F1 2021, Co-Op, Season 2, Preseason

As mentioned in my last post, for season 2 we turned up the difficulty just a tad. We were both shaking the rust off pretty quickly; not of driving the cars quickly, or at least not just that, but also of running in traffic, dealing with the chaos that adding another human driver adds to the experience, etc. So from 75 to 78, haha. We have a bit more data for S2 to change tracks on a race-by-race basis as well, so can make Bahrain more difficult (a necessary change but one we didn't go far enough to fix just yet, as you'll see). If we ever get into decent cars we'll really need to crank it up!

Here's the entry list for season 2. Moved a couple teams around from last season to indicate the WCC standings from 2021, of course, and also added in the new drivers. Mick left me to take an open seat at Mercedes, replacing Bottas (!). I suppose getting a Schumacher into a Mercedes is worth a loss in performance, but hey, at least Mick is better than probably any of the F2 graduates.

Speaking of which, my new teammate is Dan Ticktum. Jesus. Kill me now. The guy is actually pretty poorly rated in the game (much worse than he deserved to be, given what he did in F2 in 2021 in real life). But I guess the choices were Mazepin or Ticktum. I'm not happy. Also, I had to ask Brett to figure out what his car number was because I couldn't find a listing of all the F2 drivers anywhere online.

Bottas took his Mercedes gear and exchanged it for Alpine gear, replacing Alonso, who apparently only unretired for one season. Alonso's retirement doesn't make sense, but Bottas' move there sure does...a factory effort and a pretty damn good shot of crushing his teammate (who somehow finished with 0 points last year).

Everyone else came back to their old seat, I believe.

We talked about changing the schedule for season 2 and decided against it. A decision we regretted before this season was close to over. I don't know why we didn't change it all anymore...I have a vague recollection that I thought it would be nice to have some sense of "normalcy" by not switching anything around. Then again, China becomes an option for S2 (and beyond) and there are a couple tracks we just don't enjoy all that much. However, for those tracks we don't like, I think we had to make ourselves do them a couple times to really be sure. I'm looking at you, COTA...and Brett's looking at you, Suzuka.

You wanna know what grinds my gears? There was one part of the R&D tree (aerodynamics, I think) that was due for regulation changes during the first season. I didn't have that many items unlocked, I don't think, and neither did Brett. We both protected everything comfortably before the end of the season and went back to other improvements, and then this comes out when you start the second season. Somehow, protecting it wasn't good enough to even start catching anyone markedly, let alone surpass them. We go from down a bit and a ways, respectively, on the next cars ahead of us to well behind and WAY behind, respectively.

We both stuck with our teams during the offseason because we didn't think we'd really earned better seats. Which was sort of true...I scored a half dozen points and Brett scored 1, but we tore up so many cars that we figure we may still have lost our teams money overall. But shit, man, I outscored my teammate and he went to fucking Mercedes, still the best car on the grid. Goddamn.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I should be knocking on the midfield door. But I don't think I should be further away than I already was. If there were any teams that would have been switching to the 2022 cars partway through the 2021 season, it would have been Williams and Haas. And both our teams somehow lost ground on the A-Teams (Alpine, Aston Martin, Alfa Romeo and AlphaTauri). That shit really pisses me off. You know how to make someone instantly regret staying? Or how to make them instantly start thinking about going elsewhere for season 3? Look at the chart above.