Formula 1 - More Answers for Managers

Arskap got the task to collect questions from you and I am now responding to all of that questions. So every team manager would have now all clear. I hope :) Read carefully! And if you have more questions, send them to Arskap and we will respond in later news!

General
When the racing season for F1 starts?
The planned start of the first F1 season is the start of MRC season 9. The car should be done before that! Therefore it is only allowed to build chassis for season 9. In the future you will be able to build chassis for current season, and chassis for next season.

Will it be possible to somehow hide what we are doing as a team? Right now everyone can see what the other team does, but that is not how it should be or is in reality?
We don`t feel this is neccessary to handle. It is not so easy to get to know what others are doing even if you see pretty much of the data. But there is much more. And we also feel there is lot of ways how to cheat using your F1 team and driver, so we feel it is just good protection if everybody sees many team data.

In which order will the followings happen : sign pilots/sign sponsors/buy supplies
Depends on manager. Suppliers are independent, you will be able to do so soon. Signing drivers before sponsors is more reasonable, because sponsors offers are influenced by driver skills.

Drivers
Does a single owner team need to prepare 3 contracts for drivers? 2 should be enough, since only 1 person will decide.
We will make the same system for all teams to make it easier for us. On the other side we are thinking about changing this rule. The idea was to give owners control of the key decission by the team manager. But we invented system where owners can recall team manager in minutes after he made wrong decission, so we think voting for drivers is not neccessary. This would bring possibility to hire drivers for next season earlier. And it will be possible to cancel contracts less than 3 days after signing if there is enough time before next season. Altough some of you might not agree ont his change so we will see how your reactions would be like and then make the decission.

When will we sign pilots ? Are we going to pay them weekly?
Depends on contract agreed between team and driver. Contract will consist of 1 time signing payment (driver to team or team to driver) and weekly payments (team to driver). All of these can be 0.

Employees
Will there be better and more fitting employees on the market? Some should have 2 or even 3 very good skills according to description.
This is competition same for everybody. Don`t expect that employees with quality 99 grow on trees. There is only one Adrian Newey in real F1. But still new employees are generated randomly so new wmployees might be available soon...

What are mechanics for? Only to put all parts together? or are they going to do something like pit crew?
Mechanics are used during testing and races and the other name for their job position can be Pit-Crew. They change tyres, fix the cars and change the setup of the car. But they only do the manual part of the work. They don`t analyze data. Building the cars is made by the engineers. And analyzing results of testing is made by race or testing engineers. Designers are doing purely design part of the work and analysing the data from engineers to do changes in design.

Do we have to employee a pit crew, or does the driver has to have one, or can we use 1 crew from any driver for both drivers?
Mechanics are your pit crew. The screen to set the position of the mechanics during pitstops will come soon for the F1 team.

Can low quality designer spoil the work of quality car designers?
No he cannot, except project manager employees. Head designer uses most o his skills including design to affect the outcome of the development project as well as the development team leader. leaders based on their project management skills gives tasks to employees in his team. Good project manager gives tough tasks to good designers and easy tasks to bad designers, in case of worse leadership the results are worse. The weakest designer in the team usually does not affect the result of the work made by better designers. He can only affect others only if there is somebody even weaker.

Engineers needs Engineer, Design and Mechanics skill. Should we use employees with one of these attributes high or they should be good in all of the attributes?
There is no accurate answer for this, altough I recommend you to use employees with more of this skills high.

What if team looses Chief or teamleader?
Project teams can still work, but the efficiency will be very low. We recommend yout o hire somebody else quickly!

Car
Does the testing on the rig and the wind tunnel takes extra (separate) season days?
This is the good question to explain how development works. The project consists of 4 steps:
1. designers prepare plans for the part
2. engineers manufacture the part
3. testing engineers + drivers test the part in wind tunner or on testing rig (if no driver is available then one of the engineers is driving the car)
4. everybody analyzes the data of testing
and the next step is to repeat it from the step 1. Whole development project consists of many repeats of these steps. When the project is done, every step was made at least once.

