on the grid with any aero work done at all. Interestingly it didn't seem to last long, as by mid-season they were back to where you'd expect. I had thought they'd be able to maintain it and push on, but they've seemed to fall off.

So if at the end of the season new regulations are announced I will try to be disciplined and not spend points to conform my parts, so that at the start of the following season Red Bull has not gained an insurmountable tech lead. I have the competition finely balanced right now and if I could keep it that way I could have fantastic racing season after season. That's key to keeping me engaged in a long term save.

Signing with Red Bull proved to be a good move. In Max Verstappen I have one of the best drivers in the sim as a teammate. The car was competitive, and made more so through time with R&D, so that by the end of season 2 there was little to separate Red Bull from Mercedes, nearly identical on the performance charts. Throughout the second season, the table was tight, with just a handful of points covering first to fourth. With two races to go the spread was just 12 points, with me in third trailing Hamilton by 11. The penultimate race in my schedule is Interlagos, a track where I am strong (it's my favorite to drive in the sim too). It rained for the first half of the race before the sun came out. I won, and Hamilton suffered a last-lap retirement for mechanical failure. Tough break there Lewis, but you were due, weren't you? So I arrived in Brazil 11 points down, but left on top, with an 11 point lead. Final race of the season is Abu Dhabi, not my strongest circuit, but not my worst either. Managed to nick pole and win the race on strategy with a 15-second gap. I was the only car to take hards on the first stop and with the others forced to stop a second time I cruised to an easy victory and my first Formula One Driver's title. Red Bull claimed a double by winning the Constructor's title as well.

Finding the right balance for the AI is not easy, but as this season proved if you get it right, the results are fantastic. What a great season, highly competitive, with drama and awesome racing. To illustrate, in this season Max won five races, Bottas and I each won four, Hamilton won two and even Shoey Ricciardo won once, at Spain. That sort of balance makes for great racing and a fantastic title chase. With four cars still in with a chance to win the championship in the final race it's compelling stuff.

The start-finish straight at Suzuka. Here, I trail Sainz in the McLaren and Leclerc in the Fez. I went on to finish 10th





I've made a long thread here about this sim. I sort of bought it on a whim, when it turned out that I didn't get on with the Moto GP sim I had recently bought to get a racing fix. When I heard of the My Team mode I knew I had to try it. As I talked about, My Team is a fun way to play, I really like it, it just requires some house rules to keep it interesting if, like me, you don't want to dominate and would rather run a competitive league. Driver Career is good too, a little less involved, but the reduced player involvement goes some way toward keeping the field more level.

Here, my Red Bull makes the run down to Ascari at Monza. I went on to win this race.






In all, I've dropped about 300 hours in to F1 2020. I raced F2 cars, several career modes, learned car setup, pit strategies, tire preservation and all the finest points of the sim. I can turn laps in practice and make the right setup changes to dial the car in, making it faster and more competitive. Over time I continually boosted the AI until I found the right level for me. It's a moving target as I improved and the car did too. In most racing sims the car is static in terms of performance, but this sim throws that extra curve at you by having the R&D side, with continual evolution of the competition. They get faster, the hierarchy shifts, drivers move between teams or retire. Ferrari for example fell off a cliff, while Renault charged toward the front. Another save might see that reversed or another dynamic entirely. This dynamic element is wonderful in a racing sim. So much so that I would really miss this sort of thing in a racing sim that did not have it.

My Red Bull in action





So with that much time in the sim a few things I like and don't like about F1 2020. Obviously I love the dynamics of the career modes. Graphics and performance are top, sounds too. The ability to talk to the engineer with voice recognition is a game changer for me, and how do I now race anything without it? Race events are a lot of fun. The practice programme mechanic is one of my favorite things. As mentioned a few times, this keeps the sessions interesting and relevant, making me feel like part of a team and that I have a role to play, doing my bit to help us improve. A really neat touch. The rivalry system adds a parallel narrative through your season, as you have a direct battle with another driver over the course of half the season. The options are extensive, the sim is ridiculously customizable, and finding the right setup for each player is going to be no problem. Anyone can find comfortable settings, or even uncomfortable if that's your bag and you like to be pushed at the edge. The weather system is amazing. The effect this has on the racing is wonderful, the way it forces you to adapt, how it shakes up the order or wrecks your strategy. It can be anything from a light drizzle that doesn't even require wets and passes quickly to a full-on monsoon that lasts the entire race. Sometimes you get all of this in one session, from sun, to rain, to sun again and rain once more. When I think of the sims I've raced in the past, it's striking how much better a racing sim is with this sort of weather system. Combined with the dynamic tech side of the sim (and voice recognition), it's hard to see going back to a sim without these.

There isn't much I can pinpoint that I do not like. The main thing though is the lack of variability in the AI. I'd like to see more chaos and mayhem. A crash now and then, a car running wide or off track. Real Formula One is often chaotic, but the sim has none of it. There are occasional bumps, an AI car might need a new front wing every now and then, and one or two cars might have a random mechanical failure per race that forces their retirement. But the wild and unpredictable nature of the sport is missing from the sim. The AI is too much like AI, and not human enough.

The replay system is also sort of weak, Papyrus has it beat twenty years ago. Part of this may be due to the Flashback feature, which lets the player rewind at anytime and try again. Overcook a turn? You can just flashback to the previous corner and do it better this time. In general though the replay system is limited. But overall I really have enjoyed my return to sim racing with F1 2020. It really got its hooks in me. I like the events, the modes, the features. But the thing that really pulls me in is the racing. From the grid to the flag I just can't get enough of it. I love the tight competition, the need to be precise and consistent, the strategy, the screaming engines and interval deltas. My settings were on the edge for me, and every now and then I'd need to pause, sit back and let out a whew!. It's intense and challenging. Thrilling even. I'm a big fan of the sport and the sim is a natural extension of this, letting me lose myself in my own F1 fantasy, my own alternate reality in which I am a rising star on the biggest stage. And now, World Champion

The season totals for the Red Bull drivers. Good work, Max. I always blink at the instant the photo is snapped haha

I am a simracer at heart and I do like F1 2020. It is probably the best version of the series to date. Bad part is with Codemaster being bought out by Take Two it will likely be the last good installment relative to having a good physics engine. IMHO, YMMV

Yeah Patrocles, not sure what's in store with new owners. The physics of the sim is something I haven't talked about. Frankly I'm no longer that sort of simmer. There was a time when I would have been critical of slip angles, and torque curves and aero coefficients and the sort, but these days I'm more like, does it feel good? F1 2020 feels pretty good to me, but then again I'm am utilizing some aids, so that really muddles things. In the end I think F1 2020 feels about right, and good enough for me. Could things take a nosedive with Take Two involvement? Perhaps. But I reckon Codemasters will continue to operate as they do now, and I wouldn't expect any significant departures to the series. Guess we will see.

What I do expect is a name change, to F1 2K21, and probably the addition of more unlocks and microtransactions. Codemasters cost a fortune, so Take Two will be looking to recoup that ASAP, and I expect the microtransactions will increase.

