Chapters 1-6: Basic informational breakdown of how mechanics work and interact, there is minimal guidance or direct instructions on how to optimize your play. If you are concerned about making the game too easy, these sections will not interfere with that, but it will finish with a basic roundup of how to make the game more fair or challenging.
Chapters 7-?: Advanced guide with optimization tips and strategies. There is no singular simple winning pathway this year, however these chapters may interfere with your enjoyment of the game and figuring out a solid playstyle for yourself, read with caution.

Welcome to the 2023 version of the F1 Manager car guide. If you're familiar with the F1M22 guide and mechanics, much of the underlying systems still generally work the same way. However, there are some major major changes to be aware of. You may want to read the more detailed sections to understand the full scope of what these changes mean, but if you just want to know the basics and work it out from there, here you go.

• You start with all 4 design/research slots open right from the start, upgrading Design Center will not unlock more. You get more engineers and extra facilities bonuses to parts though
  
• Costs have been adjusted upwards significantly, cost cap is a concern
  
• Times for doing design and research have been adjusted, everything sits between 30-45 days before engineer counts and rapid design. Sliders do not effect this anymore
  
• Parts now have durability, and you will be constantly making parts through the year, again consider your cost cap
  
• Slider positions now make minimal difference towards expertise gain when used in Design, all stats will gain at nearly the daily rate regardless of how you set them (Intense is still 1.5x the daily gain for everything)
  
• Using Sliders in research now adjusts your research gains with a new formula, moving sliders right is +10%, moving them left is -50% from center positions, this is before any added bonuses from how you position sliders in relation to each other
  
• The additive bonus as I called it from slider positions in design is now MUCH more powerful in both adding stats and subtracting them, moreso even than the initial numbers were last year at launch. It becomes weaker at higher stat start points
  
• Stats now are interconnected more and balanced between the parts. So a godly floor and bad other parts may have less overall performance than an ok floor and ok supporting parts
  
• Not directly design related, but tire heating and engine durability are significantly more impactful
  
• DRS Top Speed/Accel were merged into "DRS Delta %"
  
• The Dirty Air Cornering values were merged into "Dirty Air Tolerance %"
  
• Nearly all the detailed information that comprised what goes into a parts stat has been collapsed and obfuscated into a single "Expertise and Facilities" line, note this includes staff bonuses and CFD/WT
  
• CFD/WT hours when used will add directly to your expertise/research gain at the daily expertise gain rate times the number of units spent. So 100 units=+100 days of expertise, this applies to BOTH design and research

If you wish to just get the cliff notes of what's important in each chapter, you can skip to the chapter notes.

This will be a quick rundown of the overall car performance values and what they do/mean, the parts of the car and what stats each uses, and what each of those stats effects

Simple breakdown of the categories

• Velocity: These are critical to be able to complete a pass, especially in rain races without DRS
  
• Cornering: This is the primary factor of your laptime pace
  
• Cooling: This determines your flexibility in strategy options (more cooling=more flexibility)

• Top Speed: Max speed your car can achieve. Like last year, the max range on this is only about 15 kph from slowest possible to fastest possible. Can be very important for getting passes done on straights
  
• Acceleration: How quickly you can get to that max speed. This has very small margins and can generally be ignored. Half of this stat is determined by your engine choice, but all engines are fine
  
• DRS Effectiveness: Determines the increase in speed and acceleration you can get when deploying DRS as a multiplier to your top speed and acceleration (high %, higher multiplier). This isn't vital to success, but if it's too low your DRS is useless and passing will be harder
  
• Low/Medium/High Speed Cornering: Each track has a map that identifies the corners and which category they fall into, the better your stats in the relevant field, the faster you are able to get through the corner and the more speed you can carry out of it. These stats are king of the pile and you should note which ones are marked as Recommended or Crucial for each race so you bring the right parts and upgrades
  
• Dirty Air Tolerance: A multiplier that applies to the relevant cornering stat when you are following another car through a corner (within 1 second, closer has more effect on your possible speed). The better this is, the less speed you will lose. This can be ignored or important depending how much you find yourself racing other cars
  
• Brake Cooling: While this says Brake Cooling, and it obviously keeps the brakes cool, what you want this for is to keep your tire temps under control. Depending on your typical race strategy, this can be incredibly useful for being able to push tires more without overheating them, or using softer compounds without having to micromanage their temps as much.
  
• Engine Cooling: This controls the durability loss of your powertrain components (Engine, ERS, Gearbox). The better this is, the slower they will degrade, and the more races you can do with them without needing to purchase extras. Putting attention into this is a tradeoff between not taking penalties/avoiding spending cost cap on expensive parts and being able to put more attention into items that directly increase your race pace
  
• Total Extra Weight: Each of your parts will add weight to the car depending how you tweak their durability, less weight means a faster, more nimble car and will improve stats across the board.

• Chassis: The skeleton of the car that all the other parts bolt onto. Controls cooling and high speed cornering
  
• Front Wing: The wall seeking device on the front. Controls general cornering ability and cooling
  
• Rear Wing: The big boy on the back. Controls your speed/DRS and dirty air
  
• Sidepods: The big intakes along the sides (except Mercedes). Controls cooling and some high speed cornering
  
• Underfloor: The underside of the car and lynchpin of the current F1 design. Controls general cornering and is the most important piece to keep competitive
  
• Suspension: The big arms holding the tires on. Controls cooling and low speed cornering

What each stat effects in terms of the Car Performance table

Velocity

• Drag Reduction: Increases Max Speed and Acceleration
  
• DRS Delta: Increases DRS Effectiveness

Downforce

• Low Speed: Increases Low Speed Cornering
  
• Medium Speed: Increases Medium Speed Cornering
  
• High Speed: Increases High Speed Cornering

Airflow

• Airflow Sensitivity: Increases Dirty Air Tolerance
  
• Airflow Front: Increases Low Speed cornering and slightly benefits Medium Speed Cornering
  
• Airflow Middle: Increases High Speed cornering and slightly benefits Medium Speed Cornering

Cooling

• Brake Cooling: Improves Brake/Tire Cooling
  
• Engine Cooling: Improves Engine Cooling

Durability

• Minimum Lifespan: Effects Total Extra Weight impacting Acceleration and Cornering and part longevity*

*Part durability is a new feature to parts in F1M23. Parts now have a minimum and maximum distance they can go. How this works in practice is that when you equip a part to a car, you can run the minimum distance listed through practice, qual, sprints, and races without any risk or penalty. There is no loss of pace as a part degrades, a part at 1% will be just as fast as that same part at 100%. Once a part hits the minimum distance, there becomes a chance that FIA scrutineering deems the part out of spec and confiscates the part. As you go beyond the minimum distance, the chance increases, until you hit maximum and will need to replace the part. This will not harm you or fail midrace, nor will having a part taken result in additional penalty besides having to put a new part from your stockpile on "early".

The below is how long each part takes to design or research and the base cost to do so. Note time can be adjusted due to Sponsor obligations or events

Research only has one mode to operate in. Design work can be done in 3 modes:

• Normal: Default cost and time
  
• Rushed: Completes 50% faster (30 days down to 20) and 50% more cost (1 mil to 1.5 mil)
  
• Intense: Default time, 200% more cost (1 mil to 3 mil), will provide bonus expertise (later section)

You can also assign 1-6 engineers to a task in order to complete it faster for both design and research, each additional engineer will increase the rate of completion by 10% (1 engineer=10% faster, 5=50%)

• Your most important and impactful parts to pure pace are, in order: Underfloor, Front Wing, Rear Wing
  
• Sidepods, Suspension, and Chassis are not vital to keep competitive, but should not be ignored as they control your cooling and give you options for strategy
  
• The most important part/car stats for pure pace are the Downforce/Cornering ones of Low, Medium, and High speed, and Airflow Front and Middle
  
• Speed stats are important for difficult to pass tracks so you can get alongside before entering a corner and using your corner stats to get past and pull away
  
• Cooling will help you manage your tires and engine parts, which can allow for more flexibility in strategy choice
  
• If your DRS is too low rated, it will basically be useless and make passing difficult to impossible
  
• Costs are very high this year and time to develop is lower, WATCH YOUR COST CAP, it is very easy to overspend if you do not plan

Now that we have know what all the parts and stats are and what they mean, lets get into where all these wild numbers are coming from. I will not cover the exact math that combines and converts the various part stats into the actual car performance stats (I know some of you cheered), as the specifics get complicated and also FD have obfuscated things to a large extent this year compared to last.

For Car Performance stats, the relevant Part Stats are taken and calculated together to determine your final Car Performance stat you will receive. So if you have 51% brake cooling on your front wing, and 49% brake cooling on your suspension, your Car Performance will show 50% on brake cooling.