If we use suppliers, can we develop a part the whole season before using it in next season? like engine, can we have supplier and build our own engine and have a perfect one for next season?
Only aerodynamic parts should be developed new for every season. Engine can be the same for a long time, for example build simple low quality engine for low money, and use it for free the whole seasons and save 5-10M per season. But remember as well as in real F1 there will be rule changes for mechanical parts too. We will announce that the rules with engines (or other mechanical parts) would change at least 3 seasons before that rule change. Then you will have to develop the engine again and also suppliers engine quality and price will change.

Will the car be very important like in real F1, or will grandi and the french guy win all races :-)?
Yes difference between 0% and 100% quality F1 car is around 12-13 seconds on track like Melbourne. Difference between McLaren MP4 and Gallardo (private cars) is maybe like 3%.

Will there be similar rules like in Real F1? And will they be used from season before? Like 8 engines per season, and so on?
Not yet, during the first seasons there will be unlimited number of engines and other parts to use. The contract covers usage of as many parts as needed by the supplier. Basically you can use the fresh engine for every race. We might bring such rules in later seasons. The same with developed parts, but you will have to pay fee to manufacture that parts for whole season (1M for engine and small fee for other parts).

If I do a part 5 days 100k€ then upgrade it 5 days 100k€ is it same than if i had done 10days 200k€.
Not the same but similar. Obviously if employee is working on same project for planned 10 days, he is more focused than if he works on something for 5 planned days and then start another project on the sametpoic for another 5 days. But the difference is not very big.

Do we get new Pirelli tires? and are they going to be fragile like the real ones (would be cool, so you need to build car that does not eat the tires)
Model with the tyres will be little different than in real F1. We would have wet tyres (monsoons), intermediate, soft and hard tyres. Soft and hard tyres would be configured to be similar to real F1 compounds, but it would not be so easy. I don`t think it is possible to have car influenced the tyre wear. We will see how the system works and it might come in the future.

What are the differences between the suppliers and their products? for exemples: will the mercedes engine be good at straights, but the renault very good in curves because of mapping?
Yes differences now can be seen on suppliers screen.

How are we going to know if our team or drivers are actually using kers and/or drs?
The system here will be simple for the begining. We don`t want to add many ways how to bring bugs to the game at the begining. Therefore DRS and Kers affects the overal attributes of the car, but not change that during the racing. Again it can be chaged in the future towards more reality.

As we can now upload picture to paint our F1 car. I want to know if a canevas will be available to draw on it like other types of cars or considering there is to many different frames it will not become available ?
I dont`t think it is neccessary. For normal users we need that because not everybody is skilled grqaphic designer, but with F1 team, I am sure you can find somebody to help you :)

We're discussing in our chat how to develop car, and trying to understand relations between project budget and quality of parts. Is it linear, or for example difference between 1mln budget and 3mln can be only 10% (of obtained quality, fr example 30% - 33%, or 30% - 37%)? And the same question with duration. Or it's absolutely secret things? :)
Difficult to explain. But you can bet that more money you will use the better part you will produce pending just some very small random influence.

How is the development affected if I change employees or facilities during the project?
Results of the projects are calculated daily and the outcome of everyday development is affected by the employees and facilities which you have during that day. If you work few days with your best employees on some project the quality of their work is pretty good and they are improving the car part every day. But if you move the employees to other project and keep only few of them after few days the quality of the part is not increasing so quickly. If you build better facility then the development can be improved.

Can we prolong the project or cancel it earlier?
No, you should make your decisions carefully before you start project.

Can we purchase part from supplier and change it during the season for another supplier or own part?
You can sign contract only with one supplier during one season and that contract is not possible to terminate. Altough you can use your own parts whenever you want even if you have already a supplier signed for the season.

Why we have 3 development teams and just one engineering team?
Engineers does not have to mentally concentrate on the project, they just manufacture the parts. It does not matter if they have to create parts for 3 different projects or just one project. So for one project you need 1 dedicated designers team but the engineering and testing team is the same for all projects.