A Rhythm is established: The 1999 Brazilian and Argentinean GPs
Yes, Australia is in America, Jose, of course it is!
Welcome back. Last time, we started the season doing pretty freaking good. The goal of the season is, barring mechanical issues or crashes, we want to score top 10 finishes on every single race weekend. We started fairly well during Australia, but we lost a ton of money. I theorized that it was due to me building a 3rd car for testing, and we might build a 4th one for R&D purposes, but it isn't that critical yet. When we need to design the 2000 car though ...
Let's continue.
The performance chart for the day. Our true competition is Jordan and Prost. We won't win I think.
I mentioned last chapter that I was going to talk about Hospitality. This is the main Hospitality screen. The purpose of Hospitality is two-fold. The first one is to increase the speed of negotiations of new sponsors, useful for a small Commercial team like us. The second one, which is more important, is to keep current sponsors happy. Happy sponsors support our team more, they pay us more money AND we can negotiate faster with them.
The only issue with Hospitality is that it costs money to do, and it is expensive to increase the quality of our stand. We can either dedicate more people to the Hospitality, which increases the Quality, or we can increase the level of Catering and Celebrities. I won't touch those because that costs moneys.
We also have to invite 3 VIP Sponsors, which are the ones affected by the Hospitality. For this one I invited Castrol (Our Title Sponsor), Mugen-Honda (Our current engine supplier) and, not Goodyear, but Ferrari (Hopefully our future engine supplier).
Oh ... about Ferrari, yeah. In between sessions, I reconsidered the Ferrari deal. I decided that I could not trust the Commercial team to be able to negotiate a good deal with Ferrari for this year, same thing with Mercedes. Part of the team will talk to Mugen-Honda again, to see what kind of deal they can give us. I considered Peugeot and ... Ford ... but they already had a long term Works deal with other teams. If the Ferrari deal doesn't get at least a block of progress after Brazil, we'll go Mugen-Honda power again.
Speaking of Brazil ...
Back to Brazil. Overheating is stupid easy around here. I would use at least 2 or 3 setup points in Heat to prevent that. You might remember the absolutely epic scenes last year where Tyrell got A POINT(!!!) thanks to the chaos. That point was a complete fluke, of course. We would out strategize the field and get another point in Germany, but this one was THE miracle. We hope to repeat ... on Merit and Pace ... and Chaos.
Hey, I can see Pedro from here!
Solid run. We lost to the Prosts (Then again, Prost's drivers >> Tyrell's drivers), beat the Jordans and a Sauber. Let's get 2 more spots, guys.
Oh ... this ... this is fantastic. If it rains long enough, we can take advantage of running on the Wet Weather tires while the rest of the field is stuck on the Inters.
McLaren, Prost, Ferrari and Tyrell. F1's top teams as predicted! Anyway, what's better than a point? How about 3 of them? The Mika was on fires, as expected. Hill was better, but man was stuck on a Prost. Takagi was in trouble all race, struggling to pass people. Still, a P4 and a P7 is a remarkable result. There are only 2 tracks where we could replicate this result.
Our result, however, was aided by so many Lap 1 incidents. AI was not patient, taking themselves out in lap 1. Notably, the Benetton took each other out. Also, we can thank Double H, Fisi and The Michael. Their DNFs helped us climb up to the points scoring positions.
I've seen this before, but I'm sure The Michael won't successfully defend his title this year.
Same with Ferrari. They need to start scoring in double digits.
Time for the After Action Report:
Not "just missed", we were a lap down on the 3rd place finisher.
Man decides to unretire, then crashes. Arrows' Test Driver Jorg Muller will take over Panis' seat while he recovers.
Yeah, in 2 races this race we scored more points than in 16 races last year. Also, why Andrea?
Yup, we already looking to improve our weakest Department. Commercial needs a serious boost.
Profit! Significant Profit! The result of not building another chassis or doing testing.
Yep, the Ferrari deal moved 0%. That's not good. Our Commercial department isn't good enough. We won't be signing with Ferrari.
We will, however, sign with Red Bull. We will get a true Title Sponsor and an extra $18m! The cash for the future is already secured. Let's go!
We will also be looking to resign with Mugen-Honda. I ... would prefer a 1 year deal, but 2 years works. No problem there. Hopefully this does move.
I can't do testing because the Chassis are quite worn, and the tracks we are going to are quite harsh on the car, sadly.
Remember when I said we would have a Morale crisis and everyone had an X? Well, we are returning from that. The Design department is a bit happier now, which will help with the Design of new parts. Good.
Back to Argentina for the final America race until Canada happens. Yes, I remember Canada now! Overtaking is kind hard around here. Need a decent qualifying.
Top 10 starting spot! Good job, Diniz!
Race didn't go that good. Diniz did an Alonso and went up to P5 ... then dropped back because, you know, car is not good. Still, Top 10 finishes.
Both Mikas DNF. That should help the Michael get back into it!
I should stop commenting on how championship fights will go.
More moneys!
Quiet you!
Huh? ... Gene? I'm ... guessing that's for Test Driver duties, because The Michael is stuck there until 2000. Also, yes, Diniz Fastest Lap. That's due to a glitch.
I have a feeling this upgrade won't come in until ... I don't know, Germany or something like that.
Good repairs on the cars, boys. We need to reduce damage enough so that we can repair all cars enough to run testing.
The Commercial department stopped being unhappy! The Mechanics might be a bit upset until we can do testing OR get more success.
Notice that, in the VIP 2 slot, Mugen-Honda isn't there anymore? That's because ...
... someone's talking to them. Someone wants to sign Mugen-Honda Power Units. Fortunately, Mugen-Honda has 2 Partner deals, so even if we miss the first one, we should be fine.
No, I won't be selling shares, but I wanted to see how valuable our team was. Despite the positive results, not too valuable.
Finally, here's the Loan screen. In the Money Repaid section you can see, that we should have paid the bank $3.6m so far. Despite that, we are still making money. We WILL make lots of cash after Loan has been paid out.
That's it, then. We start the first couple of European races, where we will make more moneys. See you then!
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