Author's Note: I was going to publish our results from Round 1, originally, but thought I needed to give some setup and housekeeping first, so started going and before I knew it I was typing about a dozen different things. So this will just be a preparatory post, allowing for the possibility that we re-start our Co-Op Career.--DID.
Brett and I decided to run a shortened schedule for our Co-Op career mode; 23 races (the full season within the game, I believe) is an awful lot and we'd like to be able to feel like we made some progress in this over the next year or two, however long we play it. Also, I'm not positive that a 23-race schedule would allow you to make any changes from season to season. So a 16-race season it would be, allowing us the option to change a half-dozen items of any schedule from year to year.
Even in real life the schedule has been a mess. The last several months, dating to before the release of the game, has seen a never-ending shuffle of the real-life season. Most recently, Qatar is rumored to be added in to replace...Japan, I think...but this hasn't been confirmed yet. For those non-F1 fans or those who are baffled and overwhelmed by the fluid status of the schedule this year, I present the following:
Current Schedule:
- 1 Bahrain
- 2 Emilia Romagna (Imola)
- 3 Portugal (Algarve)
- 4 Spain
- 5 Monaco
- 6 Azerbaijan
- 7 France
- 8 Styrian (Red Bull Ring)
- 9 Austria
- 10 Great Britain
- 11 Hungary
- 12 Belgium
- 13 Netherlands
- 14 Italy
- 15 Russia
- 16 Turkey (Istanbul)
- 17 USA
- 18 Mexico
- 19 Brazil
- 20 TBA (Qatar the leading rumor)
- 21 Saudi Arabia (Jeddah)
- 22 Abu Dhabi
- China
- Canada
- Singapore
- Japan
- Australia
Of course, the video game doesn't even have all the tracks that have been advertised to be a part of game: Qatar will not be added in, but Algarve (Portugal), Imola (formerly San Marino, now Emilia Romagna) and Jeddah (Saudi Arabia) were also not included at the time of release. Since beginning to draft this post, Algarve was added in 1.10 and Imola was added (in 1.12, I believe), but Jeddah is still not done.
All this ignores that Imola and Portimao were both raced last season and never made it into last year's game either. The subject of a steady stream of frustration and inquiry from fans of the game series, it is reported that the amount of work required to design a single track takes months. Which makes sense. But then, we're over a year past the second F1 race to take place at two of those tracks. Jeddah is a more reasonable situation, as (last I checked) the track hadn't even been finished yet...so how would Codemasters create that one?
To start the careers out, we decided to start toward the back of the field. No surprise there, people do it every year with Madden. We decided not to be teammates, at least not at first. And, at least for the moment, I am probably a bit faster than Brett, and I'd argue have an even bigger advantage in lap-to-lap consistency (hopefully Brett isn't reading this as the last time we raced I barreled into him!), so I figured I'd start down at the bottom with Haas. Brett decided to stick with Williams, the next team up the ladder.
Neither one of us could use our real names for audio within the game, which is believable for me but not so much for Brett. So we went with DeJong and Moore, respectively. I spent some time working at the combination of orange and light blue that I thought contrasted nicely, finally getting it--I'll have to get a screenshot of that soon enough. Brett's helmet...well, shit, I can't remember what his looks like. I remember not thinking it was very good but there's no accounting for taste.
You're allowed to choose who you're replacing when you start out. Sadly, we both separately either misread the instructions, or the instructions were wrong, and we both chose the wrong teammates at our respective teams--by the time we realized our mistake it was too late to go back and fix it--so we're stuck with Mazepin and Latifi, respectively.
As for the in-game settings, we opted for 85 difficulty (90ish is closer to where we would run if we had flashbacks, but that hasn't been made available for any multiplayer mode), one shot qualifying, and to use the Quick Practice functionality to save time--this last item only an option for every practice after FP1 at Round 1, as the game makes you enter the full practice mode to see how it works.
The Codemasters series of F1 games, for the last half-dozen years or maybe more, has had the option to produce telemetry output. I have found a nicely crafted open-source program (https://www.telemetrytool.com/) that receives this information and produces it in real-time for users. The utility of this program really is most aimed at someone who uses iRacing or Assetto Corsa or something like that, where a driver might be engaged in endurance racing or might have a human spotter spectating live to provide feedback mid-session. However, it also has a few charts available which I thought might be handy to show off.
To track our results and season standings from round to round, I will be updating a spreadsheet that I've had created for the last couple years in a couple different iterations. This originally started out as a spreadsheet that I typed up and printed out hard copies to take to my bedroom with me; this was several years before I went off to college (about 100 years ago) and we didn't have a laptop. The spreadsheet was originally two races per page, with a staggered grid layout for qualifying and race results coupled with running standings for the WDC and WCC, so one could have an idea how the season flowed. Unfortunately, as a hard copy, it required hand-entry, which was harder to read and also, I suspect, more subject to error. As the years went by, eventually it became a computer-maintained document for various careers, but still wasn't much more sophisticated than it had been. The only changes I can think of off-hand are a generally cleaner look, addition of nation's flags for each Grand Prix to give the sheet a bit more color and adding some AutoCorrect entries to change the three-letter abbreviation for each driver to their full last name.
Starting in 2019, when I really started to get into the series of games again, I overhauled the spreadsheet (in electronic format) to have it be a bit smarter. Unfortunately, that version was much longer than 16 races, and has proven to be a giant pain to adapt for a shorter season. All the same, I guess I need to get it done.
With the exception of a couple paragraphs sprinkled into the above, most of that was written about a month ago. As hinted at in the top note, we have gotten through a weekend (actually three, I think...or maybe four) but Brett's move and the beginning of football season, fantasy football season, and now basketball season have really taken the wind out of our sales. If the IndyCar season opened up an average of three hours/week for us, these other things have taken up probably an average of six or eight.
Brett's move has come and now gone, but as anyone who moves more than their bedroom's worth of junk, it is a lot more than a weekend activity to unbox one's stuff and get it where they want it. Add in the fact that he is starting (I think?) a new work environment (i.e. going into the office instead of working from home), things have really slowed down. I don't really think of it that calmly and coolly, but we'll leave it written this way for the time being.
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