F1 2021, Co-Op, S01, R07, Austria

 In F1 2019, I'm pretty sure that Austria was the easiest track; I recall running 2nd with the Mercs in that game in a crappy Renault that had fallen down the table a bit, and that was only a round or two after I couldn't hang with anyone but Williams/Haas/Alfa at Canada, a track that places similar emphasis on straight-line speed. In this year's game (maybe last year's too, I'm not sure) the track and the AI are much more demanding. Still, having just finished 10th at a track I think I'm bad at, I figured I had a good shot.

Well, at least Brett got something out of it. His first career point! Well done and no complaints. Well...maybe one complaint.

The game has within it some decent applications of rules. Among these is watching for illegal overtakes and also allowing a window (10 seconds, I think) to give them back to the person that was illegally overtaken. In this case, Brett illegally overtook Vettel out of the last corner and then had to give it back, so began to slow and pulled toward the inside of the track. Vettel, for some reason, was hesitant to take it back, so wasn't going all that fast. My problem was that I was right behind the two of them and saw an opportunity to execute a double overtake and didn't think that Brett would start to actively brake to get Vettel back by him.

Over a season later (in game time) and were are still talking about it between the two of us. I see Brett's conundrum and have experienced it myself, and I can understand his desire to quickly give the place back so he can carry on. Biased though my own view may be, I was miffed (and still am a bit) that he braked on the straight...one simply doesn't have the reflexes to handle that sort of reaction on a main straight when you're as close as I was at that moment.

Looks like Brett started on the medium tyre and ran the alternate strategy, which I think he'd say was correct. He was running 12th, by my count, after getting by Vettel, and finished 10th of course. I swapped onto the hard after the incident and was on that until there was a late Safety Car (for Ocon, who had an issue...possibly with me, I don't remember anymore), at which point I went back onto the medium (I think this was an error of the strategist that I didn't catch, don't know how else that could have gone wrong). Ocon ended up getting me due to a time penalty I'd gotten for the earlier incident with Brett.

A few other guys going onto the hard for no discernible reason again--both McLarens and both AlphaTauris this time around.

Minor footnote: looks like Stroll had a problem earlier in the race, which he was unable to do much to recover from. If memory serves, it was an off in the infield portion of the track, and was while he was running between Vettel and Brett. So I'm going to give that one to Brett, but who knows who was really at fault.

F1 2021, Co-Op, S01, R06, France

I just realized that I wasn't correctly logging retirements in the round-by-round sheets; I will fix this but I'm not going to go back and edit the images. You get the picture, and if my home-made F1 wiki is still working you'll see it corrected there.

On to France. This is a track I thought I disliked, and in previous editions of the game that maybe was true. But even though there is virtually no elevation and the surface is smooth as glass, there's something very racey about the place. I have a lot of fun hustling the car around here, and even though there are two long DRS zones, it doesn't feel quite like Monza where if you're in the front of a train you're a sitting duck.

Now there's a result I can get behind. My first point since my debut race, when the difficulty was far too low and we hadn't yet adjusted things. I suspect we had it turned down to 75 by this point but I'm not positive. Our results seem to suggest that, though.

Brett I'm sure is not as enthusiastic about it as I am, but he had a fine race here too. He was catching me in the latter stages and I developed a train behind me as I started to sweat my situation. I think he said that evening that he dove it in there a bit, but I just didn't have the spatial awareness for it and wasn't ready for him to be there. I suspect he was only barely alongside but he certainly deserved the 11th place finish, if not the last point-paying position. 

Looks like I was running 6th for a moment during the pit sequence, but was just steadily moving forward all race. Same thing for Brett, no more than a few positions and a few seconds behind me the whole way.

I think this explains my train at the end of the race; this was the first time I felt like the performance difference between medium and hard tyres was too big to be worth the lower wear rate. Thing is, on 25% races the field doesn't get strung out that much. Maybe on a full race the hards would make more sense, if only because you wouldn't constantly be fighting a losing battle against softer-equipped runners. I think I made this mistake another time or two later in the season but the differences started to be too habitually noticeable.

Hey, look at Leclerc; hards for him too. That Ferrari strategy team always knows what they're doing. As much as I want to drive for them, if I ever manage it I'll have to be careful about the suggested strategies.

Apart from Alonso's retirement, the field all looks pretty normal and believable relative to our other races thus far. The DeJong Train is the biggest stretch, and it's not that bad.

Great day for both of us here. Tons of fun.

F1 2021, Co-Op, S01, R05, Canada

 On to perhaps Brett's favorite track in all of Formula 1 to race on (historically). I think he's cooled on it a bit over the past couple editions of the game, but this is still a place he wants to go a lot more than I do. He's had the results to back that up as well.