There is some extra math as the same stat on different parts is weighted differently however. As seen for brake cooling below, getting +25% on the front wing brake cooling only increases car performance brake cooling by 10%, while getting +25% on brake cooling with the suspension increases the value by 15%

---

Here is a look at how each part contributes to car performance with equal increases
Every part has it's role to play. If you need speed, increasing your drag reduction on the rear wing will give more than doing the same increase on the chassis, underfloor will give you the best cornering, sidepods and suspension will give you cooling. The downforce some parts give might not look so good here, but it adds up!

Now lets take a look at where the numbers for the parts are coming from. Unfortunately compared to last year, this has been rather obfuscated and combined together, but we'll get through this.

Each stat has a base value when you look at the info page for it that states "Expertise and Facilities". This is a consolidated field that accounts for the following

• Expertise: We will go into this in way too much depth later, but this makes the vast bulk of your final stat result. Up to +80% of a stat comes from this
  
• Facilities: Various facilities under Car Development Facilities will provide extra points to different parts and stats. For example, the Car Part Test Centre will add 2% per level for brake cooling on the front wing, 2% per level for engine cooling on Sidepods and Chassis, and 1% per level towards drag reduction and DRS delta for Rear Wing. Up to +5-10% comes from this
  
• Staff:Your Technical Chief will provide a bonus to stats based on their performance ratings on a per part basis, while your Head of Aerodynamics will provide bonuses based on their rating in the relevant stat category. Each staff member can provide +5% for a possible total of +10%
  
• CFD/Wind Tunnel: If you apply any of your testing hours into a part, this also gets added directly to this growing pile of numbers being added up. The more you upgrade your WT and CFD buildings, the more gain each unit will provide.

The rest of the items listed above all tie into the focus sliders in step 2 of design which we will cover later.

Research stat info this year is a little more strange and even more obfuscated than design is. Lets take a look.

I'm suspecting something is not displaying properly here, but functionally it is working as I expect. There are only two fields I have been able to see display any numbers at all

• Car Part Expertise Reduction: This will show you by what % your current expertise level will be reduced at the start of next year. This is NOT how much you will lose as an absolute value, so for this -30% shown, if I had 50% expertise rating, then at the end of year I would lose 15% from that.
  
• Research Benefit: Unlike last year, this does NOT show your cumulative research effort if you have researched this part already for the year. This is showing how much gain this research run is going to gain you as you adjust settings. The value displayed here will be added into the relevant expertise stat at the end of the year after regulation penalty is applied.
  
• If you want to see the actual amount of expertise a regulation hit is going to remove from your stats, and/or the amount of Research Benefit you have already accrued, you need to go to Board>Rules and Regulation>Technical and you can see each part and stat in there.

So where is that 39.56 displayed number coming from then? The calculations are hidden from the player here, but this is what it is doing in the background:
So as you do research, the "base" number you are working from will continue to go upwards, but you'll have to go to a completely different menu to keep track of how and where you've researched.

Depending on your design decisions, it might sometimes initially appear a new design is losing stats when you open it up. Your base stats cannot go down through the year, they (Expertise and Facilities) will only increase. It will look like some stats go down sometimes, but the +/- differences shown are comparing to the previous part including sliders and weight reductions. If you set the same slider positions and weight as the previous part, then you'll only see increases.

• Parts are given different weights for each of their stats for how much they effect car performance, so for example a 5% gain in Drag Reduction on a Rear Wing is going to give you more Top Speed gain than a 5% gain in DR on your suspension
  
• There's a spreadsheet image above that shows how effective each part can be towards various car performance stats
  
• While a lot of information is not broken down in detail like last year, the underlying mechanics of how your baseline stats are calculated is still identical
  
• Research is incredibly obfuscated, but at most simple, the number you see next to each stat for each part is what your car will start the year with if you don't do any further research on it
  
• Car Part Expertise Reduction just shows the regulation hit, not the actual amount of stats you are going to lose
  
• Research Benefit only shows the current research task you are performing, it is not cumulative like last year
  
• These two items can be found in Board>Rules and Regulation>Technical

Expertise gets it's own chapter for a basic breakdown, it's very important to understand and is the vital element that determines your cars performance. There are a few ways to improve it and making it bigger has been radically altered since last year.

Design and Research both will grow your expertise, though the methods each uses are different from each other. For Design, the growth is a side effect of creating new parts, while Research is directly benefiting it.

As we pointed out in the stats chapter above, Expertise factors into everything to do with your car development. What I haven't explained yet is that Expertise value is different for every single stat on every single part.

This means that your expertise value for Drag Reduction on your Rear Wing and the expertise value of Airflow Sensitivity of Rear Wing are not the same number. Similarly, the Drag Reduction of your Sidepods is a separate number from the one on the Rear Wing. They all increase and decrease independently from each other. So if you boost your expertise on the Rear Wing's drag, it will not benefit the value for any other Rear Wing stat, nor Drag reduction for any other part.

Every time you put a part into the designer, you will gain some expertise on a daily basis. The daily is important, because what that means is the longer a part is being worked on, the more expertise you will gain overall. If you work on a Front Wing for the base 45 days with a single engineer, and compare it to a Front Wing on Rushed design with 6 engineers at 20 days, you will get a bit over double the total expertise gain on the part with just 1 engineer working on it.

IMPORTANT CHANGE FROM LAST YEAR: Focus sliders make minimal difference to your daily expertise gain. At the most extreme of putting 5 sliders left and 1 slider right, you will only gain about 1.3x the daily expertise for that slider right, and .9x for the ones to the left

The approach mode you use is also important. The Tooltips explain the effect each mode has on your expertise gain.

• Normal will give the baseline, default daily gains, default total gains
  
• Rushed will complete faster, default daily gains, lower total gains (because fewer days)
  
• Intense will boost expertise gain, 1.5x daily gains, higher total gains as normal (same days, but higher multiplier) This multiplier will stack onto what you get from slider positions

There are diminishing returns here, so as you increase your total expertise the daily gains will decrease. The calculation of diminishing is also run daily, so if you do one normal 40 day job on a part, the gain will be the same as doing 2 rushed 20 day jobs on the same part starting from the same expertise. Intense mode simply multiplies the daily factor by 1.5x, but because that means each day has a higher expertise value, it means the diminishing returns kick in faster so 40 days on intense design is not quite 1.5x what the gain would be of 40 days of normal design, but will be ~1.489x

The calculation for these daily gains appears unchanged from last year, where expertise is a % value between 0 and 100%
Here's what 2 years of design work growth would look like if your expertise value was starting at 30% with normal vs intense mode
You can see in the first 100 days, the growth is pretty good and normal has gained 6.6% while Intense has gained 9.67%, but as your expertise gets to very high levels the last hundred days only gain 3.55% for normal and 3.8% for intense. So it works to prevent the best teams from continuing to press their advantage and grow out of control. Teams like Williams, Alfa, and AT with very low expertise are getting much larger gains out of putting a part into design than Red Bull or Ferrari at the start of a career.

Research is much more straightforward. As stated before, the purpose of research is to directly increase your expertise levels, while last year this was purely to offset regulation impacts, this year research is the primary method to control your expertise progress directly in addition to regulation offsetting.

First we'll talk a little about regulation impacts. Each year there will be regulations that will remove anywhere from 0%-60% of your expertise in a given part and stat. This deduction will be taken from your current expertise value at the end of the year. So if you have a 10% regulation hit to Drag Reduction on your sidepods, and your expertise is at 40%, then you will lose 4% when the year ends and start at 36%. If you do more design work before the year ends and bring that up to 42%, then you will lose 4.2% instead and end at 37.8%.

The values you add via research are added after this reduction is applied. So if you had 40% expertise and you did 2% research, then when end of year hits, you will only lose that 4%, but then you will add 2% and start the next year at 38%. This is important to keep in mind because every bit of gain you get from doing designs in a year will be deducted and ultimately lessened in effectiveness, while none of your research in the current year will.

Research also works off of daily gains that will invoke diminishing returns as you do more and more. Because research has no additional mode types, there is no "intense" method of research that changes those daily gains. The only simple adjustment is adding more or fewer engineers, which as before means that the overall benefit of a research run can be reduced if you make it complete faster.

The daily gains in research however are based on the post-regulation expertise values. Because of the diminishing returns, this means research on something regulation impacting will give more stat gain than a normal design of the same part. If you had a part at 60% and a 30% regulation hit, doing a design would gain about 2.5%, while doing research would gain about 3.5%

The focus sliders here are what you will use to control what stats you want to put the most effort into. If you already have godly drag reduction expertise, you may not want to keep feeding more attention into it. With research, you can adjust sliders to put more gains into another stat that is lacking and in need of improvement and lower your focus on drag reduction gains. This is only a basic explanation of the focus system and there will be a chapter devoted to it later.

Low, Medium, High Speed downforce on parts is an oddball from the others, as it uses kN rather than % to represent the rating. In the background it's still working precisely like the other stats though, we just have to work a little harder to get the actual %.

• Low Speed is a range between 3 and 5 kN. Every .01kN is .5%, so if you have 3.87 kN rating, that is equal to 43.5%, if the screen says you are gaining .7kN, then you are gaining 3.5%.
  
