Grand Prix World 1998: The Tyrell Challenge Part 2

 Out on track: The 1998 Australian GP

Last time, we did nearly everything to prepare for our first race. I also did some stuff on the background that will be revealed as the season goes along. Let's begin.

I will give a more detailed explanation about what what all of these mean, when we can start actually setting up the car, although some could figure out what Speed, Overtaking and Heat mean.

A nice track at the start of the year. Overtaking isn't too difficult, but reliability might be a concern. Low handling cars tend to suffer around this track.

Here I present the Racing Assembly menu. Here, select the parts our race cars will have when out on the track. We normally won't do much here. The relevant part is the dry tire compound we are using. For those that don't know, we are using 1997 to ... 2006(?) rules, at the start of qualifying we must pick the type of tire compound we will use for the rest of the weekend. We have Hard tires, which are ideal for the race, and Soft tires, better for qualifying and SOME races. I'll mention which tires we will use beforehand, as that defines the strategy we will be running ... though it'll usually be Hards.

Now, we shall see the official Competitor List for the 1998 Australian Grand Prix

So, no surprises here in terms of the drivers, as shown on the previous post. The expectation is McLaren dominating the season, Ferrari catching up later (I'll make sure of that in the name of ... well, a championship battle), Williams and Benetton fighting for P3, and ... there's the rest. We will be fighting with the Ford-powered, Bridgestone equipped Minardi team who ... well, Tyrell and Minardi are pretty much equal, just running different tyre suppliers.

Our first qualifying session would be a fully dry session. Due to tire related reasons, we are at a disadvantage.

McLaren absolutely destroy the field to lock out the front row. Expect to see lots of this until Ferrari, Williams or someone else bring a good car. Benetton beat Williams and lock the 3rd row, Sauber beats Jordan for the 5th, and then there's a mix up from the rest of the low midfield. At the back, Minardi beats Tyrell. It should be noted that the Tyrell drivers only did a 4 lap run each. I did this as an experiment to reduce Car Wear, but that doesn't work that way.

Dry race, typical for Australia. Low temp, good for our engines and reliability.

As far as race strategy is concerned, Australia favors the 1 stop strategy, since the time lost during the pit stop is quite high. That's exactly what we will do. Here's where the Hard tires come into play, they can run half the race length with nearly no wear. Soft runners would be forced to run a 2 or 3 stop.

Here's the usual setup I'm running. A display of the status of both drivers, the Speech Transcription screen that I will change to see what's up around the race, and the race map. There are TV cameras available as well, but ... they are only valuable to see the overtakes. This is Lap 10 (Not 9, which is what the Laps Done counter would imply), and as you can see: 

• The McLarens, Ferraris and Williams are well clear. 
• There's a fight between a Jordan and a Prost, the Arrows boys dogfighting, 
• Stewart had a stinker of a start, and we are just chilling behind the Minardis.

This is 90s F1, gaps do be gigantic in this time and age.

Nearly a top 10! That's an amazing result!

On merit and pace, we beat Minardis and a Prost. MERIT AND PACE.

So the West McLaren Mercedes team destroyed the field, only Eddie Irvine's Ferrari was close to them. Benetton beats Williams, as they had better positions and more finishers. Alesi grants Sauber the best of the rest achievement, though Jordan had 2 race finishers. We out perform Minardi thanks to the 1 stop strategy, and we even trapped Olivier Panis behind us. Takagi put a fantastic display of racecraft to hold the significantly better, significantly faster Prost Peugeot. The Tosser was a bit too slow to jump Panis, but he had no problem with the Minardis, they couldn't even catch him.

McMerc dominate the start of the season, Benetton having 2 finishers ties them up with Ferrari, and Jacques Villeneuve provided Williams' only points so far. I expect us to remain unclassified for the full season. There are only 2 races where we could get close to the mid fielders, but even on those, I don't expect points.

Now, it is time to watch the news. These will shows what's going on in the background, what the other teams are doing. I'm actually waiting for some weird stuff to happen, I'll talk about some house rules and modifications at that point.

We didn't have money to start with!

As you can see, I was making some calls to hire better personnel than what we have, but there are ... at least 9 teams better than us, and another that might be better. We have to beg for them to sign, they just have to call and they'll get people.

"So far off the pace"? What, you expected to be slicing and dicing with McLaren? Anyway, the first confirmed driver signing, as Johnny moves to Arrows. The GPW AI is absolutely insane, specially when during the first season when everyone is about to be a free agent. For the sake of reeling them in, I will lock a few drivers into their seats, as well as force some teams to have certain suppliers, mostly engine and fuel. Mostly Ferrari ... you'll see why I say this, though the OGs know the reason. This driver and supplier lock will last two years. After that, the AI is free to do crazy stuff. Johnny is NOT a locked driver.

Neither are these two. Ralf is free to go to ... Stewart ... Guess he got tired of playing number 2 to Hill. As for Nick, in a playthrough that started during 1999, I planned to hire Nick and make him my number 2 ... but Jordan scooped him up as their test driver ... for 5 years, and that screwed us, and screwed his development. Instead, we will immediately sign him, giving him a 2 year Test Driver contract, allowing him to step in as potentially the Number 2 driver. That would be in 2000 ... like it happened in real life. Hopefully the 2000 car isn't a 2000 Prost caliber car. Bad news for Mr. Montermini, he won't be back.

