GR Racing Thread - now under new (F1) management

I’ll certainly be getting a couple of hours (hopefully anyway) into it tomorrow afternoon, wonder if reviews are going to be published this afternoon, almost seems pointless having the first lot of reviews out when a small amount of the player base are going to be playing it already.

Not even out and F1 22 already has a 6.2GB update :lol:

Reviews were out this afternoon for F1 22, pretty much as expected. Good racing game but not an essential upgrade if you’ve played last year (which is pretty much what reviewers say most years), I’ll probably be happy with it for the price I’m paying but probably wouldn’t pay full price for it. Looking forward to it, hopefully my copy will unlock tomorrow so I can get a couple of hours in tomorrow afternoon/evening.

Sadly now got something on this afternoon so probably wont’t get chance to jump on F1 22 till later on, probably won’t get in for long so won’t even bother getting the wheel out, just setting it up so I can try a race or two later on. Going to try a single lap of time trial too.

Edit, finally got some F1 22 played on my wheel yesterday afternoon and so far it’s pretty good! The cars are fun to drive, definitely more twitchy in the slow corners and more or less stuck in the high speed. The AI are good though, definitely feel faster than in last years game (still using high 80s on the slider), the race starts are really hard too. Definitely going to do a 50% or 100% race at Silverstone later. It’s not without its faults though, the FFB seems to take a second to re-engage after the game being paused and I’ve noticed a slight graphical glitch where ai cars almost seem to have a ghostly effect going on. Be looking forward to starting a career in a couple of weeks once I’ve got used to the cars and they’ve patched out the engine wear issue :fp:

Pretty good deal from Box.co.uk considering the game is £60 :dread:

I’m enjoying F1 22 as well! My pace is definitely slower though, or the AI are quicker as I’m about 10 ‘clicks’ down on what I was using in F1 2021 (from high 80s to 90, down to 80).

Edit, posted more of my thoughts in the F1 thread in off topic, but in short I’m enjoying F1 22 a lot, even if some of the stuff they’ve added is very meh.

The next Nacon Connect is happening later on, so we'll be getting to see more of Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown. Hopefully we can see a bit of the game in action.

F1 Manager

Norris binned it in Jeddah, I asked Riccardo to go onto softs under Red flag. Every other driver goes to new softs. Ric stays on of hards :fp:

Somehow nabbed a point as we had a fuel surplus and was able to create a DRS train to wear down their tyres but still

I was posting about F1 Manager in the F1 thread, but it's race day so I thought I'd switch to here. It's a game I feel like I could talk about it's downsides for quite a while, but it's got me. I turned on for the first time yesterday morning and ended up playing it for the rest of the day.

I've got Aston Martin and sacked pretty much everyone, aiming for a season where I just put money into upgrading facilities and working towards the future, while mostly ignoring this season's results. The first few races were my driver's (Vettel and Piastri) just having lonely races in 17th and 18th, way ahead of Williams but way behind everyone else. I assumed the hot shot race engineers I brought it would be adjusting the car set up during practice sessions, but they don't, so my bad there. Once I started playing with the sliders between sessions, we did start getting some improvements. Combine it with a new floor that I designed as it became clear it would actually be impossible to spend the whole budget on just facilities and next year's research and in race 8, Piastri got our first points with a finish of 8th, and he was right on the tail of Alonso and Gasly too, so not that far off a P6. He's out-performed Seb in every single race.

I am starting to wonder now what a lot of the staff do though. When I see the suggested strategies both a race day, is that affected in any way by my staff or facilities, or is it just a bit of a generic strategy suggestion? I'm not sure I'm seeing things like undercuts/overcuts come into it. There doesn't really seem to be any info about how much time is lost through degrading tyres against time lost in pits, to make that decision. The reports will show you how much time is lost by each lap of use on the tyres, and it shows you how long you lose for a pit stop, but I'm sure Toto Wolff is not sat there on race day with a calculator and a notepad.

Safety cars seems broken. It takes an absolute age for the pack to catch up, and it doesn't seem to let lapped cars through. In one race, I went from trying to chase down the Hass cars, to suddenly being a whole lap down on them because of a SC. I'm not entirely sure tyre compounds actually work either. It's hard to judge when you're comparing two different drivers, but I've done some split strats where Piastri starting on hards puts a pretty big gap between him and Seb on softs. I think I've got a slight concern the whole thing could almost be like a mobile management game with a fancy paint job. Earn money, build these facilities, and it give you the best car, but hopefully it's just me not really digging into the strategy side of things yet.