OK, a quick update about how AI teams deal with the regulation changes.... so it appeared to me that the AI teams ignored this, and failed to conform their parts, meaning they took the full hit to the regulation changes, losing all progress in the affected departments. But at the start of season three of my current career I noticed it isn't exactly true. Looking at the performance chart, I saw that most teams failed to make a dent, but two teams did, Mercedes and Racing Point. While most teams had a steep drop on the line graph at season's start, those two teams had a much shallower drop, suggesting they conformed some parts. With me not doing so in order to keep a competitive, level playing field, I suddenly found my car outclassed by those two teams. And really, this is the worst possible way for it to work. If they all did it, or all didn't do it, it would be a simple matter to follow suit to keep the competitiveness of the division. But having a split makes that impossible, and the player either needs to keep pace (and outclassing most of the field), or to ignore it, and falling well behind the teams who do conform to the new regs.

In the end it's not a huge deal, and this has the effect of mixing things up from season to season, as some teams rise and some fall, but next season they've got another shot at it. Things don't necessarily snowball, with fading teams unable to arrest the slide and the improving teams getting out of sight. There's a bit of a reset during the offseason, and each new season brings some sense of unpredictablity. One season McLaren will be strong, but the next Renault are, while McLaren are now off the pace. The hierarchy shifts and it's pretty cool, an element of dynamism in the order of the field. That's keeps thing interesting and refreshing as the seasons tick past. So maybe these regulation changes are a double edged sword, with some good and some bad that comes out of it.

Supposedly the Assetto Corsa series has the most realistic physics modelling among all auto racing sims but what does that matter if the gameplay is dull as hell? At least for me it was and I really, really tried to like Assetto Corsa but it was just too sterile.

Is that right, does AC have that rep? I have the sim, and I've played it, but yeah, it never quite grabbed me. Might be worth another look in the current config. That video Frank posted of the '66 cars mod in the GPL thread looked wonderful really.

Then again, if Cyberpunk comes out on the 10th then I won't be doing much else for a while I don't think.

So random thoughts... I was thinking about how I could shake up my career in F1 2020. The plan all along was to start on a smaller team, impress, get signed by a big team, then compete for championships. Done and dusted.

So I was thinking that after the current season I'll look to change teams again. That would leave Red Bull in a fine state due to the influence I have had on their development, and then I'll move on to a rival, and build them up, then do it again. Spend a couple years at a team, then move on and see if this has any lasting effect down the seasons. So maybe I'll swap over to Fez next season, if they'll have me. Try to win with them, and then move to Racing Point or Mercedes for a couple more seasons. Driver Career is ten seasons, and not sure I'll see them out. But shifting between teams seems a good way to keep it interesting.

Yes, I I should have been more clear in that I feel Codemasters is making progress with the game physics (at least for what I have seen from owning and playing F1 2016 through 2018) and having the options to increase the realism is not necessary but a good thing in my book. I worry now that with Codemasters being bought out that Take Two may tell them to "dumb it down." Hopefully, you are correct and Codemasters will have some independence and continue improving the game.

I like the sound of the F1 season from your description. I will likely pick up F1 2020 in the new year. Then I need to start finding more time to play the game!

Do you mean the newest game Assetto Corsa Competizione (ACC). People seem happy with the physics and tire modeling. rFactor2 and Automobilista 2 are also highly rated with the physics and tires. I know what you mean about having a dull game - iRacing may not have the "latest and greatest" physics but the online racing is so easy to join, fun, and exciting that I spend 80% of my game time with their sim.

I never tried iRacing, despite the Papy lineage. Was it pay to play at launch? That might have been why. It has a top rep. Cool to see you're still in to it.


Here's a shot I like. Me trailing Max in the chicane following the long back straight in France. Paul Ricard is a track I had never run prior to getting F1 2020. I like it. Too flat, but a good racing track with overtaking opportunities. Nice flow and a lot of different corner types.

Yes, my understanding is that the game has a monthly fee and you pay for any additional cars. That plus the lack of AI-controlled cars turned me off to buying it.

Yes, iRacing is mainly online racing game and it can be expensive. The quality and frequency of online racing events is what keeps me using the game. AI has been deployed as early beta and is available to all members with limited cars and tracks at the moment. The AI itself is quite good and should be getting better.

iRacing has frequent deals for new members and discounts for current members. The base membership has about 40 pieces of content spread across Road, Oval, Dirt Road and Dirt Oval. Additional cars and tracks can run from $10 - $15 each. If one is interested in online racing then iRacing is always worth a trying one of the discounts.
https://www.iracing.com/membership/

F1 2020 is half-off on Steam at the mo. Get it while it's hot! (and less expensive)

Still kicking along with my career. For some reason I cannot wait for the current season to end so I can switch to Ferrari. Something about the prospect of resurrecting a fallen giant that has great appeal. I have about five races to go in the 2022 season, and trail Max by 14 points. Of course there is no guarantee I'll get a seat at Fez I suppose. But by that time I may be double World Champion so they may make room

My concern is that if I do get hired by Ferrari that I'll replace Leclerc instead of Kvyat. There's no control over this and I wonder how the game decides which current driver gets replaced when signing the player. We would stand a much better chance of a return to glory with Leclerc in the fold.

I'm having some great racing at this stage. I complain about the AI being too much like AI, with little to no chaos or mistakes. But the flip side to this is that it's like racing a field full of professional, sporting, talented drivers. Unlike many racing games, the AI in F1 2020 doesn't shunt you, knock you off the track or generally run in to you at all. It's all very clean, which is really nice. It means I can race side by side through consecutive corners and not worry about being sent flying off the track. The only problem spot that I've encountered is turn 10 at Bahrain, which is a very slow left-hander. If I slow a little too much on entry I have been run in to from behind, but it does more damage to the other car than to the back of mine, and the resulting new wing that car will need during the next pitstop means they'll pay about a 7 second penalty for running in to me.

So while I do complain about the AI being too good, there's a positive side to this as well. Racing in heavy traffic is very nice in F1 2020. As long as you hold your line it makes for some really close and thrilling racing.

Now that you guys have mentioned it, yes I think it was the lack of AI for offline racing, combined with the pay to play that sent me in a different direction. I think it was around the same time that GTR2 came out and I know I was racing that sim, plus still racing GPL and N2003 too at the time. iRacing's always intrigued me, but at this stage it's unlikely I'll give it a go. I'm really happy with what F1 2020 is giving me, as far as a single player experience it's probably the best racing sim I've tried, though MP has some issues by all accounts.

I'll be buying it tonight! Once my friend and I finish our 2019 League season we will be transitioning to 2020. We would definitely be interested in starting a league with you and other SimHQ members.

I'm in! It would be cool if we could get at least say six drivers, have three teams, and have both a driver's and constructor's fight for the titles. All MP cars are equal, so which chassis you choose doesn't matter. If we ever get around to this I think it would be a blast.

Agreed. Now we just need to recruit 3 more people.

I considered it for a second, even though I don't have a wheel and would really like to have one before getting into a racing sim, but the clincher for me is lack of VR support. That is a must for any flying or driving sim for me.

It has Virtual Racing, that counts right?

Ah, so close to our first recruit.

But yeah, if anyone reads this and wants to join the SimHQ Formula One Racing League let us know. Looking for three drivers to commit to it. Maybe we could kick this off around the New Year? If there's any interest I'll start putting it together.

I am interested in possibly racing but it would depend on dates and times. Are you guys all east coast US so far?

Yes, the cost of iRacing is worth it only if you want to do a lot of online racing without any hassle or wait. I was in a few leagues before joining iRacing. I found league racing even better due to racing the same people most of the time which increases your respect of each other (and any bad behaviour can be fairly and quickly dealt with in a league - unlike the iRacing protest system where literally everything other than blatantly intentional wrecking is called a 'racing incident' by the iRacing stewards). Downside to league racing (at least for me) was the paucity of online racing events and that is was led me to iRacing.
IMHO, YMMV


Old clip I made of a couple of laps at the old Silverstone layout of us slower pilots battling it out at the back of grid. I mainly use the Mercedes AMG in GT3. It doesn't have the best cornering speed but at some tracks, like Monza or Silverstone, where it can 'stretch its legs' it can be quite fun.