Unusually, it looks like I was the one who had the faster fast lap between the two of us. But when we're ending the race in the last two spots, does it really matter?

The positions on track didn't ring any bells but this tire chart sure does. This was a race beset by a fair amount of rain, and after sprinkling for a while (where the AI are just a lot stronger in the "starting to rain" conditions than any human is). Looks like Brett had some offs and kept trying new tires when the Safety Car came out (twice during this race, I believe).

Looks like I was doing okay after the first round of pitstops and for a lap or so after the first restart, but I think I made contact with someone and brought out the other SC and pitted to try to salvage the race for myself. Didn't work though haha.

Brett, meanwhile, had lost so much time to the pack that he barely caught everyone else at the restart, at which point he bottled it again. I'm sure he was miserable for this one.

Looks like I was the last car going around for the second SC period and neither of us caught the pack for the last restart.

Yeesh.

F1 2021, Co-Op, S01, R04, Spain

 Now we come to it, that terrible track where the AI is just too strong. No, not Monaco; it's true there too, of course, but that circuit is so unforgiving it's almost like its own acknowledged section of hell. With the ability to just pull it off the calendar, it's easy to ignore. Instead, I'm talking about Catalunya.

You'd think it would be easy, wouldn't it? With all the testing that goes on there, it's probably the track where we see cars running the most of any track on the schedule. It's not a particularly unique layout and doesn't have anything that seems like it should be difficult. But that modified chicane has had my number ever since it was added in 2007 (holy hell was it that long ago?). And no matter how much I try, I can't seem to get it right more than once every five or ten laps. I suspect that it, like a lot of chicanes in F1, might be much easier with a wheel, where a minute change can be made at low speed without ruining momentum as much. Or something like that. But without a wheel (or, rather, without a compatible wheel...I still have a Driving Force GT but I guess those don't work with the PS4) it's hard to say for sure. Maybe if I follow my dreams and get into iRacing once the move happens (that's another post).

Yup. Looks about right. A personal fast lap 1.7 seconds off of Brett's. Looks like I had a 3 second time penalty as well, but I don't know any easy way to capture that without screwing up the content or requiring another column (and I just ain't in the mood when I'm a season and a half behind in maintaining this thing). But what happened?

Also, Raikkonen's Fast Lap is not a misprint. It's wrong and impossible, but it's not a misprint--that's what the game showed. Sometimes that seems to happen, as I see posted on Reddit regularly.

Huh. Well, this looks like it was a bit confusing. Lots of multiple-place changes that don't appear to be pit-stop related by non-human cars. Wonder what was going on with Alonso, for instance...or Ocon. Or Giovinazzi. Unusual.

Okay. Now I'm baffled. Brett pitted from softs onto hards, then back onto softs, and then onto another set of hards? The last one makes sense but the first one doesn't...or the second set of softs doesn't. Or both. And I two-stopped and went for hards for 8 laps or so? And Ocon started on the mediums and put on the softs for the last five or so laps, when everyone else made the softs last about 10 laps? Bizarre.

And there was apparently no Safety Car for any of this. I see a problem for (presumably) Brett, and later a bit of a problem or two for me. But what happened here I don't recall and can't even make out from the data listed. PER-HAM-BOT podium and that's about all the information I can provide of meaning.

It's conceivable that there were some reliability issues here; that sounds vaguely familiar, but (as I've come to find out) I'm having an awful lot of those problems with the Haas. I think what I'm seeing is that I gave up on the race while Brett kept on. Usually that shoe is on the other foot. Actually, his data is pretty stable (the lower of the two white lines)...was his driving that consistent, or is it possible the AI was driving for him and I let the race run out without properly retiring. I'm so confused. Wish I could remember this one.

F1 2021, Co-Op, S01, R03, Portugal

As I get older, racing on a new track for the first time is less exciting. Maybe 10-20% of that is due to the catalog of tracks I've raced becoming larger, so it naturally would be less novel to drive in a new place. But I think the rest of it is just getting older and worn down by having to learn new things. What a sad way to be at 34, isn't it?

I will say that I enjoy the idea of the track; very polished surfaced, very sterile, and yet with a fair amount of elevation change and corner variety. That's an unusual thing amongst the resto of the F1 calendar, so I'm glad it's around. And, being a new track, it doesn't seem all that difficult. It will probably be harder in the next edition of the game as more users will have supplied feedback by that time.

Back to back wins for Perez at this point, and Red Bull out to a surprising and comfortable lead for so early in the season. Strange race results here, though--6 sets of teammates finishing consecutively.

I've gotta say, I don't remember this round AT ALL. Obviously Brett had a problem; looks like he started decently enough to get in front of me but it didn't last long a couple of shemozzles (TM David Hobbs) followed by a crash out or some such. I toiled around at the back the rest of the way, it looks like. Not much else happened for anyone else, so far as I can tell, either. Except for Russell, who briefly ran 4th by pitting later than everyone else.