I'd agree with a lot of that. The strategy stuff is all vanilla, your good staff just allow for better part design or better feedback rates or pit stop speed.

I had Riccardo on old Wets on a dry track in Monaco with brand new super softs on all cars behind and he only let 3 cars through in 6 laps. This situation occurred because of odd SC behaviour only letting some lapped cars through (any does not mean all) but I think it was as the lead car kept putting for softs. It is also how Gasly won that race. I think the differential between items isn't great enough, and the strategy layer doesn't give you the tools to make smart decisions. It may not be licenced and be 7 years old, but MM was able to put a lot of useable data in easy reach and got this bit right.

But for all my issues with it, it does have a fun loop and I'm up to Azerbaijan and want to keep playing. Maybe it's because no other management game looks so good? I really don't know.

The difficulty is so random on F1 22, did a 50% after the Grand Prix today, last to first as Verstappen and still won by 20 seconds on 70 difficulty, in driver career (as Alfa Romeo) I struggle to even get 10th at some tracks even after a fair few upgrades to the car.

Definitely going to spend time on F1 Manager tomorrow, well that’s the plan anyway :lol:

Bug warning - if you change a gearbox that is terminal mid practice session but don't complete the switch before the session ends, then your new gearbox also gets the terminal wear and condition. Danny Ric now on his 4th gearbox :fp:

Pitting under a safety car pretty much kills your race, if you're anything from a mid table team down anyway. On paper, it looks like you'll be fine, a few seconds behind the guys ahead of you, with a gap to the cars behind you, but depending on where the point of the first lapped car is, you can suddenly find yourself a whole lap down on someone you were just chasing down. There's a lot of promise here, but a lot of really big stuff they need to fix ASAP.

Still really enjoying it for all it's faults though. Had a great race at Paul Ricard where I took penalties for new engines and ERS on both cars, but in the first stint we both got up up into the points. Then I was able to use car 2 to go long, get ahead of the RBs and Mercs and hold them back to let car 2 catch up. Was in a proper battle with Leclerc, Russell and both RBs for the win with 7 laps to go, but Russel spun and took me out with him, and I actually came off worse as it killed my tyres so I had to box immediately. Which did manage a 7th and 8th finish though, with both cars setting the fastest lap of the race at some point, so things are definitely improving. As the team goals are so low, I use all my wind tunnel time for research, and then don't use any of it for designing mid-season upgrades. They still seem to give decent improvement though.

Ugh.

So managed to get P2 and P3 in Quali due to changeable weather. Lando had a 13place penalty so starts 14th. Ric sits behind the race leader on his 1 stop hards and goes well. By the end of the race were fighting for the win but really we can't keep up due to high fuel usage and the Ferraris on a 2 stop. It's okay, 4th is a good result. With 5 laps to go, drop off to conserve fuel as I'm -0.3 fuel and you save 0.1 per lap according to the tool tip. But it stays at -0.3. Slow down on the tyres. Same. Completely back off on the lap time. Still -0.3. Ric pulls over 3 corners from the end.

Ugh!

I don't mind doing badly when it's my fault but I have no idea what would have saved fuel for him then. It normally works. Game is so riddled with bugs.

Even in my singular race I found if you’re low on fuel usage (although one neat thing I found round Bahrain at least, is that Aston only fuelled for 56 laps, so fully expecting to get lapped, no idea if this was intentional or a bug though!) if you increase ERS usage alongside conserving fuel it made it a lot better.

Also I can kind of forgive bugs in their first game in the series (well I hope its a series anyway), likewise I could with Codemasters for the first few years but its just bizarre now that even using the same, ageing engine its still got bug after bug at launch.

Yeah, I had Piastri run out of fuel with 2 corners to go at Suzuka for the same reason. I'd set it on conserve for the last 20 laps of the race and it just flipped back and forth between -0.1 and +0.1.

I flew through the first 2 seasons, ploughing most of my money into facilities and research rather than development, just got my car reveal in season 3 and the ranks are almost all identical to how they were at the start of season 2 (a lot of them are ranked between 15 and 19 out of 20), but the race results suggest a car that is definitely superior.