• Medium Speed is between 5 and 7kN with the same .01kN being .5%. Meaning 6.15 kN is equivalent to 57.5%
  
• High Speed is 7 to 8 kN so each .01kN is 1%, it's far easier to read as you just ignore the 7 and treat the trailing numbers as the %, so 7.45 is 45%

Annoyingly, this means the granularity which you can compare your gains in these stats is not very great. Especially with High Speed, if it says you are gaining ".02kN", you might be gaining 1.51% or you might be gaining 2.49%

We've gone over how Expertise can be raised and reduced, but to put a flow and understanding to how the game tracks it, you can think of every stat on every part having 3 "types" of expertise

• Current Expertise: This is the value used when a new car part is designed
  
• Regulation Expertise: This is a negative multiplier on Current Expertise
  
• Research Expertise: This is the value from your work in research

Let's follow the various numbers from the start of a Career through to Year 2 with examples.

• Expertise is the most important value for progression
  
• Every individual stat for every individual part has it's own Expertise value, they do not relate to each other
  
• Expertise is gained at a daily rate, the faster you complete a job, the less total expertise you will gain from it
  
• This means assigning 1 engineer to all tasks is the most efficient expenditure of money for expertise gain
  
• Design will increase all stats at nearly the regular daily rate (1.5x for intense) regardless of focus slider settings
  
• There is diminishing returns to the daily gains, so as your expertise goes up, the effectiveness of growing it goes down
  
• Regulation impacts take your current expertise at the end of the year and reduce it by the stated %
  
• Research benefits are added after this reduction and are not affected by it
  
• Research is the primary way to control specifically where you are allocating expertise gains via slider focuses

For returning readers from last year with concerns, these chapters are just an explainer of how the mechanics work. This will not tell you how to dominate the field, though the AI does do a better job of keeping up through the years.

Delicious burgers that it's easy to eat too many of. But in game they are these things


Just upfront to get it out of the way, the durability slider lives in it's own little world. Moving it around will change how long a part lasts, and how much weight it adds to the car, which can effect the other car performance stats as we covered before. In terms of its relation to the part stats, it's entirely independent and moving it will not impact those values, nor will moving the part stats sliders impact the durability/weight. Going forward when I talk about moving "all/other sliders" around, I am never including durability in this.

As you move sliders around, they will impact the final stat total for all stats, either increasing them or reducing them. Let's move Drag Reduction right, Engine Cooling left, and leave Airflow Middle in the middle and see what each stat does

As you can see, each are getting their base increase from expertise gains, but moving the sliders has changed the Design Focus values and final stat value for each field. For all three stats, the Airflow Middle line is having 0 impact because we did not move it at all. We put less focus into the Engine Cooling and what that has done is applied a penalty to the Engine Cooling stat, while adding a bonus to the other two stats. The inverse has happened with Drag Reduction, putting more focus on it has provided a bonus to Drag Reduction at the expense of reducing Cooling and Airflow.

First thing to note is that these benefits are specific to this part you are designing. If you do a part design with a huge boost to your drag reduction, the next design you do of the same part will not have that bonus. The base it will work from is the same set of staff, facilities, and now slightly increased expertise that the initial part was working from. If you want to get the increased drag reduction on the new part, you'll need to adjust the sliders again.

The second thing to note is that moving the sliders has a BIG impact on the resulting values. Every track has different recommended and crucial performance values. Monoco will reward better low speed cornering ability, while Monza wants top speed and high speed cornering. So what you can do with the slider settings is create a variety of parts tailored to specific track styles if you wish.

Alternatively, if you have more cooling stats than you believe you need, but other stats are suffering, you can effectively reassign your stat allocations for your parts by stealing from one stat to provide to another.

There are also slider presets, so if you are concerned you may be taking advantage of the AI with custom slider settings, you can simply select a focus preset that aligns with what your aim is with a part design. The AI does not use custom slider settings, but they absolutely will use Presets.

• Durability is a unicorn and it's final value has nothing to do with any other sliders but it's own
  
• Sliders you move left will penalize the final value of that stat, while boosting every other stat
  
• Sliders you move right will boost that stat, while penalizing every other stat
  
• The stat adjustments from moving sliders is specific to each part, they don't carry from one to another
  
• Moving sliders has no impact on cost or time to complete as it did last year, and only minimal on expertise gain
  
• Moving all sliders to the right will result in the boosts and penalties entirely negating each other, you may as well just leave them in the middle. Same with moving them all to the left
  
• The effect is very powerful and making track specific parts is a viable approach this year

For the most part, Research sliders work identically to design sliders. The main differences are that the adjustments are significantly smaller and that there is an effect from moving all sliders at the same time. Also you can't see the particular breakdown of how much moving one slider increases/decreases the gain on another stat.

First lets take a look at some simple slider placement examples




We see that moving all sliders to the right results in all increases going up by about 10%, while moving them to the left results in a nearly 50% decrease. So obviously, you want to just always put the research to the right, don't you? Well no, because remember this is feeding your expertise gain, and this is the best method to control where those increases are going, and regulation hits are rarely equal across the board. If you are taking a huge hit to your Airflow values, you're going to need to put more attention into those numbers to offset the impact that will have.

Now lets go through some different slider settings to see how the values deviate when we don't keep everything at the same setting.

Ok, that's a lot of numbers to look at and try to understand. Don't worry, we'll break it down into easy chunks. To start with, let us presume the middle slider settings from before as the baseline gains, and that we are trying to pump up our Drag Reduction.

In the top left, we put all focus into the Drag Reduction and removed all focus from the rest. The results are that Drag gains are now at 240% of their previous value, while the other stats are now 30% of what they were before. Overall in total this is 75% of the gains we saw with everything in the middle (6.7% vs 8.76%), so a pretty significant hit overall, but also a significant gain in the one stat we were trying to pump.

In the top right, we left everything in the middle except for Drag Reduction. This only results in small increase of 40%, but every other stat only falling to 90% of the baseline. 8.81% in total gains is about equal to the baseline of 8.76%. So all around, very mild adjustments.

In the bottom left, we retained slider "balance", one stat right, one stat left. Now we get a 65% increase for drag reduction, while cooling falls to 20%, and the Airflow stats are getting a tiny 5% increase. Our total gains of 8.26% only lose 5%

In the bottom right, we use a focus preset that puts 3 items right and 1 to the left. Now our drag is back to only a 30% increase, but our Airflow stats are also now up 30%. Cooling meanwhile has plummeted down to 15% of it's baseline. Our total gains at 8.87% is higher than baseline.

In broad strokes, moving a slider to the left of center will cause a larger reduction than the gains from moving a slider to the right. However, if you move no sliders to the left at all, then the effect is incredibly marginal on a stat you do want to improve. So you will have to balance overall expertise growth with your specific stat needs and the impact of regulations.

• Research sliders are much smaller impact than Design sliders are, you will not get double digit improvements here
  
• Moving sliders right gives a 10% bonus to base. Moving them left gives a 50% penalty
  
• Setting slider ratio and creating focus on certain part stats is the best method to control your expertise distribution
  
• Keeping your sliders "balanced" by moving equal amounts left and right will only have moderate impact on your total gains, but also only provide moderate impact towards stats you are focusing on
  
• Not moving any sliders to the left will only provide minor help towards the one(s) you move to the right

Welcome to the final chapter of the basic guide to design and research! Now we'll take a look at the last piece of the puzzle for your cars progression, CFD MAU hours and Wind Tunnel Hours
These are a special sort of "resource" you will receive in 6 ATR periods a year at that you can apply to either design or Research. The further up the field you finish in the previous year, the fewer of each you will receive in each period. This resource has two effects when used, one applies to both design and research, the other only to design.

There are two buildings in your Facilities related to this resource, the CFD simulator and the Wind Tunnel. Upgrading these will not change the amount of hours you get for either, but will adjust how effective they are for design. They do not benefit research in any way.

• Wind Tunnel: Provides a bonus to Airflow Front/Middle, Downforce, Drag Reduction, and DRS Delta
  
• CFD Simulator: Provides a bonus to Airflow Front/Middle/Sensitivity, Downforce, Drag Reduction, and DRS Delta

As you can see, they both cover mostly the same ground. Note the "effects gained" listed under each building is per unit spent. Which means .1 hour for CFD and 1 hour for Wind tunnel, so for 1 hour of CFD testing, you want to multiply those values by 10.

This benefit of CFD/WT only applies to design

When you apply CFD and WT hours in design mode, you are directly adding stats to the part you are making. Just like with focus and design, these stats are only applicable to the part you are presently designing, they will not carry to the next one. Unfortunately, this is another item rolled into "Expertise and Facilities", but you can see the difference between the design on left with no hours spent, and the one on the right

To reiterate, this bonus is additive, which means regardless of whether you have an airflow sensitivity of 60%, or one of 30%, you will get the same flat % bonus with the same number of hours and same level of facility upgrades. If you have a high level facility and/or your expertise values are so high that new designs/research are not providing much improvement, this can be a bit of a boon when applied to your 3 core parts (floor, front wing, rear wing)

And now for something entirely different! To start with, your facility level means absolutely nothing for this effect. A level 1 facility that has been neglected for 20 years (The Williams real world experience) will provide the same benefit as a fully working level 5 facility.