Technically, I guess I don't know for a fact that Brett had the problem: I didn't get a full listing of the results from the game, I only got the top 14 finishers (all that is displayed at a time within the game). The telemetry app I use doesn't distinguish between drivers of a team in the views that I have been pasting here. However, the driving of the lower-place white mark in the above is erratic enough to be confident that it is Brett (not much different than my own green, which as the user with the app, is the only one that is distinguished from its teammate).

Actually, I guess I have two reasons to believe it was Brett. Looks like he started on the medium tyre--British spelling alert!--and then presumably had some wing damage so pitted early for the hard compound. What a drag.

In any event, I had to use these telemetry screenshots to guess at the finishing orders of the last six runners and made up fast lap data (which doesn't matter since we know none of those drivers got Fast Lap).

I think it was at this point we realized we needed to turn the difficulty down a touch, from 85 (!) or so. Probably took it down to 80-82 at this point, even though I knew the next round was going to be tough as well. Better to undercorrect than overcorrect, I guess.

F1 2021, Co-Op, S01, R02, San Marino

San Marino! Hah! What I meant to say was Emilia Romagna. There's a habit I'm unlikely to break, just as I'm unlikely to call the Commanders anything but the Redskins. Big yikes in 2022 but that's where yours truly is living in his old age.

Well, on to business:

Not a great round for either of our human participants. F1 2021 is of course the first appearance of this track for us since 2006's F1 Championship Edition for the PS3, which Brett owned and I borrowed. I'm sure he was a lot more comfortable with the track at that time, and we didn't do much practice for this race as we wanted to save time and figured we could get away with it here more than most other tracks.

Wrong. Something about the default setups at a lot of the tracks in this game make the car unstable on corner exit for me, and I'm guessing for Brett too. After not getting a time set in qualifying, it looks like he didn't get very far either:

The telemetry stops when we're both out of the race, so if there's a double retirement there just isn't as much information to go off of. Looks like Bottas had a terrible start with some contact and had to pit for a wing or something and was working himself back up. Brett ran as high as 17th or so before binning it (if memory serves, at T1) and I didn't carry on much longer. Can't recall if I also wrecked (very possible) or if I decided that I wasn't going to move up enough to make it worth wasting Brett's time (also very possible and something I'm sure we've done at least a couple times so far). I'm guessing that Ricciardo had started the pit cycle when my race ended.

As suspected, Bottas put on some different tires. However, he went for the Medium compound instead of the Hard. I wonder if he was able to run the rest of the race on that set; I could have figured it out in the moment, I suppose, but definitely I wasn't in the mood. What a rotten round.

As for the championship, Perez follows up a rough season debut with a solid win, the first of many for him (you'll see). Norris takes a great 2nd to keep himself at a surprising 3rd in the standings, and Gasly also finishes a nice 7th to make himself the current best of the rest.

F1 2021, Co-Op, Season 1, Round 1, Bahrain

I'm sure you thought I had died. Sometimes I wonder about that myself. To put it mildly, I hate, just absolutely hate, having my time wasted by other people. However, I love, absolutely love, wasting my own time. The people closest to me definitely know this too, but I'm sure if my co-workers (who I hassle when they don't respond to me for weeks at a time) learned this, they would be shocked.

Making a long story short, Brett and I got started on a career save, got maybe 6 races into the first season and then decided to start over.

For one thing, he's rusty at his racing...with a family, he doesn't get as much time to play as I do and so his results were just unbelievably bad (something like 4 DNFs out of the 6 races and one of the finishes was in 18th place or something). It went unsaid, but I'm sure we were both thinking that he would have been replaced by another driver at that point.

For another, the game gives you the option of choosing your teammate. Actually, wait--more accurately, it lets you choose what real-life driver you'll be racing in place of; I had fudged the bucket by misreading the page and thought I was choosing a teammate, so chose Mick Schumacher at Haas...to replace. Leaving me with Mazespin™. That was bad enough, but I think I told Brett what to do (he went through the deal after I'd set it all up, 10 minutes later) and he made the same mistake.

So we took a mulligan, fixed the teammate situation, got a sense of how to handle various screens that operate differently in Co-Op than they do in single-player, felt a bit more comfortable with the chaos that is racing F1, on a controller instead of a wheel, online, with another human also racing on a controller instead of a wheel, and generally have enjoyed the second run-through much more than the first. 

So much so that we're now about halfway through Season 2. And I haven't posted a damn thing about it. In my latest effort to commit myself to blogging/frequent writing for pleasure, I'm going to try to get it all caught up.