F1 2021, Co-Op, S02, R03, Portugal

Ran a few laps in preparation of Portugal. Unfair for Brett but definitely need to make the round play out like more of the others. And, hell, I just needed to be more comfortable around here. The track is pretty smooth in surface but there's a fair amount of elevation and a wide variety of corners, leading to a few that are easy to spin oneself around on exit.

Managed to qualify myself 13th, which seemed like a victory, and then followed up a great start (6th place!) by holding on to 10th, which definitely was a victory! Brett was a little off in qualifying (not having prepared, I'm sure) and then managed to race himself right up behind me by the end.

Looks like Brett ran the alternate strategy pretty well. He probably coudl have made the softs last a bit longer but who knows. Ferrari ran both their cars onto the hards. This better not be a sign of things to come (assuming I get my wish!).

Wish I could see just how close I was getting to the cars in front of me. Looks like I was separating myself from Leclerc but evidently had a time penalty because I finished behind him. But I think I was closing up on Sainz and Bottas--definitely wouldn't have been able to pull away but hanging with them all is still a big win for me.

Brett, meanwhile, pitted at just the right moment--came out just in front of several cars and was moving slowly away from them (being on the softer compound).

F1 2021, Co-Op, S02, R01, Bahrain

On to season 2! We were pretty ticked to have lost ground in the R&D battle, but I suppose it was sort of merited by all the cars we ruined as rookies. Of course, I'm confident the game isn't built to connect those dots, but it works out in a way that's not totally unreasonable.

Well THERE's a finish! First human podium of the career. I felt (and still feel) slightly guilty that we didn't turn up the difficulty even more than we did, because that's just too easy. But a huge sign of encouragement for me in my second season. Brett only finished 9th, but did secure fast lap, so a great day for him too.

Ferrari got the strategy decently right this time around; Schumacher and Gasly were the ones handed a handicap of hard tyres on this day.

It looks like it may have made a difference on this day for Brett because of that fact. He outqualified me and ran right on my tail for the first half dozen laps before a slight spin moved him down and out of the points. Before you ask, no, it wasn't my fault; just a lonely spin, probably at the hairpin if I had to guess. He went for the undercut at this point, and was able to work himself back up past Tsunoda, Bottas and Gasly, and up to Sainz and Schumacher (who was developing a bit of a train after his switch to hards.

I, meanwhile, had been able to hang with one of the Mercedes throughout the first stint, and was able to get them both along with Norris, running second for a lap or two. Norris got by me, but he was unable to get more than a second or two ahead of me. Meanwhile, the hard-shod Mercedes helped me build a bit of a gap to the cars running behind me, and after things sorted themselves out behind me Perez continued to battle Hamilton for 4th, slowing themselves down enough that I was able to maintain the gap until the very end.

Hell of a day.

F1 2021, Co-Op, S02, R02, Emlila Romagna

(Formerly San Marino)

Great day for Brett! Way to bounce back. Sixth and ran pretty damn consistently.

Meanwhile, I trudged around at the back. Beat Dan, at least!

I don't remember anything about this race except for driving around at the back and hunting down Dan and also Carlos having some sort of accident and ending up behind everyone else. I'm not sure if I had an accident or damage or spun or what, but somehow I ended up moving from 13th or so down to last. At least it happened around the predicted time for my pitstop.

Looks like, after that, I was able to run fairly consistent lap times. I wasn't losing much time to anyone, not even the leaders, caught Dan and was catching Russell quickly. That's really my silver lining for the round: even through I threw away a decent result--13h would have been just fine and a huge overachievement for my dog of a Haas, and I don't really expect I could have down it, but maybe 14th or 15th was achievable--I also beat Sainz (my target for season 3) and was about matching Leclerc. Turning heads at Maranello is the key.

Brett, meanwhile, appears to have been running 5th but was demoted a spot due to some corner-cutting penalties or something similar.

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.

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.

...

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.

F1 2021, Co-Op, S01, R16, Abu Dhabi

I promise you that I want to get better at this track. But it's another that I really struggle with. Can't seem to get a good grasp of it. I have done some laps since this race and am at the point where I can keep up with my teammate, I think, but I can't find a way to pull out a gap at all. Actually, I think the track was quite easy back in F1 2010. But hell, that was a long time ago.

One more race and we get down to the nitty gritty of season-end items and contract negotiations, etc. I will have to take a brief break from these race updates to collect all that data, double-check the yearly worksheet to make sure it looks okay, and will have to do some serious work on the wiki pages: they are a big casualty of modifying to make the sheet be only 16 races long but I didn't have the motivation to create fake data to work with so I've been waiting until the first season was over.

Also, I'm going to try to find a way to measure the R&D chart; might just be eyeballing it but I'll try to be as accurate as possible so I can step back and look at some of the outlier performances of the season.

On to Abu Dhabi:

Terrible round for me; I don't think I crashed out or anything, but rather just shut it down. I may have had an engine issue or something too, but wouldn't bet on it. I'm just bad there.

Brett had a great race. Probably his best race of the year. I got to watch the second half from his T-cam and, although he had a big train behind him, he kept composure and didn't let almost anyone by and brought it home jusssssst outside the points.

Elsewhere in the field, Sainz had another nice run to beat out Ricciardo, and Lando increased his gap to Leclerc for P5. McLaren held onto P3 in the WCC, barely, and Tsunoda beat Gasly and scored points for only the third time all season.

Not a good day for me, but a pleasure to see Brett have a solid day (especially since he didn't score any points hah) and very excited to get season 2 underway--actually, the time of writing this, we are up to race 14 of an identical 2022 schedule. But I'm hoping to be less behind my the time season 3 gets going.

F1 2021, Co-Op, S01, R15, Australia

Onward to Australia, a track that I've driven probably a couple thousand miles on over the years. Being a typical season opener for much of that time, I'm sure I just started careers over and over and over. But good golly is it tough!

Hamilton ties up championship #7 in Australia, bouncing back from a rough Brazil to knock Verstappen out once and for all. Mercedes also gets another WCC, having Bottas run with Verstappen all season long. And Sainz gets another podium! Always the bridesmaid so far, but I keep holding out hope for him moving forward.

Looks like I made the wrong tire call again; in this case it appears I had an early off so the call isn't as terrible as usual. But man, both Brett and I were having some big problems here (as well as Mick, who may have gotten together with Brett during this one). The three of us were also running well behind and not making up any ground. Looks like at least I manually retired to move onward--don't know for sure about Brett. Vettel was the first DNF--yay!