On the last post, I said something along the lines of "We would get $16m due to reasons we would explain later". This is the reason, I did the basic strat of immediately signing Pedro Diniz, the Pay Driver God. With a yearly cash influx of $9.6m and not bad stats for a pay driver, he's THE reason why player controlled backmarker teams will survive during their second year. Of course, we need to get there in the first place. He was signed to a 3 year deal, with $20k bonuses for race wins and championship victory (both he probably won't get, but it sweetens the deal). This is bad news for one of our current drivers.

Oh, dear, Lord Newey will replace Ross Brawn as TECHNICAL DIRECTOR(!), not Chief Mechanic. BTW, why the F'ing F is the paddock surprised we aren't testing. WE DON'T HAVE CASH!

The game will also rate ... with some sort of nebulous system, how good the manager was after a Grand Prix Weekend. Expect me to be the Least Effective Manager often times due to Tyrell F1 being terrible.

After Action Report

Now, let's talk about us and what Australia did to us. The problem with the first three races is that they are not in Europe. Australia, Brazil and Argentina. To get there it will cost us many moneys, moneys we don't have. The first mission is surviving the first 3 races. After that we get a bunch of Europe based GPs that are cheaper than the rest. That's when we'll stop draining money. After this race, though ...

That ain't good

I KNOW!!

Not ideal, as you can see. We have resources and tools to prevent bankruptcy. I'd rather use them later in the season.

We'll look at a breakdown to see where money went.

The data is a bit skewed, due to the starting cash given to us by the cash sponsors. It will be more accurate after the Brazilian GP.

The expenses ARE accurate however. The biggest reason we are losing cash is the fact that we have to pay Ford nearly half a million for their engines. And while our pay drivers cover that, then the next big hit is the Transport costs, as I explained before. 

Staff costs will increase a bit through the year, simply because we need personnel to complete all of our goals. It's either high morale personnel, or more personnel. High morale only occurs on good performing teams, so instead we'll do the Soviet method of throwing more of people at it until it works. As for construction, that's how much cash the Engineering department spends building stuff, like Spare Parts. We can't escape from that because we NEED to repair the cars.

Let's talk Sponsors

My Commercial Department has been busy. They are trying to get a licensing deal for a Fan Club, but I have a feeling that won't happen until the last round or something. I usually don't bother with Licensing deals, but we need any kind of extra money.

The bulk of their job has been calling Red Bull, Peugeot and Mugen-Honda for a deal. Red Bull didn't even bother with us, which tells me we won't be getting a Team Sponsor. No big deal.

What we need, though, is to stop spending $7.5m per year in engines. That's why we contacted both Peugeot and Mugen-Honda. I could have contacted Ford again, but decided against that. Here's the deals we got.

So, both Peugeot and Mugen-Honda are happy to work with us, which is fantastic, but I can't split forces and negotiate with both. Besides, only one of them will be our Engine supplier anyway. Both are offering us a Customer deal and a Partner deal. That means it is time to talk about deal types.

• Customer: Simple, we buy the supplies outright. It is unlikely that we get improved components from our supplier, and if we do it'll be many weekends after the Partner and Works teams do.
• Partner: We help the supplier in the development of components, and they will supply us for free. The supplier will try to send improved components based on the testing done by the team. Depending on the deal, the team can adjust the design of said components, remapping some of the stats. A very good deal will allow the Partner team to receive components made for other Partner and Works teams
  
• Works: The Partner deal on steroids. For suppliers with considerable resources, the supplier will focus their resources on our team. They will supply us with their best equipment and will provide us with a significant amount of cash. Similar to the Partner deal, they'll send improved components every so often. Better deals allow us to direct the development of the components. Even better deals allows us to get components developed by other Works and Partner team, as well as protect our own components from them.

In this case, we DO NOT want a Customer deal. That's the whole reason we are dying, because we are losing stupid amounts of cash by paying Ford. At the same time, we want to close this deal quick, as we need to sign Tire and Fuel suppliers (They can be Customer, since they are cheap anyway), as well as a few Cash Sponsors. With that in mind, we will target the 4 block Mugen-Honda Partner deal. We will also bias some resources to looking for a Tire deal. I also think I know which fuel supplier to sign as well.

The Mechanics Department

So, after the race, both cars got worn down. The wear was less than expected, a result of running less laps than the lead lap cars, but it's still significant. We actually can race with worn cars, it's just that eventually wear turns into damage turns into DNF turns into more damage. That gets costly. So you want to make sure that damage is 0%. That will change next race, however. What I did in preparation of the hell known as Interlagos was repair Rosset's Car 1, leave Car 2 as is, then give Takagi Car 3. The reasoning is that repairing Car 1 will use up a lot of time from our mechanics. If we had to repair another heavily worn car, we won't make it. Instead, we'll lightly repair Car 2 in a moment, using only 1 spare, use up Car 3 at Brazil, then go back to Car 2. That will make it difficult to test, but we won't be doing tons of testing this year.

That will be it for this post. From here onward, it will be two completed races per post, with the final race post being a full season debrief. Optimistically, I want that post to be along the lines of "We did suck, but ...", but there won't be much positive aspects this year. 

O P T I M I S M

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