The 2nd effect using CFD/WT hours on a part has, is that every unit spent will add 1 day of expertise gain to a part's stats. Meaning, if you put a part in design for 40 days, you would gain the 40 days of expertise gain as normal, but you would also gain 100 additional days of expertise on completion for 140 days of progress on all stats.

The same effect is true for research. But recall that slider positions in research change each stat's gains. This effect also extends to applying CFD/WT hours. So if you did a 40 day research and moved sliders so one stat was getting 140% of daily gains, and the others 90%, then applied 100 units of CFD/WT, you would be getting 140 days of progress as before, but the one stat would gain at 140% the regular rate for all those 140 days, and the others at 90%.

Lets do some examples in a chart. If I have A set of sidepods that start with the given %s, and put them into design for 20 days, here is the difference between what the 2nd designs will gain in expertise with and without CFD/WT
Adding 100 units effectively made the 20 days into 120 days. It doesn't sextuple our % gain of course because of diminishing returns, but if you did the 20 days run 6 times in a row, you would end with the same stat growth.

And for Research we will do the same kind of test. Sidepods, in research for 35 days, with and without 70 units of CFD/WT added. But for this one, we will move the Drag Reduction slider to the right, and Cooling to the left.
We effectively tripled the number of days progress from 35 to 105, and the numbers all essentially tripled in value, similar to before.

This is all up to your progression, and your situation. There are positives and negatives to any approach. You can spread the hours around to all your parts, or spend an entire ATR allocation all in one place. You can put it all into research, or all into design, or a mix of both. What is "best" for you won't be best for someone else, but some general advice

• Using them in design allows you to "double dip" as it were. You will gain the facility bonus stats to a part, and the higher your facility is, the higher the benefit will be. And on top of that you will gain extra expertise towards the next part you make
  
• The next part you make is key there, the second benefit of expertise gain will not be realized until you either do another design of the same type, or the new year begins
  
• Remember that regulation hits will apply to your current expertise, and that is what will be gained when you put the hours into design, so if there are big regulation hits, you might lose a significant portion of that progress using those hours in design!
  
• While research does not provide immediate results, I remind you it is the best place you can control how each stat is growing with sliders, so if there are big regulation hits to particular stats, you can use hours to entirely negate them. Or if you are very weak in a particular stat, you can gain up to 2 YEARS of daily gain on it in one single research.

Because of how the UI/information is portrayed to you, it can be confusing to understand the numbers the game is showing you when you use CFD/WT hours on a design and then when you go to make a 2nd design, so we'll go through it and hopefully it will make more sense.

Lets take a Chassis and leave all sliders in the middle

We are getting 1.55%, 1.7% and 1.63% right now purely from our current expertise being higher than what our currently fitted part has. This puts the final stats for the part at 58.51%, 55.94%, and 56.20%

We are going to put this part in with Rushed approach and 6 engineers, so it only takes 14 days. Then emergency manufacture the part so we can fit it to the car immediately. Then we will begin another Chassis design.

Now we see this design is going to be .7%, .78% and .74% improved on the one we just made. If we did not produce the new part and put it on, the values under "1" would be the same as the previous image, and it would show gains of 2.25%, 2.48%, and 2.27%, so just be aware it's comparing your CURRENTLY FIT part to the new design. But these values in this image are purely from natural expertise gain from 14 days of design, most designs you will see marginal improvements like this

Now lets do the same thing, but applying CFD/WT hours to our first design.
This time, because of the hours applied, we are getting 3.37% to Drag and 3.45% to Airflow, but Cooling remains at 1.7%, as neither set of hours apply any additive bonus to the part. Doing the math, that means that our CFD and WT hours are adding 1.82% to Drag and Airflow on top of the previous numbers from the very first image, keep this value in mind.

Now lets run it for the same 14 days, E-manufacture it, and do another design.

Now, this might look a little strange. Why are Drag and Airflow showing 4.7% and 5.08%, but Cooling is now 7.27% improved? I told you to keep that 1.82% value that CFD/WT added in mind. The Part you have equipped has that value added on top of it that is NOT carried over to this part.

What this new part is showing for final stats is based 100% on your expertise, staff, and facilities. So to get the true expertise gain you just received, you need to ADD that 1.82% value to both the Drag and Airflow positive values here. That makes them 6.52% and 6.9%, which is much more in line with the 7.27% for cooling. If you want to know how much bonus expertise we just gained by using CFD and WT hours, then you can subtract the .7%, .78%, and .74% that we gained from the part with no hours used from the 6.52%, 7.27%, and 6.9% and see that we gained an extra 5.82%, 6.49%, and 6.16%.

• You receive a set batch of hours about every 2 months in 6 ATR periods, if you don't use them, you lose them!
  
• You can only use the 1st ATR period in Design
  
• CFD/WT hours have two benefits, one which will improve parts by a flat % based on your facility upgrades when used in design, and one which will directly increase your expertise by 1 day per unit spent
  
• The flat % benefit does not carry to future parts
  
• Your facility level has 0 effect on the expertise gain benefit, Level 1 is the same as Level 5
  
• When used, the daily gains benefit will be multiplied by the same factor as your base gains based on slider settings
  
• Red Bull career begins with ATR penalty for cost cap infringement, but this is not a punishment you will see in any other year on any team, it's fines only if you break the cap

The following chapters will go into far more depth on why you should follow one of these approaches, but one of the major issues from last year has remained this time around. Once you have your feet under you, you will quickly find the AI between you and the ground in a long play. To avoid this, there are a couple approaches you could follow to retain a long term challenge and keep things interesting.

• Do not poach from other teams, only take those with expired contracts
  
• Don't just grab all the best drivers and staff, and if you develop your own to become the top, let them go when contract ends
  
• Minimize the amount of optional and bonus incentives you are accepting (race incentives and sponsor obligations)
  
• Only use slider presets
  
• Either do not weight strip at all, or only strip at most a total of 15kg
  
• Use only 5 ATR periods, only use all 6 if you need to make up ground

Get that USB cord out of there, that's not what I mean. The AI is far improved from last year on car development, but it is still very easy to outdevelop them just by keeping your slots running at all times. So for the simplest approach, just don't do that. Instead, develop your car similar to the AI and allocate the following through the year

• 6 Intense Designs
  
• 12 Normal Designs
  
• 12 Research

For example, you could use ATR period 1 to do your 6 Intense runs, then ATR 2 for 6 Normal Designs, ATR 3 for Research, ATR 4 for your final normal designs, and then ATR 5 for research. Or whatever combination/order of intense/normal/research you feel like as long as you don't exceed 6 intense/12 normal/12 research

This one is simple, you can run things year round, but you cannot use intense design at all. And you may only use 3 of the 4 slots. You should however still limit your research to 2 ATR periods or if you keep close count of your jobs run, don't exceed 40% of your time into research.

Another simple one, just don't do research, at all until it's your only option due to end of year. Especially not in heavy regulation years. You are not restricted beyond this in development (Though if in practice you find this still leads to large gaps to the AI, please report back). Running simulation numbers on this, this looks like the most fun approach, as you will be at a measurable disadvantage at the start of every year but will make up ground by the end of the year before being knocked to the back again.

If you come up with other approaches, let me know!

The following chapters may impact your enjoyment of the game. A big part of the game is figuring a lot of this stuff out for yourself, and making yourself perfectly optimal right off the bat may spoil your experience. I will start out lightly with more informational/math based analysis in the first few chapters before we get into direct instruction.

There are many paths to success in this game that are perfectly viable, I will present a few of them and some alternatives/situational optimizations in this section. There almost certainly will be other approaches that are perfectly capable of leading you to success. There are also situations where doing what is "optimal" may not be the best of approaches. I will try and identify those as we go, but 2023 is much more difficulty than 2022 and the AI is far more relentless at keeping up.

You will need short term optimization and long term depending where you find yourself and what the AI does, so do not take this as an absolute "I win" guide perfect for all teams and every season. The goal is something that generally should work, but you will need to adjust as neccessary.

Also if you have a fear of math and numbers, stress medication is advised

Cost cap is a BIG deal this year and you will have to manage it very carefully. It's very easy to accidentally go over. Thus far, the only two penalties known/reported are a fine against the following year's cap equal to the amount you went over, and being fired. Our primary purpose is to maximize development with our old friend from last year, Intense design.

There's actually not much that counts against the cost cap.