Question: does the game allow multiplayer racing (with say the 6 people on 3 separate teams as above) with a grid that can be filled out with the AI? That sounds like it would be fun.

I see your note that the game is on sale, too. I may have to give it a go.

Yes, the Codemaster F1 driving sims allow you to fill out the rest of the field with AI cars for the online MP races. This is a huge difference with iRacing where there are NO AI-controlled cars.

Thanks for the info. That sounds fun.

YES, THERE IS AI IN IRACING! IRACING DEPLOYED AI CARS AND TRACKS IN DECEMBER 2019 AND ARE SLOWLY RELEASING MORE CARS AND TRACKS. Multiclass racing with AI was deployed last May. Everyone is still asking for the option to allow to race with the AI with friends on a hosted server. It is still expensive game so I do not see people joining for the AI alone. I have been using AI to practice racing in a group, how to pass safely, using less-frequently rotated cars and tracks, and to learn to drive the more difficult cars (Porsche GT3 CUP - no ABS and no TC makes it a fun challenge). Current roster below:

Cars
Audi RS3 LMS TCR
BMW M4 GT4
Dallara F3
Global Mazda MX-5 Cup
Indy Pro 2000 PM-18
Kia Optima
NASCAR Cup Chevrolet Camaro ZL1
NASCAR Cup Ford Mustang
NASCAR Cup Toyota Camry
NASCAR Xfinity Chevrolet Camaro
NASCAR Xfinity Ford Mustang
NASCAR Xfinity Toyota Supra
Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 Clubsport MR
Porsche 911 GT3 Cup
SCCA Spec Racer Ford
Skip Barber Formula 2000
USF 2000
VW Jetta TDI Cup

Tracks
Atlanta Motor Speedway - Oval
Barber Motorsports Park
Brands Hatch Circuit
Charlotte Motor Speedway
Chicagoland Speedway
Circuit de Barcelona Catalunya
Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps - Grand Prix Pits
Daytona International Speedway - Oval, Road Course
Daytona International Speedway [Legacy]
Donington Park Racing Circuit
Dover International Speedway
Homestead Miami Speedway - Oval
Iowa Speedway - Oval
Kansas Speedway
Kentucky Speedway - Oval
Kentucky Speedway [Legacy]
Lime Rock Park - Grand Prix, Classic
Martinsville Speedway
Michigan International Speedway
Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course
North Wilkesboro Speedway
Nürburgring Grand-Prix-Strecke
Nürburgring Combined - Gesamtstrecke Long
Okayama International Circuit
Phoenix Raceway - Oval w/open Dogleg
Road America
Road Atlanta
Rockingham Speedway - Oval
Sebring International Raceway - International, Club
Summit Point Raceway
Talladega Superspeedway
Tsukuba Circuit - 2000 - Full
USA International Speedway - Asphalt
Watkins Glen International - Cup, Boot
WeatherTech Raceway at Laguna Seca - Full

Ah, thanks for that updated info Patrocles. It's nice to see that iRacing finally added AI cars.

Because of the cost of buying cars/tracks I would never recommend iRacing for the AI racing alone since there are other games available for less money. I believe the AI in iRacing leans more to being a good component to retain current members or bring back non-active members that have already bought cars and tracks for online racing. imho,ymmv

Anyway, sorry to derail thread...back to F1 2020...

Anyone running an older Fanatec CSW V2 wheelbase and Fanatec pedals in F1 2020? Was it easy to setup the hardware? Did I read correctly that the game does not support mouse control?

I didn't even set my wheel up for this one. I'm using a controller. And I think you're right, that the mouse doesn't work in the menus. But I'm not sure. I just navigate with the controller.


Career update.... I finished the 2022 season with my second driver's title, by ten points over teammate Verstappen. I then switched teams to Ferrari. It's a big step back. I went from easily the best chassis on the grid to the sixth-best. And as feared, I replaced Lerclerc and not Kvyat. But this is fun, fighting in the middle of the pack again. Resurrecting a fallen giant. It would have been easier with Leclerc, but so be it. Leclerc went to Alpha Tauri, taking Gasly's seat, who left to take over my vacated seat at Red Bull. Red Bull are easily the class of the division after my involvement and no regulation changes at season's end. Alpha Tauri are also very strong along with Mercedes. Then there's all the rest.

Finished 8th in the season opener at Bahrain, and again in the rain in China. In both cases my strategy was off, pitting an extra time, which cost positions. In the third race of the season at Zandvoort I had a great drive in the rain to third. But Red Bull finished one-two and they'll run away with it this year I'm sure. Regulation changes are needed to bring the field closer together again. Hopefully we will see some here at the end of 2023.

Thanks! I found a compatability chart at the codemasters forum and it says F1 2020 supports my wheel.

This ain't no simulation in this clip...

Crash from today at the F1 Bahrain. Romain Grosjean's car splits in half and bursts into flames. Thankfully he made it out of the inferno with minor injuries.

Grosjean Crash

I bought 2020 during the Steam sale so I'll be installing it tomorrow and checking it out.

I was watching the race live and saw that crash. Amazing Grosjean walked away from it. During the broadcast they wouldn't show any replays for about ten minutes, I guess to be sure they weren't showing a fatality over and over? But I was annoyed that it took so long to see what had happened a second time because it was quite unexpected and spectacular live, but it took a long time to get a replay of the incident. As frightening as the crash looked, it was almost way worse as a marshall attempted to cross the track after the crash in front of the oncoming cars. This probably didn't make it in to the news footage, but you saw it during the race. It brought flashbacks of Kyalami '77. This cannot happen in 2020.

Great! I was so busy these past few weeks I forgot about the sale and game. I need to check if it is still available at discount price.

How is the game running for you? Solid framerates? My PC is getting a bit long in the tooth so to speak. I am running an Nvidia 1060 card and it can get a solid 60+ FPS in Assetto Corsa Competizione which is pretty demanding from using the Unreal game engine.

what controller or wheel are you using? Can you comment on the Force Feedback if you are using a wheel and pedals.

I was using an Xbox controller, which was suprisingly easy to drive with in the sim. I had thought it would be worse. I was using my laptop which has a GTX1070 and I did not have any issues. Pretty sure the game set the graphics settings to or close to their highest settings. I never checked my actual FPS but there was never any lag, ghosting or stuttering at all.

I'm playing the game with ultra detail settings and my frame rate is more than adequate. I believe the benchmark showed an average FPS of about 110 when I ran it. I'm using a Logitech G29 racing wheel and pedals and I haven't had to touch the default FF settings. I like the resistance I get from the default FF well enough!

F1 2020 runs beautifully for me. I have a modest box, Ryzen 2600, 1660Ti and 16 gigs o'RAM. I'm not running a fps counter, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't pegged at 60 at all times on ultra. In traffic, in the rain. It is very smooth which is important in a racing sim with the action so close at times. Technically, I've had zero issues with this sim. Smooth and stable.

