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 It went unsaid, but I'm sure we were both thinking that he would have been replaced by another driver at that point.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.

Here is our entry list for Season 1. If it wasn't stated clearly enough in a post five or six months ago, I'm taking the challenge of starting with Haas and Brett is starting with the next-slowest team on the grid, Williams. We wanted names that had audio available and so went with the best approximate matches that were listed. Not terribly happy with the results, but que sera sera.

And here are our race results. We did the "short qualifying" sessions to save a considerable amount of time and stress. The 10th place finish for me in my debut race is a great omen, albeit a little unrealistic; Bahrain is very easy compared to most other tracks in the game. Brett unfortunately spun and DNF'd; I don't recall much about where or how but my guess would be spinning on exit of the infield hairpin.

As I think I've mentioned, I do have access to an open-source telemetry program that produces a bunch of great information and is compatible with the Codies F1 series. I haven't been able to get it working just how I want it to, resulting in the program using 2020's graphic colors for the cars (resulting in yellow for the old Renault, now Alpine) and white for Williams (which was stupidly changed to blue for 2021). All this means that the result is hard to read for someone who isn't invested, but for me, I can see that Brett lost it somewhere on lap 6:

We've also got a tire chart for the race. In this case, it looks like the strategy was pretty similar across the field--no hard tires involved and no obvious two stop strategies and no exploitation of the stupid AI when it comes to stopping under SC for fresh softs or something like that:

Lastly, maybe my favorite looking chart shows approximate gaps between cars. There are several charts showing gaps in different ways. Most of them are neat to look at, but you have to reconfigure it differently for every track to really get full use of the screen, and I'm not that interested:

What this one tells me for Bahrain is that there was a spin for one of the AlphaTauris (the royal blue in these charts) and that a Safety Car was deployed a few laps later, probably for whatever happened with Brett. All the field scrunches up in the laps after that, and then start to open up again for the last 6 laps (we're running at 25% race length because we definitely wouldn't last a full race distance without flashbacks).

At this point I don't remember much about what happened in the race. It's been almost four months at this point, though. If I can manage to keep working my way up to present day it will become clearer.