• Car Part Development: This value is both your Design work cost and the cost to produce parts normally
  
• Car Part Research: Shockingly, this is the total you spend on Research for car development
  
• Staff Salaries: This is your 3 of your 5 specialists in the Staff tab. Both Race Engineers, and your Sporting Director. Tech Chief and Head of Aero do not count, neither do any of your drivers
  
• Engineering Team/Scouting Team/Pit Crew: This one self identifies
  
• Emergency Purchases: This covers all powertrain purchases, and any parts you produce as Emergency/Immediate
  
• Facility upkeep: Self defined. The cost of upgrading a facility does not count against this, but the higher upkeep once the facility is upgraded will, keep that in mind. Refurbishing also does not count against this

The cap size is $139,200,000, but regulations can increase or decrease this size.

At the start of the year, you are forced to spend $15,650,000 for your initial allocation of parts, and the bare minimum for facilities against the cost cap is $13,182,000, the relevant staff and team salaries are going to run you 2-10 mil in total as well, so early on, you're looking at around 100-105 million in cap space to work with. But, facilities, just like last year are going to cost much more when you upgrade, so let's look at them


So right off the bat, take notice that not all facilities count against your cost cap. The Team Hub, Scouting Department, and everything within Operations but Weather Centre are all only from your "unlimited" pool of money.

Secondly, pay attention to the scaling. Suspension Sim and Car Part Centre only increase by about 30% from level 1 to Level 5, so those are fairly low cap impact benefits. Meanwhile your wind tunnel and CFD go up by around 7 times and those two alone eat an extra 12 mil of cap! That's nearly a full cycle of intense development you could do. So there is some cost benefit analysis we need to do here in a bit.

This is going to be a decent amount of cash and will depend on just how durable or not you make the parts, and how much your drivers feel like paying a visit to every wall on the track. There is a use case for doing max durability parts if your drivers won't wreck them early. When you have very low expertise (sub 40%) you can run max durable parts the entire year. Doing this, you will save enough cap space vs using fragile parts that you can do an extra round of intense design. This is very edge case and you will be effectively "one research behind" the entire year you use this strategy. But you will then be "one research ahead" of the standard plan until the next 4 years when regulation reset happens.

For the purpose of simplicity, I'm going to simply recommend strip all weight and durability always. It's worth an effective 5% to your cornering related expertise and will give you the biggest acceleration boost possible with parts alone (it's comparatively nothing, but number go up)

The cost of parts on top of your initial allotment will range from a minimum of $17,850,000 up to $37,200,000 without accounting for crashes, we want to take higher in this value because things happen even to high skill drivers, so we will presume $30 mil for this.

So lets get our starting point here for progress. We have 4 slots to work our magic in, and we want to keep them all full for the entire year. Since every part is important, we'll work in values of "whole part cycles" where we do each piece in turn.

It takes 236 days to work through all 6 parts without doing extra engineers, and we have 1460 effective workdays (365*4 slots), this works out to 6.19 cycles. There are events which will close your design center down for a few days that will hit at least a couple times a year, as well as one that will boost your center by 50% giving you two free slots to work with! We will just simplify the math down and say that our baseline is 6 cycles of parts in a year of optimal spending/expertise growth.

Baseline means cheap so we'll start with all normal approach cycles. This is $7.5 million to do a run of each part, 6 times a year means $45 million in design/research alone. This should be the bare minimum you spend on your part development. From here, we want to make this as large as we can within available cap space by swapping normal designs for intense designs, each of which will cost $15 million for replacing an entire cycle.

Lets make a table of our cap costs with a set of low/min values and high/max values and see what we can do (rounding to nearest millions)

Well that's a mighty difference. What we see here is early game with cheaper staff and less facility upgrades you can pull off nearly 2 full cycles of intense design work, but if you upgrade everything to max, you're left with only a single part you can put on intense design. How much difference does that make? Lets just consolidate all your expertise into a single average, and presume you are averaging getting 10% expertise hit every year after all your work. Over the course of 5 years, this is what the gap would start to look like
Not ideal, we fall a couple % behind and even with diminished returns on the higher value cannot make up the ground. But we are forgetting the power of facilities which can add 5-10% to our stats, and that better staff provide better bonuses. As well as CFD and WT can be used to setup our early parts with even further bonuses. In the next chapter we'll factor that into our calculations and start adjusting our spending to be most effective

• Managing and optimizing the cost cap is going to be the key to having a solid strategy
  
• Race Engineers, Sporting Director, and scout/pit/engineer teams all count against the cap, all other drivers and staff do not count
  
• You are losing 15 mil from cost cap for initial parts, and facility costs can range from 15 mil to 30 mil based on upkeep cost
  
• Some buildings do NOT count against upkeep!
  
• Building parts is expensive, about 25-30 mil/year you will need to run with non durable parts
  
• At high levels of everything, you will only barely be able to keep all development slots filled year round
  
• Building upkeep scaling is varied greatly, some only increase 30% from level 1 to 5, others increase 600%, there's cost/benefit to weigh here
  
• Doing as much intense design as possible while keeping all slots running is going to be vital

We'll start with the easy ones that you should max out. No math or thought needed for these at all as the cost increase is either small or irrelevant

• Suspension Simulator: Only 30% upkeep increase for 20% total increase to suspension stats
  
• Car Part Test Centre: 40% upkeep increase that gives you +85% across many stats and many parts
  
• Team Hub+Everything in Operations: Doesn't count against cost cap, neither does scouting, but that's your choice
  
• Race Sim: It's only an extra 400k hit, and greatly increases driver skill gain rate
  
• Factory: The minimum level you should have for this is level 3, I'm going to recommend level 4, and it's only 600k more to up it to level 5, so that part I leave to you

This puts us at $15.3 mil of upkeep at base leaves us with Design Center and the CFD/WT buildings (which you may already have at level 2 depending on team). First I need to explain my stat valuations for future graphs.

Because stats aren't equal in your overall speed, when I am doing the average overall rating in graphs with buildings, I'm applying a weighted value to what I calculate as the overall average. So a building giving +2% in cooling only gains 1% as I have a 50% valuation for it.

• Drag Reduction: 75%
  
• DRS Delta: 50%
  
• Low Speed: 100%
  
• Medium Speed: 100%
  
• High Speed: 100%
  
• Airflow Front: 100%
  
• Airflow Middle: 100%
  
• Airflow Sensitivity: 50%
  
• Brake Cooling: 50%
  
• Engine Cooling: 50%

Don't take this to mean ignore the lower ones. Having 50% engine cooling and 60% downforce is much better for surviving a season than having 40% engine cooling and 70% downforce. But once your Cooling is at 50% and Drag is at about 60%, the benefits aren't as useful overall, things will only cool so much and the range on top speed is rather small.

As you level up the Design Center, it gives an extra 1% to 10 different stats per level at a cost of 800k annual upkeep, until level 5 where it jumps up by twice that. After weighting, we will consider it .75% per level as the average. This is flat % bonus on top of our stats, so at lower ratings this will be of little difference, but towards the end of the 5 year cycle, it will mean more.

Everyone starts with at least a level 2 Design center, so we'll use that as the base, and we'll go with 2 full cycles of intense design for it. With level 3, we will have to remove 1 part from the intense design, and remove 2 for level 4. At level 5 we need to knock 4 parts off and only do 1.33 rounds of intense design. But for each level we go up, we will add another .75% our our resulting stat average. Here's what that looks like graphed out.

Sorry phone users and those with bad eyesight. If you have difficulty seeing it, Level 5 starts out with a 2.25% advantage at the start and despite the lower levels constantly closing the gap, by the end, Level 2 and 3 are 1% and .5% behind. Level 4 does essentially catch up by season 2 and ends up swapping with Level 5 a few times through the years, but it's very marginal.

I declare it a tie, Level 4 and Level 5 are close enough you can justify maxing it or stopping at 4.

This one is going to be harder. So we'll assume you're taking 1st place and getting a "low" amount of hours to use, because if you're in this section that's the goal anyway! Each building has a different base and scale increase per level per unit

Wind Tunnel (40 hours)

• Airflow Front and Middle/Drag Reduction/DRS Delta: .009% + .003% per level
  
• Downforce: .189N +.072N per level (note, N, not kN)

CFD (3.0 hours, 30 units)

• Airflow Front and Middle/Drag Reduction/DRS Delta: .013% + .004% per level
  
• Downforce: .255N +.085N per level (note, N, not kN)
  
• Airflow Sensitivity: .026% + .008% per level

And as mentioned before the cost scaling is horrendous with these two, with each going up by nearly $1 million in upkeep per level and by nearly $4 million for the last level of Wind Tunnel and over $2 million for CFD.

Research is the better place to spend the hours you get as it won't be affected by regulation hits, and also will offset regulations/let you allocate stat gains. But you have no choice but to use them in design at least once, so you may as well get some mileage out of it if we can. So lets compare using all our units at each level.
I am not going to insult your intelligence by analyzing this. You can see the numbers, the gains (and remember this is ALL your hours in a period) are pathetic. I even calculated out if you finished 10th in the WCC and had level 1 or 5 of both facilities (How you could have max facilities and be so bad as to finish 10th as a player is beyond me), and the TOTAL difference of 200 units to your airflow was barely 3%. This doesn't need a graph, there is only one conclusion

Do not upgrade these. Ever. Unless you want to make things harder.