I'm still playing F1 2020, but the pace has slowed and maybe a couple races or so per month now as I have other irons in the fire. But I am posting because F1 2021 is around the corner, slated for a July release. With how highly I rate F1 2020, this purchase is a sure thing. And there will be a new feature, a two-player career mode. That sounds like a lot of fun, and I am wondering if there is anyone here who would like to form a team with me and run through several seasons. Obviously this takes a commitment, so I am not expecting much response, but I thought I'd throw it out there. Details of the new mode are sparse, but I expect it to work just like the current driver career, but with the ability to add a second player, either on the same team or as rivals.

My idea would be to pick a midfield team and take it to the top over a few seasons. McLaren, Alpha Tauri, Alpine, one like that. Doing it all with a teammate seems like a great experience. But to get through the sessions and seasons would require a commitment many won't want to make. Is there anyone who would? Settings can be hashed out, and we'll need to try the new version to get a feel. But I'd expect I would want to run it like I do my F1 2020 seasons, where I allow several driving aids but also run the AI at a fairly high pace. 50% race length to ensure pitstops are a factor. So each race event would take two hours or so, maybe run one race per week at a suitably convenient time. More often if we each can do so.

F1 2021 @ Steam

Portimao, Imola and Jeddah are added this year, but as post-launch free DLC. Imola!

I'll be buying 2021 eventually but definitely not on release since I'm still knee-deep in 2020. I've also been frustrated with how the League mode works since my friend and I both got a "NO SHOW" for one of the races since we kept getting an error when we tried to progress from Practice to Qualify. There are still some bugs in 2020 that were not fixed.

It hinges on stable and reliable connectivity of course, and we can't know now how it will be. With how popular the sim is in e-sports you'd think that would be a top priority, but we shall see.

And it hinges on someone actually wanting to do this. I think it would be a blast, but I think finding a willing participant will be a challenge. Keeping one even more so

Well, regardless if this comes off for me, I'll be picking it up straight away.

That's not even the main problem. Several times I've had a League session terminate because either Steam had a technical issue or the match-making service that Codemasters uses had a hiccup. How do I know this? Because the voice comms that I use to talk to my friend while we drive was never interrupted so I know it wasn't an ISP issue.

So since that post last week I've been playing more. I'm in a standard driver career, fifth season. I signed with Alpha Tauri first, then switched to Red Bull for two seasons, then to Ferrari for season four. At the end of season four I had managed to resurrect the fallen giant. We didn't win any silverware, finishing third, but were able to improve the car enough to have it equal to Red Bull on the performance charts by season's end. With regulation changes announced to chassis and durability departments, I was able to save much of it by stockpiling points in case the reg changes were announced. The announcement came with just three races to go, but I had 7,000 points saved, and this would go a long way toward making Fez the class of the division when season five started.

Our technical development was confirmed when I won the final two races of season four, at Interlagos and Abu Dhabi. I missed the title by about 20 points, but was well positioned going in to the new season. Then contract renewal came up. My role and results in propelling sorry-ass Ferrari up the table would surely go rewarded. Not being the greedy sort I chose the middle contract option, and expected to re-sign. But it was rejected! And just like that I was booted from the team I had saved. I was stunned, as my plans for next season were dashed. Ungrateful bastages, the lot of them!

So what to do? In the end I decided to come full circle and re-signed with Alpha Tauri, a team well off the level of the top two. Another climb up the table is in order and my chance for another title, having won two at Red Bull, is very low. Formula One is a cutthroat business

Just a post to put a bookend on my F1 2020 career. Release of F1 2021 is slated for one month from today. Can't wait. As is obvious from my posts above, I rate this sim highly. I've had an absolute blast with it. As detailed I did a number of careers, from F2 to My Team to standard driver career. I just finished my fifth season in my current standard career, winning both the driver's and constructor's titles with Alpha Tauri of all teams

That's 80 races (5 seasons x 16 races) and the stats say that's about 12,000 miles run. Love this stuff. I won the driver's title three times, which is a little too much frankly, but only managed one constructor's. At least one title can be chalked up to Max blowing up with a couple to go too often haha, but manage it I did and with Albon as my teammate! Talk about hard work lol.

There's very little I can cite as negatives here. The main one for me is the fact that the AI cars are too much like AI cars. I pray that some sort of variance and unpredictability will be baked in to 2021. Formula One needs chaos, and there is precious little of it here. Can you imagine a five season career without a full course yellow or any type of safety car? Well, I just lived through it. This really needs to change. The regulation changes cause uneven response from the teams, which does have the nice effect of causing some teams to rise and some to fall. Mercedes finished fifth in the constructor's for example in that last season. But I think this needs fine tuning.

Maybe I can cite things like no displayed lap record and that sort of touch as well. But overall it is a fantastic racing experience for me. I find it thrilling. The weather system, the engineer voice comms, the tight racing and competent AI make for a good sim and I am very much looking forward to the next one. New teams and drivers, liveries. But the main attraction is tracks. Not sure they will all be included with release, and I desperately want Codemasters to start giving us more tracks, even those not on the current schedule so that I can mix it up. A library of all the tracks from multiple years so that I can switch up my schedule as the seasons roll by.

Release slated for July 16

F1 2021 @ Steam

One of the many things that made "Grand Prix Legends" such an awesome and timeless sim is the AI. On many occasions I would see an AI car make a mistake and spin out or crash into another AI car. These AI cars definitely did not "drive on rails" like so many other racing sims I've played.

In some ways still, GPL is the gold standard.

It's an interesting thing, AI. The phrase "good AI" has a lot of leeway. One of the best I've ever seen is in the old sim MiG Alley.

When many people say a sim has good AI, I think they usually mean that the AI is good at whatever the sim is. Racing, fighter planes, chess, doesn't matter. It performs the task well and efficiently, whether it is running around a track or dogfighting against a competent human. But I want more. A good AI isn't only good, but bad. What I mean is that a really good AI mimics in some way the unpredictability and non-infallibility of a human. It simulates mistakes.

A racing sim needs this. A corner run too wide, a spin, a crash in to the armco when least expected. You see it in virtually every real Formula One race, aside from, amazingly, this year's Monaco Grand Prix.

Codemaster's version of F1 is too sterile in this regard and it really stands out to me. I don't want AI cars to crash to improve my chances, but to both make it more realistic as I see it and to introduce that sort of unpredictability and chaos on race strategy. A sudden safety car is potentially race changing. Do you come in? Stay out? Will the car right behind you do the opposite of you? Will it add a stop or eliminate a scheduled one? Do you now try and run to the end on hards when you otherwise would have come in 10 laps from now to take on mediums?

On a more personal level, as a human, last time I looked, I make mistakes. Get sideways on exit and you will always lose time to the infallible AI with no chance it will be returned at some point in kind. What this means is that every mistake the player makes is punished, and encourages AI pace settings that allow some rubber banding, a slight pace advantage that allows the player to recover his time lost through his mistakes. I try not to do this, and set the AI to a pace competitive with my own. To the point, in those 80 races I set fast lap 20 times and sat on pole 18. But some chaos is needed and will make this sim series better, in my view anyway.

I mentioned MiG Alley and it's really old now and not sure how many still around played this sim. But the AI was so convincing in appearing to be human. AI skill range was visible, seriously. You could tell how skilled the AI was by the way his jet was flown. As the most striking example, the lowest level AI could be scared in to losing control. A simple burst of tracer might cause him to punch out even if not hit with any gunfire. Pilot induced oscillation was a thing. You could get the AI to lose control of his jet, begin fishtailing uncontrollably until he spun and crashed. It really was great, and that was 22 years ago.

