F1 2021, Co-Op, S01 Postseason

With the season over, I just thought I'd post some stills from my homemade spreadsheet for those who like tallied counting stats. Possibly some of the homemade wikis I made, if I can ever get them fixed again. Maybe even an R&D Performance chart replication as well, though that will take some serious work and time...and I also need to be in the game save with Brett in order to start viewing it.

Very balanced distribution of the wins between the top teams; obviously McLaren wasn't on the level of Mercedes and Red Bull over the season, but they had their days. Given the distribution between the drivers of Merc and RB, though, it's kind of astonishing to look over Perez's season. Four straight wins between rounds 2 and 5 and no more after that. In fact, only one more podium besides that for the rest of the season for Perez (occurring at GB, with half the season still remaining).

Less of an even distribution of the other items; Mercedes was dominant on Saturday, but Ferrari managed two fast laps despite not winning any races, not being on pole and only having 4 podiums over the season. Both of those Ferrari FLs was Leclerc, and they appear to be legitimate (neither unrealistically low lap times, like Raikkonen's, or after changing strategy following a crash).

Relative to last season, there's a much bigger dropoff in points scoring below the top four teams. Gasly did almost all of AT's scoring over the season, but was well adrift of everyone above him. Same for Alonso (except he did all of Alpine's scoring).

Terrible years for Ocon and Giovinazzi, and to a slightly lesser degree Stroll. Not sure how those guys couldn't find their way into the points, especially since the driver update was done by mid-season or so of the real-life 2021 season and given their real-life performances in relation to their teammates.

I'm excited to see a change in reliability from those top four teams for next season. A single retirement for eight drivers over 16 races? I suspect once Brett and I push our way up there we can at least reduce their consistency, but even we aren't responsible for too many DNFs for the AI cars.

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STOP PRESS: Went back to the game a few nights back (as I was able to get in a couple races with Brett), and snapped a bunch of photos of the R&D chart. Took a bunch of time to try to reproduce the chart--close enough for jazz, anyway--so you could see just what happened over the season. Obviously, there are some problems for Brett and I. We were making decent progress for the first half or maybe three quarters of the season, but after that we kind of pooped out. The Aston/Alpha/Alfa/Alpine grouping stayed pretty tight all season, which must have been nice...for them. Merc and Red Bull were tight most of the season (although Merc had the edge most of the way) and Ferrari/McLaren was painfully tight (as borne out in the standings).

As a note to you, and a reminder to me, I believe we used 75 as our baseline difficulty for the season, at least after shaking out the setup we wanted for the year. We ended up making 78 our baseline for season 2, making modifications on a track-by-track basis as needed.