This makes our Facility cap hit $17.1 mil, or $18.6 mil if you upgrade Design Center to 5

• Everything but your Factory, Design Center, and CFD/Wind Tunnel are worth upgrading to max level without question
  
• Factory upgrade should be done to your preference. Level 3 is the absolute minimum you should have, but the upkeep increase is minimal enough that it doesn't hurt to go to 5
  
• Design Center is justifiable at level 4 or level 5. You get more built in bonus at level 5, but you lose a good amount of cap space
  
• CFD and WT upgrades are absolutely garbage and not worth it at all

This will be the prelude to our main course of identifying just how we need to build out our supercar. First we must go back to Car Performance stats and see just how much difference each of them make.

For this section, Bahrain was used to test each item. A baseline was set with a Merc Engine in the Mclaren with the better laps of Lando Norris or Pierre Gasly (nearly all were Norris, naturally) all stats besides the one being tested were at 60% (where I ended up after 1 season, we had a flat 5% regulation hit). 30 Laps were run in P1 at standard pace on Hard tire, restarting the session if anything impacted their run like a VSC or Red Flag or Damage. Some amount of variance applies, but times should be indicative enough of a trend and measurement of effectiveness. Now let's go through the results stat by stat.

Quick answer, any choice but Mercedes is fine just as last year with Pros and Cons to each. The effect of acceleration is slightly measurable, but just to note, there is no listed Top Speed difference in Car Performance value. But besides Merc which has the worst power and second highest fuel load, the others are balanced out due to their fuel loads allowing them to be faster, or their fuel loads being high enough to slow them down to be in line with the others.

Durability here (checked after 90 laps) is to show there's not really a difference between engine wear rates IF you have them properly cooled. As last year, a bit over 50% is fine for all engines in standard operating modes. We'll go into more detail later on with Cooling, but in general, if your cooling is bad, you might want to go with Mercedes, but otherwise pick one of the other 3 (Renault saves you 1-3 million!)

So this result was really peculiar with 60% and 80% drag reduction on all parts being equal laptime. My takeaway from this is that clearly more drag reduction does give more benefit on longer straights (312 vs 314), but on shorter stretches, it only helps up to a point. So my valuation of this as "Tier 2 value" seems justified as the gain from 60%-80% is not the same as 30%-60%.

I perhaps undervalued DRS in the previous sections. It's certainly not life changing, even comparing 30% to 80% being a couple tenths, but it's no slouch either. I'm going to put this into Tier 2 with Drag Reduction, don't put all you focus into this, but also don't drop it too far.

Steam is doing it's best to restrict my pile of words, but I can always break chapters into multiple sections. Anyway, here's cornering!

Hail to the King! Downforce is still your key factor to solid laptimes making huge impact. But we need to first look at that airflow effect table first

Hail to the Queen! She's also incredible at impacting laptimes. So obviously both of these factors are very important. But we should combine them so I can properly display how important it is you treat these royals as co-equal.

Obviously decreasing both to 30%/increasing both to 80% had a larger impact than either one on it's own, that makes sense. But the COMBINED effect of them together is greater than the sum of their parts. At 30%, Downforce and Airflow each lost 1 second and .5 seconds respectively, but with both at 30%, it's a loss of 1.7 seconds. And at 80% each gained .3 seconds and .6 seconds, but combined gained 50% more time at 1.3 seconds.

These numbers want to stick together. While it might be difficult to do so, since downforce is a factor on 4 of the 6 parts, and airflow is only on 2 of the 6 for each one, you will want to try and increase both evenly and keep them about equal. These are your two largest factors to pace, so you want to increase both these values as much as you can while designing parts but keeping the other stats properly ratioed to their valuation.

Dirty Air and Cooling are much more different and harder to really show data on without having to do large data dumps. So instead I will combine my notes from testing at 30/60/80 and compile my observations.

This has 2 purposes, to reduce the damage to your cornering ability when behind another car and harming your laptimes, and allowing you to close up behind another car through a corner for an overtake into a straight. This effect starts to kick in when you are about 1 second behind a car in front, and higher values will reduce both the range it starts to impact your car, and reduce the amount of effect it has on your laptimes.

At 30% the effect is very pronounced. And even with a car multiple tenths faster, the dirty air will frustrate your efforts to get past. You'll be kept about 1.5-2 car lengths behind in most corners, which means you are at a disadvantage coming out of the corner and have to cover extra ground before you can even attempt a pass. Which is made even more difficult because you are SIGNIFICANTLY slowed through the corners and losing an extra .5 or more on the car in front. Even with very strong DRS, this pretty much locks you down behind slower cars. We need more than this, it can't be ignored as much as last year.

At 60%, things feel pretty solid. You can get much closer, about half a car length to a full car length. You will still be slowed through the corner, but only by about .2 overall through a lap if you're staying at similar distance through the lap. With even moderate DRS you should be able to get past without much trouble as you are coming out of the corner so much closer than before.

At 80%, the difference isn't as noticeable or measurable as the previous jump. It certainly helps, as you can stay decently inside a car's length through any corner, so there's a small improvement to the ground you have to cover in a passing zone. But there's a minimum distance you can close up since obviously at some point, you will just be ramming the car in front. The time loss goes down a little bit more here to around .1, though this is hard to measure when your laptime is taking far more of a hit because the car in front of you is slower rather than just impact from dirty air.

Overall, I would say you don't need any more than 50-60% in this area as your target when designing parts. You can apply more if you want, but the benefits would be far more well applied to your downforce or even DRS/Drag.

This was fun. I did the same 30/60/80 test with it, but since traffic is really important here to use for measuring impact, I gave every single other stat 100% so I could sit behind other cars for extended periods in practice as I was so much faster. I made a ton of notes, but I'll try to cluster them together and summerize.

Every single level of cooling managed to reach the same highs in traffic, and sat at the same lows in clear air. Even at 80% engine cooling, both engines and tires managed to reach over 120 (Handily this is the mark the mediums overheated at). And even at only 30% cooling, in clear air the temperatures were able to fall to 112 degrees for tires and engine under load at the line. The difference was the rate of change and how sensitive to traffic each level was.

At 30%, even catching a single car would spike the temperature into the danger zone within a matter of a few corners and would remain overheating the entire time. It took 3-5 laps to get the temps back down to normal levels once back in clear air.

At 60% it would take around two laps before things would consistently overheat, but behind only one or two cars would frequently dip back to optimal temps and wasn't overall too problematic. Behind 3 cars the tires and engine were stuck overheating over most of the lap. But once back into clear air, it only took a lap or a little more to get back to the low level temps.

At 80% the car was extremely resistant to overheating. It took being behind 3 cars for multiple laps for anything to hit danger levels. And as soon as they were clear, the temps were back in optimal within 2 corners and back to low levels by the end of the lap. Even at these cooling levels though, putting the tires on Orange/Aggressive mode in clear air would still cause them to permanently overheat. The same was not true of the engine. It was managing to stay out of overheat mode in clear air with fuel on Red/Push. At 60% Push would make it overheat.

My determination on cooling is similar to Dirty Air. 50-60% is sufficient regardless of your engine choice. The extra caveat here is that depending how much you want to micromanage your pace and temps with pushing pace or fuel you may want to go a little higher than that to give you more leniency and options.

• There is no best engine, Merc is the only one with a pace disadvantage (but has durability advantage). The other 3 are quite balanced, pick whichever
  
• Drag reduction is a secondary priority, it's beneficial, but higher %s are only beneficial at higher speeds/tracks with longer straights
  
• DRS is also secondary priority for similar reasons, the benefit you get falls off the higher your %s go
  
• Downforce and Airflow Front/Middle are your primary priority. These both scale incredibly well at higher %, but you need to increase both together. Neither will improve your pace on it's own as well as both will together
  
• Airflow Sensitivity/Dirty Air Tolerance is a tertiary concern and severely drops off in any benefit after 50-60%, but below those values can be very actively harmful in slowing your progress through the field as you will have great difficulty being close enough for DRS zones
  
• Cooling is also tertiary with the same 50-60% target, below this, you will suffer faster powertrain part degradation. But you can go higher than this if you use more aggressive race strats with more frequent usage of higher pace modes when not actively battling others.

Before we get into the math, I got inspired and made an entire calculator tool for Designing car parts where you can select a slider position for every stat for every part (limited to Left, Middle, Right, sorry) and it will calculate your +/-% values for each setting and then show you what the result on your car performance is.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vk2xDmr8sE54shZDA8gHnlMb0kLC9Vk2sQrLD9ZL3UQ/edit?usp=sharing

I discovered a fair amount delving into this as the sliders work differently to last year. Design has the more major factors to consider, so let's delve into that side first

First off, lets go over just playing with a single slider. With any given stat, when you move the slider to the right, you will get some amount of gain to it, we'll say for example, +13.40%. If you move that slider left you will lose -13.40%, the exact same amount. Which makes sense, we've gone over that the sliders will give you the same values if you move them all together (all left or all right).