F1 2021 is out, and reviews and player comments are good once again.

F1 2021 on Steam

I have not picked it up yet. I definitely will, but frankly I really want Imola and that track didn't ship, to be added later. I may wait until it does.

Codemasters have kept last year's modes, but also added Braking Point, which is a narrative-driven mode that puts the player in to a rivalry and has him deal with various situational challenges. I'm not too interested in that, although I'm sure I'll give it a go at some point. They have also added a two-player career mode which sounds awesome. Another change is they have reworked the practice sessions, with a major change to programmes, but I have few details.

It would have been difficult to mess up what was such a fantastic version in 2020. It''s a really good sim and Codemasters needs to just keep on keeping on. Personally, I'd like to see a growing track library, rather than limit us to each season's schedule, but perhaps there are contractual limitations with F1. Still it would be great to create my career seasons with an evolving list of tracks to keep it fresh as the seasons roll by.

I will eventually buy F1 2021 but I'm in no rush. I still have lots to do with 2020.

I think I'm at the end. I dropped 300+ hours in to 2020 and did a little of everything -- F2, My Team and driver career. In all about 10 full seasons worth of racing. I'm ready for some new tracks and liveries, an updated driver lineup and team names. I wonder if sprint qualifying is in the new game?

My Team is great, but needs some tweaking in terms of technical progression in my view. Driver career is where I had the most fun, signing for Alpha Tauri, moving to Red Bull, then to Ferrari and then back to Alpha Tauri. That was a fun career.

Heh, i just checked Steam and I currently have 58 hours in it so you blew me away in that game.

I checked too and it is actually 419.9. Got my money's worth. Very nearly bought the new sim last night but didn't pull the trigger. Just a matter of time and then lights out. I want the new tracks, especially Imola, but who knows when that will be so I'll probably get it despite this.

Turns out that sprint qualifying is not in F1 2021. Too bad, that.

I failed to resist and bought F1 2021. Installed it, and did some hotlapping at Austria to get everything configured. Turned a solid 1:05.4 which puts me about 19,000th of the laps others have done in just two weeks! Haha.

Then straight to career, choosing standard driver career, and signing for Alpine, the best sounding car on the grid, alongside Fernado. Performance hierarchy at the start is a snap shot of last year's finish, not this year's order. So Alpine are the 6th best chassis at the outset, with Aston Martin reflecting Racing Point's strong season, but which they have not carried over in to this season. Ferrari are worse than reality, but it is a fair reflection of last year's finishing order.

The sim is much the same as 2020, and of course is missing three tracks, well four actually. But Imola, Jeddah and Portimao did not ship with the release and are intended to be released down the line as free DLC. I like having the new driver lineup and liveries along with the team name changes. Up to date. Just need the tracks now. The fourth missing track is Turkey, which will not be made. Turkey replaces Canada, which is cancelled due to coronavirus restrictions, but Codemasters has no plans to include it.

The menus and UI got an overhaul and everything is a little more streamlined. Race weekends seem to go a little faster, with load times between sessions seemingly a little zippier. Practice also got an overhaul, but under the hood is still mostly the same. Practice programmes are still there, all the same ones as before. But instead of having all six to run each race weekend, three are randomly chosen. They've added an ability to automate it for those who don't want to go through these paces. I love the whole thing myself, so I choose the 'manual' option, but it's a nice change for those who just want to get on with it. And if you hit the bonuses from the practice programmes you get a boost to one of the dev departments.

They've also added the Braking Point mode, which is a narrative with situational challenges to complete, similar to Madden's Longshot. My Team makes a return and I'll be giving that a go to see if they've tweaked it.

After just a couple hours, and a 50% Bahrain race in the books, my impressions are very favorable. It's like F1 2020, only a little better

I take those public rankings with a grain of salt because there is some very obvious cheating/hacking going on. I remember recently looking at the hot lap public rank times in F1 2020 for some of the tracks and the #1 ranked player for some of those tracks had an impossible lap time. By "impossible" I mean a lap time that was several seconds faster than the real world lap record.

Yeah, no doubt about that. We could probably cull the top 10% and delete them as invalid, but Codemasters doesn't seem to care about that. I don't put much stock in it either, especially as I don't run public, but it's still a decent gauge and these laps become your ghost car when hotlapping.

I mentioned it earlier, and will again, that they have also added a two-player career mode. Split screen returns too.

Performance is fantastic. It defaulted to Ultra High for me and runs like glass. Looks great, runs great. Presentation is nice, about the same as 2020.

One other thing I forgot to mention. If you've read through this thread you'll know that my main gripe with F1 2020 was how much like AI the AI is. No chaos, few mistakes from the AI. They drive too well. Few crashes, spins or collisions. I remarked that I had just finished five seasons of my last career with zero safety cars or full course yellows. That needs to change.

In reading up on the new version in advance of getting it I saw a number of comments that this has changed. That there are spins now in the AI, with one person noting how Hamilton spun twice on the same corner on consecutive laps. That may be a bit over the top, but if this is true, that the AI can make 'mistakes' and have a bit of variability to their laps then the sim will be immensely improved.

I've run one race event so far, the season opener in Bahrain. There is a new race length available now, and to get 50% it is now called 'long'. There's also a quick 5 laps, short 25% and full 100%. I run the long option. In the race, I qualified 7th, and did a two-stopper, starting on softs, pitting for mediums on lap 7, then again with 8 to go for another set of softs. The leaders also were on a two-stop, but most went soft-soft-medium. The upshot is that when they came in for their second stop I was still on mediums and that allowed me to lead the Grand Prix.

Hamilton came out and got by a couple cars and, with both a faster car and fresher tires, quickly caught me as we approached turn 10, the tightest on the track, a lefthander. No sense in defending too hard, so I got off the line to the left as we braked to negotiate the turn. He charged up the outside on the right to get by but got his right hand wheels on the kerb, which upset his balance and he ran wide on to the apron, as I kept on. He lost probably 6 or 8 seconds as he recovered on to the track.

A minor thing, but something I had not seen in a couple hundred races in F1 2020. It looked like a natural mistake! I didn't notice any other stuff like this during the race, and only one retirement, Yuki for mechanical reasons. But if this is indeed a thing now that will make F1 2021 a big improvement in my view. Looking forward to seeing more of this stuff.

One of the MANY things that made Grand Prix Legends a classic of the game genre is that the AI drivers would make mistakes just like real-world drivers do. And of course even the top tier drivers in the real world like Hamilton, Clark, Schumacher, Gordon, Andretti, Earnhardt, etc. would make mistakes from time to time.

I drove the wheels off GPL back in the day, and I just don't remember that. Partly it's due to probably 90% of my track time was spent in online racing or hotlapping. I moved on from AI races pretty quickly, even though they were a lot of fun. But once I found a crowd to run with I focused on league racing. And those guys were all over the place

Except Frank (in case he reads this)

The guys I raced with nicknamed me The Robot, due to my low lap deviation. yeah, those were the days. I even had that as my avatar in the Frugalsworld days, which is where I ran the league. Need a time machine frankly. I'd love to experience that all over again.

I ran the next two races in my first season last night, at Spain and Canada.

I'm pretty poor in Spain, and I suspect it's just one of those tracks where the AI runs relatively faster for any given setting. I have them cranked up a bit so that I run in the midfield with my midfield car. And at Spain I just can't quite match them. Qualified 17th and crossed the line 13th. Canada's not much better really, qualified 13th and finished 11th, just out of the points in a race that went from sunny and dry to pouring rain by the end. Teammate Alonso has yet to score.

