Post 8 * Supporting an F1 Team

There are a few ways you can support fellow managers/team owners at the F1 level in this game.  If you are new, the chances of you being involved in team decisions and such are not really an option at the F1 level.

This is one of the F1 Teams in Season 16.  I like their Livery/paint scheme, so I chose to feature this car in blog 8.

Why would you support a team?

National pride.
Your friend or mentor owns a team.
You like that team for their livery or brand.

What ever your reason, any are just as good as the other.  The team owners would appreciate your support.  I support a team called HammerHedz, as the owner of the team is also a big helper to young drivers and managers in the game.  He is also very patriotic and tries to encourage American drivers often.

The easiest way to get involved is Voter Points.  you can go to the Promote the Game section of the site and choose to vote.  If you go to game ranking sites and vote for MRC every 24 hrs or so, you will get points that you can donate to your team.

In this picture you see a chance for seven points to acquire.  You vote for MRC at each of these sites and you will get one point from each site.

When you build up points, choose the team you want to donate the points to.

Your F1 Team of choice can see you donated to them in date and time stamp format.

Becoming a Driver in F1

If it is your eventual goal to become a driver, you must support a team, and show commitment to an F1 program.  Driver contracts are awarded by team owners.  Some teams are owned by multiple investors and some teams have a dominant investor with a few minor investors as well.  Either way, a season contract offer is the choice of the owners.

At other levels of series it is determined by driver points.  In F1 it is determined simply by; did a F1 Team Owner issue you a season contract or not, and do you want to take it?

Team Research

When you examine F1 Teams you can see tons of data.

Facilities

Research

Suppliers

Money

Sponsors

Employees

Drivers

Fan Club

Those are just a some of the many things you can look into.  Don't shy away from supporting lower ranking teams.  I believe there is a lot of fun and helping an underdog team out perform and grow in the ranks.  Also many reasons can land teams in lower rankings.  Change in ownership, bad luck, a risky gamble on an engine or development type.  All of these things can be corrected and recovered.  Pitch in and help.

I hope you enjoyed learning a little about the F1 Stucture of the game.

Until next time. Happy Racing!

Post 7 * Employees

Employees are an important factor in this game.  They are most important in the fact that they will bankrupt your team if you hire them to early in your career.  Your assistant will help you hire, fire, and locate employees in the employee market.

Hold off on a group of mechanics/pit crew until you are in bigger series.  F3 drivers are developing and need all the money spent on training a driver that you can spend.  With that in mind coaches are valuable early employees.

My advise to young teams is, hire one coach only.  What ever you are going to focus on training first.  Hire one good coach and train that category like crazy.  When his contract is up for renewal, evaluate if you want to train up another area or keep training that category.  If you want to keep at it, renew his contract and keep at it.  If you want to train another category, let him go and hire another coach.  Paying multiple coaches at a time is a waste as you can only use one coach at a time in  your training focus.

Public relations managers do get you better sponsor deals.  These guys are worth hiring when you need sponsors.  Get three sponsors for 9 weeks, and let him go.  You have 9 weeks of good income now, and don't need another PR guy until the end of those contracts.  Latter in your career you may keep one employed full time, but early on, it takes to much money away from driver extra training.

Race engineers help young drivers.  If you want to dial in setups faster, a good race engineer can help.  Americans call the lead race engineer a Crew Chief.  This game calls them Race Engineers.  That is a good thing to know as you look for getting a guy that can help your team set up a car for competition runs.

As you grow into bigger race series, mechanics do make a difference.  Two to four seconds advantage per pit stop can be gained by having a better pit crew/mechanics.  I am running in the NASC Gold Cup Stock Car Series this year.  In a 500 lap race, we sometimes pit stop four to five times.  With my crew getting my driver out sometimes four seconds faster per stop, that is a twenty second advantage at the end of the race.  My driver can place a few spots higher per finished race based on mechanics and crew.  Sometimes I can look at the end of race results and see five or six finishing positions within a five second window.  Those mechanics make that difference.

Here is a look at my current employees to prove, I practice what I am typing here.  These employees will change out from time to time, but you can see a few things.

I currently have no PR Manager.  I am training driver skills as I have a driver coach at the moment.  I have a Race Engineer/Crew Chief and I have a pit crew or team of mechanics.  This team will change as contracts expire I try to replace with better, less expensive, or equal employees as I adjust budgets and continue training expenses.

I hope that helped.

As always, until next time. Happy racing!