The amount moving a single slider has is relative to the stat starting point you are beginning from. If you are designing a part and without moving sliders, you will have 40% Drag Reduction, then when you move it right or left, you will add/remove up to ~12.6% to that value. If instead, you are starting with a 71% part, then you will then only be able to add or remove ~7.44%. Here is a table of select values to show what the max amount you can add/remove from a stat can be for different starting points.
The trend here is the higher up the stat starting point is, the more off a cliff the amount you can adjust it tumbles. At 0%, if such a thing were possible, the slider would be worth 15%, all the way down to the slider doing nothing at 100% if you manage to achieve a perfect stat.

I of course, have managed to create a graph to show the progression and falloff as your stats go higher.

With the effect a slider has on it's own final stats covered, we can talk about how they interact with other stats

This is going to be perhaps a bit complicated to understand and very filled with numbers, apologies in advance

To start with, every single stat slider effects every single other part on a car to a unique degree. For example, if we set all stats to 0 for Chassis, and moved the slider to the right (Please ignore that this creates impossible negative % values, we're experimenting here!). It would gain 15% as we covered. In return, it would apply negative values to Engine Cooling and Airflow Middle, but not equally even though they are the same rating. Engine cooling would lose 7.8% and Airflow would lose 7.2%. If you were to then move Engine cooling to the left, Engine cooling would lose a further 15%, Drag Reduction would gain 7.2% and Airflow Middle would gain 7.8%.

For a more complicated example, lets take sidepods with all stats at 50%. Moving Engine Cooling to the right will add 11.25% to Engine Cooling, while removing 5.29% from Drag Reduction, 3.04% from Airflow Front, and 2.92% from Airflow Middle. There is, as far as I could determine without spending inordinate amounts of time, no real rhyme or pattern to these numbers, other than the fact that if you add them vertically or horizontally, they all cancel out to 0 if all stats start at the same value.

Below is with all parts and stats starting from 0%. Note that Downforce values must be rounded to the nearest .5% due to decimal torture.


This is all well and good of course. But I had to cover the part about "higher ratings mean less impact from moving sliders, lower ratings mean higher" for a reason. Because the same factoring applies to how much that stat is effected by the other sliders

Welcome to the 2023 version of "FDev, why"? If you don't quite follow what I'm saying, let's walk an example of what happens if say, you had a huge Drag Reduction -70% regulation impact taking it down to 35% but the rest of your stats are at 80%

Ignoring that I messed up the precise values, the balanced slider "final stats" of this part design work out to 33%, 82%, 77%, 77% top to bottom. You can see if I slide the large values to the right, there is little change in them.

But of course, we don't really need to pump those numbers, we need our drag reduction pumped up, so let's put that right and the others left and remove that spoiler box

Oh my, that's quite the increase there for Drag Reduction, which the other 3 only decreased a rather small amount. Let's inspect what the sliders are doing to it.

Just the Drag slider itself is providing 13.16% to itself. Every other slider adds up to another 13.16%, effectively doubling the increase. Now, this was to be expected from our previous look at the stat/slider relations where the rows would cancel each other out, if all the numbers in a row were instead positive, it would be a doubling of the main value.

Instead we have gained a total of 26.32% to Drag Reduction, at a cost of -1.94%, -2%, and -1.76% to the other stats, which in total is only 5.7% between them. That's a 409% return on our "investment"!

What is going on here is that the effect where a slider will cause a greater increase at lower stat values is applied REGARDLESS of what other stats are at. If all 4 stats here were also at 35%, the effect on drag reduction would have been the same, it would gain 26.32% from these slider positions. But if the other stats were that low, they would have also lost a combined 26.32%.

While you are at lower stat levels, either at the start of a career, or after a major regulation reset, using the sliders requires significant tradeoff with big losses and big gains. As your stats get higher, the sliders become more marginal in effect, although the AI will also be suffering from success as well in development, so smaller differences make more impact. But when you have major regulation hits that only impact certain stats within your parts, you can take a small performance impact to your high stats, and use it to enormously increase something that got hit hard.

At this time, I'm uncertain how to feel about the way this has been designed. This is enormously powerful for the player who can create custom slider settings, but the presets that the AI uses are better (still some holes) this year. This will need some practical application to see if it works out or not.

• I made a Slider Design calculator where you can create a "full car" plan and see the effect of different slider settings Link Here[docs.google.com]
  
• The higher your starting point is on a given stat for a given part, the less effect moving a slider will have on it. By the time you hit 70%, sliders will be half as effective. by 80% it's down to 1/3rd
  
• Moving the slider for one stat will effect every other stat to a varying degree. Adding more DRS will remove twice from Airflow than it will from Low downforce
  
• All sliders will cancel out if placed in the same "position" (ie: All right)
  
• Lower stats getting more effect from sliders and higher stats having less effect means at high stat disparities, you can remove a small portion of a high stat with a slider and provide an enormous gain to the lower stat, gaining 5x as much value in the small stat as you lose in the larger one.

We have finally arrived to the direct instruction part of the guide where I will give you a selection of powerful slider settings, the pros and cons of each, and some adjustments you may wish to make to them. I will be using/sharing images from my calculator linked in the previous section to display these.


Here is an example of a car with 40% across the board and what the final numbers look like.


Here is the career start Haas when it's parts are plugged in


And here is a Season 2 car after being hit with a -10% cooling and -30% Airflow (Front/Middle/Sensitive) regulation


Pros: This is a very simple "overall improvement" set of sliders for whatever level of performance you happen to find yourself at. If will give 5-10% improvement to your overall cornering ability while losing very little in Speed, Cooling, or Dirty Air performance.

Cons: We are trading quite a bit of potential cornering performance to keep speed up. And we are not making up for the lost stats that were hit by regulations and using the higher bonus's they will receive to their sliders. Also this will not boost your cooling at all

Situational adjustments: Anything you received a regulation hit against you should move over by one position if it is performance impacting and/or in the case of cooling it's not at a high enough level to prevent excessive powertrain purchases. You may also need to move some of your higher values left to give more boost to the weaker stats.

Here is the same 40% car from before with these settings


And the Haas


And our regulation hit car


Pros: This will give you the fastest possible hotlapping car for almost every track

Cons: This is a horrible idea, don't do this until/unless you are about 70% across the board where it becomes viable. This demolishes your cooling and you will absolutely burn through powertrains. You will also have a much more difficult time completing passes. If you encounter a rain race, prepare to be frustrated at not being able to complete a pass because the AI is outdragging you down a straight.

Situational adjustments: If you do use attempt to use this in Season 1 or 2 For one thing, ensure you are hitting at least 50% in your dirty air and cooling levels or else prepare to qualify high and then be trapped behind a car waiting for pitstops to roll around. Also you can give yourself a chance to pass at least by completely inverting the Rear Wing Positions (Right on Drag/DRS/Airflow, left on downforce) and having a strong DRS and offsetting half the top speed loss.

We're going to start with Pro/Cons/Adjust, because this one is designed specifically for adjusting.

Pros: This is a combination of pure pace focus with the All Rounder, with a "simple" flexibility built in as you make numbers bigger and regulations make numbers smaller.

Cons: This is much more difficult to keep optimized as several settings will change based on your circumstances

Situational adjustments: There are two adjustments this car is based around. The first is cornering downforce. The front wing base should middle focus whichever of the 3 you overall are lacking the most in. So if your low speed downforce of your parts (not the car performance) is lacking, then swap the medium and low speed sliders.

The second idea behind this design is aiming for 50-60% Dirty Air and Cooling performance values and making specific adjustments as we hit those values. The baseline may not hit 50%, but we're going to live with that if it is short. Each of the three values has a pattern to follow if you have "too much" of one

Dirty Air: Follow these steps if you are above 50-60% (use any value within this range you want)
-1st: Front Wing, Drop Sensitivity to middle, revert if this takes you below 50%. If you are still above 50% then...
-2nd: Front Wing, move the weakest Downforce you can right one position, still over 50% then...
-3rd: Front Wing, Drop Sensitivity to left
-4th: Front Wing, move weakest Downforce you can one position right
-5th-7th: Rear Wing, Sensitivity to middle, then to left, then you can raise a downforce to middle

Brake Cooling:
-1st: Front Wing, Cooling to Left
-2nd: Front Wing, move your weakest downforce right one position
-3rd-4th: Suspension, Cooling to middle, then to left

Engine Cooling:
-1st-2nd: Chassis Cooling left, then Drag Reduction Middle
-3rd-6th: Sidepods Cooling middle, Airflow Front or Middle right, Cooling left, Other Airflow right

Hopefully that's simple enough to follow, here's a few examples to show various stages being adjusted

Our 40% car.
-Medium Speed is the lowest stat with the Front Wing Downforce on Left/Left/Left, so we put that middle.
-Our 3 "dump stats" are not over 50% enough to go through the above steps


Haas
-Has terrible medium speed, so it gets the initial allocation to Middle on the Front Wing.
-Dirty Air is over 50%, but not enough for us to drop sensitivity.
-Brake Cooling is high, so we can drop Wing Cooling to Left, it is still over 50% so we can increase Medium Downforce another level as it remained our weakest level, further adjustments dropped it below 50% so we stop there.
-Engine Cooling was quite high, so we drop Chassis Cooling to Left, and are able to move Drag Reduction to middle. Adjusting Sidepod cooling reduces it below 50% so we stop there.