In Spain I saw a AI spin! Perez was running third and just lost it under braking in to turn 15, spun and stopped along the side of the track, bringing out a safety car, which fouled my race, but that's another story. I came across it seconds later and just missed him as he tried to rejoin. I only saw what happened by watching the replay after the race. But unforced errors like this are great to see. It's the one thing I think the sim needed most and I'm happy to see some evidence of it being there.

And things are definitely faster through the event sessions, the load times after the workstation screen are much faster now.

A few shots. I turned everything from ultra-high to high. It ran like glass, but my video card was running a little hot so I knocked it all down a notch.

A few shots from yesterday's action

The Alpine cockpit





The field runs the first lap in the rain




I started My Team and this is the #21 Black River Racing car, ahead of rival Raikkonen




Here I try to fight off Max Verstappen at Paul Ricard

Do the graphics in 2021 look noticeably better than 2020?

No, I can't say the graphics are any better. About the same I reckon. But it looks fantastic and more importantly, runs beautifully.

Ok thanks. I'll be buying it eventually this year but I'm in no rush I'm still playing 2020.

I had begun in standard driver career. But that was more to get up to speed with any changes with the new version. In F1 2020 I had really enjoyed the My Team mode. My Team puts the player as owner/driver. Aside from piloting the car, the player is now in control of all aspects, from engine supplier, to livery, to hiring the second driver, to signing sponsors. For many years I had wished a racing sim had this, and with My Team it finally became a reality.

However there was a flaw or two. At the end of each season there may be 'regulation changes' announced. It can be for any of your development departments (Aero, powerplant, chassis or durability) and essentially wipes out all of the development you have done in the affected department. It's a fine mechanic in theory, but the problem was the uneven response from the AI teams. Some dealt well with it, some seemed to ignore it, putting these teams at a severe disadvantage to those who did something about it. Doing something about it means spending resource points to make existing parts 'comply' with the new regs. This requires spending these points on this instead of new upgrades. Any parts made to conform then can be run in the next season. This can give a team a huge headstart, especially in comparison to those who did little or nothing.

The upside is that the hierarchy isn't in stone. Unlike every other racing sim, the fastest cars in the release are not necessarily the fastest two or three seasons down the line. This is great and gives the sim a unique shifting order that makes career modes much more compelling to me. In my last F1 2020 career Mercedes started off clearly the class of the division, as we'd expect, but by season five they finished fifth in the constructors. Some rise, some fall, some do both.

So really, all I want to see is some tweaking to how the AI teams react to regulation changes. I like the concept, it just needs some fine tuning. Too early yet to see if this is any different in F1 2021. The mode is nearly identical to last year's offering. Some presentation changes were made, but the nuts and bolts are the same. Our HQ is a lovely lake-side complex now, which is nice

The real drawback to the My Team mode in my view though was how quickly I was able to go from backmarker to champion. In just a few seasons my lot were winning the championship, and it all felt too fast. So hopefully these two things got some attention and some tweaks. We'll see. If it has it won't be revealed until I am a few seasons in.

There are a number of things different about the new version, but the one I think stands out the most is car handling and setups. I always do my own setups in racing sims, it's a huge part of the appeal. I head out on a baseline setup, then turn laps to dial it in. How is the balance on corner entry? Mid corner? Exit? How is my top end compared to my rivals? How are the tire temps, and wear?

Turn a few laps and come in to tweak. Just a little at a time. Some camber perhaps? Or a slightly stiffer spring or roll bar? Lock the coast side of the differential? Dial out the bad and get the car feeling right and proper to my style. I like a touch of entry oversteer if I can get it. So I have a lot of fun with this part of racing sims.

In F1 2020 I tended to go with a stiffer setup, springs and roll bars on the higher side. Relatively low wing settings. When I got the new sim, I built a car like in F1 2020 as a baseline and good grief, it was nearly undriveable. So right away I could tell the handling physics were different. So I got down to it, running hotlaps to figure out the new physics. In the end it took a much softer setup to feel right, to get the car balance right, to get proper levels of grip, especially on exit. It's a striking difference, but very satisfying to work it out on my own and build a competitive car.

Nearly finished with the first season in My Team. Two races left to go.

I had spoken about how I wanted technical progression for the player to be slowed a bit. And it seems to be the case. In this first season, despite my best efforts, we've really made no progress at all up the performance charts. We have more or less held station, down in about 7th. Partly this is due to my scrub teammate, straight out of F2 not generating many resource points, and partly due to the fact that our fledgling facilities mean we generate fewer resource points, upgrades take longer and the chance of failure is still relatively high. All of this can be improved with investment, but not much is going to get done in the first season. This should start to improve through season two, but of course the competition isn't standing still. Still, it feels slower than in F1 2020. That's a good thing. Careers are ten seasons in this sim and I wouldn't mind taking five seasons to start threatening a title.

Throughout this thread I have praised the weather system. It's the same in F1 2021. Last night I ran Interlagos, which is my favorite track and i usually do very well here. In this race there was a light rain, so light in fact that it was too dry for inters, but enough to compromise grip. It made it very difficult in this sort of traction no man's land. But it shows how nuanced the system is, and how weather plays such a crucial role in this sim. The skies threatened to open, and when I asked the engineer for weather reports he kept saying heavier rain was imminent. But it never arrived, just a drizzle, and finally cleared with a few laps to go. Far and away the best weather system I've seen in all my years in racing sims. For what it is worth I battled hard to run tenth through the rain, and then managed to get past Vettel once the track dried with three to go to finish ninth.

Some more shots of the #21 Black River Racing car. This is at High Settings, although Ultra High runs well too, just a bit on the hot side

Here I lead Leclerc down to turn 11 in Texas



Battling a Red Bull



A good shot of my car. I've since redone the sponsors decals. Not as much echo lol





Check the front wing endplate. Looks like I got in to the back of someone. Or maybe the side




Check out the grime building up on the car




Putting the pressure on Max Verstappen (or maybe he just blew past me)




A cool shot showing the reflections and mirrors at Mexico. Again this is not maxxed out




Battling an Aston Martin

Nice screens DBond. I'll most likely buy 2021 within the next month or two.

Thanks Panzer. Yeah, great sim, having a blast with it. I'm running My Team, custom season length at 16 races, which allows me to remove a couple tracks I don't care for. Once the three missing tracks are released there will be more latitude for season schedules so I can mix it up and keep it fresh. Cannot wait to run Imola, one of my favorites.

AI strength is set to 85. A little lower than in F1 2020 where I ran it at 90 mostly. But I'm still in a slowish car so cutting a half second off the AI laptimes isn't a bad idea really. I suspect I'll bump that as my car improves. Even at 85 the AI laptimes are at least as fast as what the real cars run, with 1:03s at Austria and 1:17s at Hungary for example (fast lap Sunday was 1:18 in the real thing). Race length is 50%, 60-minute practices and full qualifying. Between this year and last I have run seasons with each of the qualifying options. All have their merits, but I dig the Q1/Q2/Q3 thing and that's what I go with usually, and in this season too.

Mercedes are the class of this division in the first season and Bottas clinched the title with three to go. McLaren are right there, along with Red Bull. Six drivers have won races, and all but five or six have scored points. Worth noting that in My Team we are adding an eleventh team, for 22 cars on the grid. I love the shifting performance hierarchy this sim serves up in career modes. Compelling stuff.