Into season 3 already? :shock:

How well does the “focus on next years car” help things?

Not entirely sure. Those reports still say my car is the 19th worst for brake cooling, 17th for top speed, 15th for medium speed corners etc, but I went from fighting Williams and Haas for 16th to being a consistent points scorer in season 2, and even got a few podiums, although I feel like those came in kind of cheap ways.

If you can make a 1 stop work, it always seems to be the way to go. The other came from the AI being laughably bad at using the weather predictions. About 18 laps into Australia, the forecast showed 2 laps of light rain, followed by about 16 laps of heaving rain. A bunch of front runners pitted for new slicks right before the rain started. 2 laps later they went in for inters, then 2 more laps and they were in again for wets. I did screw up my second car too though. You get a 'track is dry' message once it goes below 1m of rain on track, but going onto slicks then was still a lap too soon and I lost a ton of places to people still on wets.

I also have two young drivers in Piastri and Vesti, who get experience way quicker than someone like Seb did, so it's possible the improvements could be coming from their fairly quick stat improvement.

There's also a whole bunch of stuff regarding research I don't really understand at all. Like how do you know the point where you're doing just enough research to keep up with other teams, or the point where you should improve on those around you. I put pretty much all my wind tunnel and CFD hours each period into research, and I think I ended up doing 1 research product per part over the course of a season (usually 2 parts per period, split the hours and engineers evenly between them). Would it be better to split the hours up more, to increase the number of research projects done over a season? Split each period into 4 projects instead of 2. Who knows.

Cracked on with free practice round Jeddah (luckily don’t have to drive it in this!) and I have no idea how to set the car up :fp:

I take it the idea is to get the min/max bar as small as possible but they don’t seem to have decreased much during FP1 :dread:

Being realistic, I doubt I’m going to be able to make Seb a WDC again with Aston :lol:

Edit, that is the case with the setups, slowly getting more optimised throughout FP2 now, hopefully this is an area that will naturally decrease as your team and engineers get better?

Edit 2, maybe its better to let the AI take care of FP sessions? An Alpine and an Alfa Romeo just crashed into each other in Q1 anyway! Seb might be through to Q2 if Perez can’t improve. Edit again, he did improve and knocked Seb out :lol:

You need to do enough laps for the driver to give you a confidence rating, then you can pit them and amend the sliders. Each time the tell you their view, the window bar drops smaller. Sometimes there is an animation showing this, and sometimes not.

Edit: on sliders, each slider does have a tooltip telling you what it modifies when you move it. Also I find sorting out straights first (only two sliders affect it), then the top bar, then the 4th is preferable. This leaves toe to tweak the last two bars.

Depending on track length, staff and drivers, you can do 2 - 2.5 cycles per practice session. Should be enough to get to 95% most of the time, as you need 295% to get the 15/15 confidence for your driver. If you're up to 14/15, it's usually good enough.

Grin, how are you on Season 3!? I've put 20hrs in and only just finished the British GP in season 1. Are you skipping practice and quali?

With parts research, I find that the 40days per part is the limiting factor, and the CFD values. Trying to upgrade the windtunnel and CFD as McLaren (which I think is the irl plan) to boost those figures. I don't really have a handle on my finances or cost cap though, but I seem to be making money so moving parts to rushed more and more.

I sent them out for 15 laps in FP1 before adjusting the sliders, things just seemed to go downhill when I messed with them :lol:

I got it up to about 70% for Vettel, 65% for Stroll, next race weekend I’ll try going through them again, I might try simulating all 3 FP sessions though, I’m enjoying the FP sessions for now but reckon they’ll lose their shine after a while so I’m hoping the AI will be good enough to get a decent enough set up generated for you.

Jeddah is going to be another lonely race I think, got them both on a one stop from Hard to Medium for Vettel and the opposite for Stroll, Vettel had a nice tussle with Ocon for 10 laps but once he got past he pulled away quickly. Stroll already gone off the track and been overtaken twice :fp:

To keep it semi realistic I might have a complete overhaul of the 4 available engineer slots in the off season, although as I said the race engineers don’t seem too bad.

GR Racing Thread - now under new (F1) management

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