Season 3 Car
This is essentially a car with high enough stats we can go through every single step above as the values are sitting well above 50%. You can see the end result looks very similar to our "Pure Pace" car above, except with only minor speed loss and large DRS gain.


The other benefit of this approach is that you can apply the exact same process regardless of regulation hits, though of course you can come up with your own adjustments as you deem fit based on your present circumstances.

• I honestly have no idea how I could possibly create notes for this chapter. If you want a method/approach to determine an optimal slider set, scroll up.

I did several seasons to see how the AI will work on their car, which you can use to either exploit the AI, or to keep things balanced between the AI and yourself. I did several seasons, and then a few tests of playing with AI money and buildings to see what would occur. Results are here

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SfyaSgRcdDoFpLsSJAkUXuIC7JoroAx-_LBWnmM5rJ0/edit?usp=sharing

The AI does not cheat when it comes to finances...mostly. In terms of income, they have the same 3 primary sources as the player in WCC prize money, Board Payments, and sponsorship funds. As regulations increase or decrease prize amounts and each team's rating (Board>Team Rating) fluctuates based on WCC and WDC finish position adjusts where they fall within the field, the AI will receive exactly the base amounts you would expect them to get. They also receive the weekly funds from the Tour Centre they will upgrade.

There are two additional items with sponsors the player has access to, but the AI doesn't really use. First is sponsor obligations, these are the merchandising, driver appearances, etc that you choose at the beginning of the season. Each team has a preset list of obligations they MUST do a minimum amount of, and this extends to the AI for additional funding to their teams. The AI does not appear to ever accept anything they are not required to. However they will occasionally accept more than the minimum they are required to. Most of these are incredibly not worth the tradeoff, but there is up to $36M for grabs with everything on and maxed out (this could be a 50% boost to 10th place main sponsor fund).

The other one is Sponsor performance targets. Every race gets 3 "default" ones selected at random, as the player you can choose to add additional ones, but the AI will not do this. The "automatic" ones also have a lowest position of 15th as an option for qual/finishing, which a bad team is going to have a hard time hitting.

All this to say, the AI's income rate by default is incredibly wild and inconsistent. The lower teams tend to get as little as $170M and the top teams are around $250M+. This is a massive factor in...

There are a LOT of expense categories, so to just rattle through the baseline ones that don't change (much): Initial Powertrain parts, entry fee, pit/scout/engineer team wages all total up to ~$25M

Building upkeep we've covered already, and AI will slowly upgrade (or quickly if they can afford) and eventually hit $38M. This amount does not decrease as buildings degrade, important later.

Parts/Powertrain will vary depending on who is put in the car, but will base around $35M (plus accidents) for parts and +2 Engines, +4 ERS, and +2 Gearboxes and $22M (plus accidents)

We are already at $120M, and income level makes a huge difference on our remaining items. Part Design has a target expenditure of $50M, Research has a target of $15M (If you're good at math, you already see a problem arising), then there is also building upgrades/refurbishment and staff wages. The first priority of the AI is to get as much R&D work done as they can, and then the best staff they can afford/available within their remaining budget, and then if there are any scraps leftover, then they will do some upgrades or refurbs.

The lowest I've seen them spend on R&D is around $40M in total, but while most teams are aiming for 40-60M in staff, and leftover money for facilities, the bottom teams can only afford ~$15M and do little to nothing in facility improvements.

There are 2 ways the AI plays by a different set of rules, and both end up being fine ultimately in terms of balance.

The first is that the AI does not have cost cap restrictions. For teams with large funding pools and solid drivers, they do end up around $140M. However, if teams have poor drivers and either large slush fund piles or large income streams, they can end up well over this due to crashes. But they do not pay fines as the player does. They do however need to have the money in the bank for parts/engines. This could really brutalize the AI if they had to deal with the fines and put them deep in debt, so this keeps them from permanently breaking.

The second is that AI doesn't pay any driver bonus fees, even if it's in their contract. As their spending is already far from optimal, this helps keep the AI from being unable to develop from the extra fees (also, you can sign drivers without a race bonus, so just pretend the AI contracts having them is just a display thing)

AI development is far from optimal, so if you want to ensure long term challenge you should try and replicate their activity as closely as possible, or only slightly exceed them to get a steady progression (This is very difficult after the regulation reset for 2026).

The AI is significantly better than last year at working on their car, and you don't need to majorly hamstring yourself in order to keep things close, but there are some important observations from the data collection to identify.

AI will not keep their slots filled for the entire year. As mentioned in the previous section, they will target 50M for design and 15M for research, once they hit those marks, they will no longer do any more runs. In general, this leads to them using 60-80% of their R&D slot time, so the first item if you want to be fair is to only use 3 slots through the year. This shortcoming only minorly hinders AI potential, moreso backmarker teams who have less funding.

The next item to point out is that about half the time, the AI will also fail to use their ATR hours for anything at all. They will always at least use 5 of the periods, but they are very hit or miss about using all 6. Typically this is because they already either hit their cap on spending for R&D, or because they can no longer fit a run in before the end of the year. To keep this one fair, either don't use one period a year, or alternate between using it or not. This shortcoming moderately hinders the AI, especially backmarker teams who are losing a large amount of hours.

The final item is in research. In general, the AI will spend about 40% of the year doing research, no team will do a "Haas approach" and throw in massively to research over design. This holds true in both normal years with minor to moderate regulation hits, and also in reset years with 55%+ regulation hits. They WILL target whatever is listed as the targeted part/stat and give much more research attention to the relevant parts. If Downforce is the regulation target, they will work on the 4 parts with Downforce more than the other two parts. If it's the regulation reset and all parts have -55% and Suspension has -65%, they will put twice as much research into Suspension. Most years, you don't need to do anything special as they mitigate regulation hits alright. But DO NOT spend major time on research in heavy regulation years, or you will end up far far above the AI in the following year. This shortcoming massively hinders the AI in reset years, and ends up meaning that post reset, the gap between top and bottom of AI cars is less than 5% at around 45% car stats.

Other simple observations. The AI never uses 1 engineer for anything, ever. Typically they do 2 or 3, which ends up meaning they waste a lot of money losing on days of expertise gain on top of not using all their slot time. They also use the same sort of weighting system as last year where they look at other cars and try to shore up their perceived weakness, which sometimes leads to heavy circular development of certain parts through a year as one AI improves their chassis, so the other teams do so, and now the first team needs to do another chassis to keep up, etc. They also do 1/3rd of their designs using intense mode, and never do rapid design.

It's been a while since I dropped an image, so here's a graph of the first 6 years of testing before I started throwing extra money at the teams and editing their buildings to see what would happen.

You can see there's not really much in the way of year to year changes or massive shifts of gaps between teams. The closest was the last couple years of this where Red Bull and Ferrari, due to $70M in staff wages, were running out of capability to do a reasonable amount of R&D, but even then they are still closer to Alfa (7% difference) than even Merc was to them in year 1 (10%). Most of their staff costs are from top tier drivers, while Alfa has bottom of the barrel, so Red Bull still kept getting top of WCC and Alfa was still in 9th/10th.

• AI budgets have no magic, their income sources are identical to players, they have no magic sources of money
  
• They take no "optional" funding (extra sponsors, extra race incentives, etc)
  
• They receive and spend between 150M and 250+M
  
• They will spend up to 65M total on R&D if possible if income allows
  
• Budget cap does not apply to AI, but they spent 120M as a base before extra parts/powertrains due to accident
  
• AI only uses 60-80% of their R&D slot time
  
• AI only uses all 6 ATR periods half the time, but will use 5 always
  
• AI does ~18 designs a year, 6 as intense, rest normal. They also only do 12 researches regardless of size of regulation hit
  
• They will spend more time on parts hit by regulation for research than parts not hit by it
  
• There is no significant deviation by any team on R&D. No team will focus more on next year research over current year design, or vice versa. No team will go extra heavy on offsetting regulation compared to any other team.
  
• Ultimately this leads to all AI teams being near identical after the first regulation reset, the main difference between teams comes down to drivers and staff afforded.
  
• Once you are aware of what you are doing (by reading this guide, you know enough to qualify), it is still very easy this year to outdevelop the AI and retain a perpetual gap. So you will need to follow/create an approach to retain challenge.