Amazingly, I am one of those six that claimed victory. My win was in Austin, my home grand prix no less, and it was in some ways similar to Ocon's win last weekend in Hungary. Five of the top six drivers in the title chase were DQ'd. Not sure how it happened really, but Verstappen, Perez, Hamilton and Bottas were all DQ'd for failing to respect yellow flags. I think something went wrong with the safety car, a bug. Those cars somehow got ahead of it and were disqualified. The fifth car was Ricciardo who ran up my ass end in the esses, and then got piled on from behind to retire. So I led the restart and from there I stayed out front on tire strategy and took the checkers for a shock win.

I finished the opening season, with a DNF at Australia and a tenth at Abu Dhabi. Not a strong finish, but the first year was never about results really. More about working out setups for each track, technical development and facility improvement, and getting a feel for how the off-track stuff is working in the new version. Had a pretty good season nevertheless, with that shock win in Texas, one other podium and a number of points finishes to end the season on 105 points, good for about 7th in the order. Mercedes won both championships.

In anticipation of both regulation changes and driver market moves I began stockpiling money and resource points toward the tail end of the season, putting development on hold. I knew from F1 2020 that prize money does not get awarded until after the driver signing period. So if I want a good driver I had to start saving money to be able to afford it. I was tracking and targeting three drivers to take over for Jack Aitken who had sat in my team's second seat for the second half of season one. I had hired Robert Schwartzman at the start, but he was a scrub, accomplished nothing. But his acclaim rose so much that his contract went from $800k to $2m. No sense paying all that money for zero points so I made the switch in the summer signing period, signing Aitken to save about 1.2m. He accomplished nothing too. But he did it cheaper haha.

The three targeted drivers were Gasly, Leclerc and Norris. I would have loved to sign any of them, but none were interested, due to my spartan facilities. Season-ending prize and sponsor money would quickly correct this, but it comes after the signing period. However, Carlos Sainz had interest. Why he would want to leave Ferrari for my project is a mystery, but no need to point that out and we began a bidding war with the folks from Maranello. It was quite a tussle, each outbidding the other in turn until the bidding reached 7.1m, and I said I can't go much farther. And as luck would have it Ferrari dropped out and Sainz was now driving for Black River Racing. This a massive upgrade over the F2 scrubs. All ratings are significantly higher, he should finish higher and generate more resource points. He had better for all that money I am investing!

This was the most wild and woolly driver market I've seen in this sim. All moves happen simultaneously with your team's signing, so you can't see how the dominos fell. Which move came first and caused all the others to follow, which would be interesting. No, once you leave the screen from your signing, all others are already at their new teams. The most jarring move was Max to Merc! Just shoot me haha. Alonso retired, Vettel to Red Bull. Bottas to Ferrari, Russell to Aston Martin and plenty more. Driver moves is one more neat touch in this sim and adds much to the career modes.

Then the windfall, nearly $40m in prize and sponsor money which was immediately invested in our facilities, which lowers failure chance, generates more resources points, and gives the AI driver boosts among other things. I also decided to switch engine supplier. Used Ferrari in season one, and they currently have the best durability. But I switched to Mercedes for season two, a little less reliable, but better performance. Unfortunately I don't like the sound it makes when throttle off but I am stuck with it for a year. It should win us a few points anyway.

But the main thing I wanted to see was how the AI teams reacted to the regulation changes. It was the worst possible changes, to both durability and powertrain, since those two departments were the ones I had focused on in season one. Our car has the division's worst aero and chassis, but the best durability and powertrain. And to save all these parts, to make them conform to the new rules, took every point I had saved in advance. Other teams would have had fewer parts to 'save', so the regulation changes came down on the two departments I least wanted them to, and that affected my team the most. In the end, a few teams saved theirs, most did not. We did, so remain level with where we ended season one. So in a relative sense we improved a little. Essentially it all seemed to go exactly as before, and I can see no real difference in F1 2021.

For what it is worth, I mistakenly said earlier that we hovered around seventh all year on the performance charts. It is actually ninth, third from the bottom, which is ninth not seventh, doh! Only Haas and Williams were worse off through the first season. My finish position in the title chase therefore suggests I might have the AI set a bit too low, but then again, many of those points won were due to strategy and not pace. I didn't set a single fast lap of the race all season.

Season two is off to a good start. Black River Racing is now primed to begin our ascent in earnest. All of the money invested in our facilities is already paying off, and at the halfway point of season two we are now fifth on the performance chart, up from ninth, where we finished the previous season. On one had that's great, building a faster car is the main point. But once again, like 2020, it seems a bit fast, for us to overtake those teams in half a season. If this rate keeps up we will be nearly topping the chart at season's end. Our car is now level with Ferrari. Plus, durability development doesn't factor in the performance ratings, and we lead the grid in durability. My suspicion last year was that I generate more practice resource points than the AI does, since I focus on it and ensure I take a maximum haul each race weekend. With perhaps more points to spend than the AI teams, I can overcome their superior facilities. But that's speculation since I cannot see these details for other teams, only their place on the performance order.

Unfortunately, new and expensive teammate Carlos Sainz has yet to score. It's only a matter of time, but I would have hoped to see some points in the bag at this stage. He now has a top-ten car, so I'm expecting him to convert that in to points. At season's end I will make another run at Gasly, Leclerc and Norris. With our improved HQ they may be keen. We'll see.

Mixed results for me through the first half. I sit fourth or fifth in the table. Max is leading the title chase for Merc. I have trouble writing that lol. But he has grabbed his chance with both hands and looks odds-on favorite for the title. My best race may have been my worst result, the most recent race in Hungary. Qualifying was frustrating. I drove well, but couldn't crack Q2. The AI is really fast here (pole was 1:15-flat). It's a difficult track, very tight and twisty with plenty of off-camber corners. When I saw that I couldn't reach Q2 in the driving rain I swapped all my parts for new ones, taking a grid penalty, which only dropped me a few places to the back of the grid. From there I ran to 13th at the flag, which seems poor but I felt like it was one of my best races, making no mistakes at all, no flashbacks, just really consistent and despite not scoring felt really good about the drive. I also failed to score in Spain, but have done everywhere else. Had really good finishes in Bahrain, China and France.

So we go to Spa for the next race and I like my chances there. Our car is fast down the straights due to our focus on powertrain dev and Spa will reward that. I'm good at the remaining tracks save Suzuka, where I tend to struggle to be consistent. I removed Australia for this season (replacing it with China) since I suck at Albert Park for some reason.

There's a bit of a bug with the rivalry mechanic, that affected the second half of season one and first half of season two. As the ninth rated team out of eleven I was only given the choice of the best and fastest drivers to choose as my rival. Max, Hamilton, Perez and Bottas. No way I can compete with them at that stage. This should be choosing drivers closer to the player's level, but something isn't working right. Now that our car is better it's not an issue anymore, but I went a year with no rival because I knew I couldn't compete.

The team management aspects sounds so realistic. Can you compete against another player or players controlling different teams? I can see a path of the game becoming an amazing simulator with multiple players on one team (manager, mechanics, drivers) competing against one or more teams also controlled by multiple players.

Hey Patrocles, how's things? Yes there is a two-player career mode, added this year, and as far as I know the players can join the same team or race for different teams. But that uses the standard driver career mode, not My Team, so the team control is mostly missing. The player can still run the research and development side, but engine suppliers, sponsors, facility upgrades and teammates and that sort of thing are out of his control, as far as I know. I have yet to try it. I had posted a few weeks ago seeking a partner for this mode and got all of zero replies lol, so even though it seems to me to be an amazing thing, this two player career, there isn't much interest seemingly, at least around these parts. I'm still very interested in doing this if anyone decides they'd like to do it.

Perhaps if it proves successful they may add additional player slots to this mode and have more than two. But first I want the missing tracks haha

So we went to Spa for round eight of sixteen and I lit it up. I knew Black River Racing would be strong here due to our powertrain development, and we took advantage. I got a poor start from pole and dropped to fourth before Eau Rouge, then settled in behind Ricciardo. It's interesting how the teams shake out, some you can tell at this stage have better aero and some more power, and their performance reflects it depending on the track type. For example McLaren are very strong at horsepower tracks like Spa and Monza, and Ferrari, who are weak at those tracks, are very strong on the downforce tracks like Hungary and Zandvoort. It's pretty neat dynamic, which is constantly shifting, and makes for an excellent, interesting and variable career mode. No two should ever play out the same.

I was able to hang on to the back of this breakaway pack of four cars, we got a bit of a DRS train going and pulled out from the rest of the field. I tried very hard to stay within DRS range and went for an undercut at the first stop. I was first in to swap softs for hards and came back out and went all out on the outlap. I then undercut the two McLarens on consecutive laps and finally Max to take the lead. He would nip at me the rest of the way but not enough to get by and I took the win, first of the season. My teammate Carlos Sainz was running sixth and then retired due to mechanical failure. Of course he did. Same thing happened next race at Zandy and he is still scoreless after nine rounds. I am paying him 8.2 million for this.

There's another new mechanic is this year's version, called Focus. It essentially reflects the driver's form and morale. When high he will perform at the top of his game, and when low he will struggle. Jury's still out on this one for me, but it's one more thing the player needs to monitor, and it can certainly affect the race outcomes. Something else to add variability to the career mode and that's something I can get behind. A driver with a run of poor results can see this plummet and find himself in a bit of a hole that is hard to get out of. Conversely, a good run of results can snowball down the line. What's at question is if it it ebbs and flows at reasonable rates. In my season many drivers seem to be on the low side at the moment, but it will take time to gauge how it goes over a longer haul. Those consecutive DNFs for teammate Sainz has him very down, and I need him to snap out of it and get scoring.

A few shots of the presentation

Abu Dhabi



One of the most famous, and diabolical, turns in motor racing



A cool shot showing the elevation at Spa.




Zandvoort, just a marvelous track to drive. One of my favorites going back to GPL.




Hey it's Will Buxton. Sup

And boom just like that, Black River Racing is topping the performance chart. By the Russian Grand Prix, which is round 10 or so, we were top. That's way too fast. Season one went at a fair pace, holding station, but season two we vaulted from ninth to first in car performance. Just like last year, for this to be a more compelling long term mode, the player needs to establish some house rules or he is going to dominate. Normally you'd think I could just bump the AI to compensate, but that has the effect of making your AI teammate super fast, because his pace is also controlled by the AI level, and in the fastest car he dominates, not the player. So it all adds up to making My Team awkwardly balanced. I want to be fighting in traffic, not running away in clear air, and finding this balance, while also being efficient and smart with the research and development, is not really possible.

A title is beyond us this year, Max and Merc got out too far in front, and with two races to go second for me, and third for the team, look most likely. I'll stick with it another year at least to try take a world title. With our ascent up the chart, my teammate Carlos Sainz has come good, scoring in five straight and is now a factor in each race. We have Brazil and Abu Dhabi remaining, two of my strongest tracks, so we will try to finish the season on the up and head in to next year as possible favorites. No regulation changes were announced for this year.

About the two-player career mode. I am very keen to give this a go and want to give a rundown of how I would envision running it, in case it might cause someone to want to join me. I race with a controller. A headset/mic is also required, not only for talking to me, but with your race engineer as well. When the skies open up in the middle of your stint you need the ability to easily change strategy on the fly. Trust me

I am thinking we would run a 10-race season, the shortest option, at least for the first one. The main reason to do this is to allow us to cherry pick the tracks, and avoid all of those that might prove troublesome. Let's face it, some tracks are far more difficult, to lap consistently and with no errors. I can run a whole race at Paul Ricard without a problem, but doing the same at Zandvoort or Monaco is unlikely. We need tracks that promote staying on the track and off the walls lol. In MP there are no do-overs, mulligans or flashbacks so we need tracks where we can compete. So Monza, France, China, Bahrain, Spa, USA, Spain, Russia, Brazil, Abu Dhabi would make a good schedule, as one example. Of course if anyone decides to join me we will discuss it and set the schedule together.

I want to allow aids to make it easier to achieve this. Low brake assist and medium TC, pit assist and assisted start. Reduced damage or none at all.

Event settings would be 50% race length with a shortened practice. To save time maybe go with the one-shot qually, but I'm open to all qualifying options. 50% race length means we need to pit, so that tire strategy is a thing and the race isn't simply a sprint. I would expect a typical event to take about two hours, and we could run one a week or whatever our time allows. AI level is up in the air, and something we would need to play around with to find the right one, but it needs to be set where a couple of mistakes don't ruin chances. The flip side is setting it low means a driver running a solid race may be way out in front of the AI. This would take some trial and error, and will be guided in some measure by our respective skill levels and pace.

I'm happy to share my setups, in case they may prove useful, and to help anyone get up to speed if they feel they need it, even running spontaneous practices or whatever to gain experience and track time.

We could drive for rival teams, but I'd rather be teammates, competing together. And I'd suggest that we leave Red Bull, Merc and Ferrari to the AI, to give us capable rivals. Instead we would take a midfield team to the top. Alpha Tauri, Aston Martin, McLaren, Alpine or similar. Or even see if we can restore Williams to glory

So if anyone is interested let me know.

No applications have been received at the time of this writing, so there's still time! Reserve your seat today. It's not often you get a shot at a world drivers championship you know.

Season two done and dusted, with two strong finishes. I finished second behind Max, and Black River Racing also finished second in the constructors behind Mercedes. I won four of the sixteen races, at Monza, Austin, Spa and Interlagos. Carlos Sainz scored in each of the last seven. I tried to sign Lando Norris after the season but I messed it up and get another season with Carlos which is fine. I ditched the odd-sounding Merc engine for a Honda for season three. Sounds a little better, especially throttle-off and has a very pronounced and defined turbo whine, which I like so far. So we started with Ferrari, then Mercedes and now Honda in three seasons. Sponsor and prize money were reinvested in our HQ facilities, which opens the 'ultimate' level of car upgrades. With no regulation changes after season two we should reach a fully maxxed out car around the middle of season three. At that point any technological gaps to other teams will begin to close. We start season three dead even with Merc on the performance chart

So I am expecting a shot at the title. We'll see how the season shakes out. Same schedule, but I swapped out Hungary for Canada. I have no street courses in the lineup.

Monza was a good one for BRR, with our excellent powertrain package we are always a threat at horsepower tracks, and I got a great start, first to Rettifilo, a turn that's easy to get wrong, and early on the throttle to pull out as the tight field negotiated it. By Parabolica I had pulled out of DRS range and eventually victory.

Here I lead the field through Rettifilo. Looks like every car started on softs





Diving in to Parabolica with a nice gap back to the Mercs, out of DRS range at least.





I climb out of the car to thunderous applause




Sharing the podium with the two Merc pilots, Hamilton and Verstappen, who would go on to sweep the championships