The typing has begun! Apologies for delays, I am assisting with bug hunting/identification and it's eating my time. Also, I will add the notes sections after I finish the basic guide. Apologies to those that prefer the shorthand notes.

1.5 Update: Most of the AI's car dev has been fixed! Presently, they do not do any intense designs, or use any slider settings. But they are using their slots year round with similar ratios to last year, and using all their ATR allocation, however they only use about 25-30% of it on research.

Welcome to the 2024 version of the car dev guide! I will provide a breakdown of the basic mechanics and functionality of the car dev system so you can make yourself competitive and understand better what all the parts, stats, and settings mean.

If you are new to the F1 Manager series, I will warn you that trying to learn these things for yourself is part of the intentions of the game, so you might spoil that experience for yourself by reading this. If you are ok with that, or have given it an honest try and are still confused by some aspects, please read on!

As last year, I will separate this guide into two major sections; basics and breakdowns that will give you the tools to have an idea of what you are doing, and an advanced section where I will spell out the best ways to develop your car and specific strategies and settings that work well against the AI. I will repeat the warning about spoiling yourself at the start of the advanced section for those that don't want to be handed an "I win" button.

I know the main chapters are very wordy, but each one will be followed by a "notes" section that will summarize in bullet points the main takeaways for those that want to minimize reading

-A car dev difficulty setting was added in a late patch to last year's game and makes a return here. In short, Easy means the AI gets reduced expertise gain, Hard means they get boosted gain.
-Brake Cooling has been renamed to Tyre Preservation, and actually does reduce your tire wear as you increase it.
-Acceleration has been removed from the main screen, but still shows in Car Analysis. It was removed from the main screen because you should not be concerned with it!
-Not directly car dev, but parts can develop faults now at any point if you push them too hard, so cooling and durability has more importance this year.
-Also not directly car dev, but the new mentality system will give your drivers a positive or negative effect if your two cars have different parts fit and one is better/worse than the other

Please please reach out to me on Discord in the F1 Manager Discord (link is towards the bottom of https://www.f1manager.com/ under "STAY IN TOUCH"). Steam is bad about message notifications and I can't properly tag people who comment. Also don't feel like you're bugging me by pinging me there with relevant questions, I'm already over 6000 pings.

If you wish to do a translation of this guide, Please let me know and I'll provide a link below to it. If you want to convert it into Youtube content, feel free, just be sure to link back to here. If you see this guide on anything but Steam or a link below, let me know so I can try to takedown, those sites are trying to steal much more than just this information from people.

The car dev is the basic way you improve your car's performance and move your way up (or if you do it poorly, down) the grid. You have 9 individual parts relevant to your car's performance


Powertrain: Components based from your engine selection, these have set stats and cannot be changed. You have a limited number for the year, though additional can be purchased for a high cost and with grid penalty.
-Engine: The powerhouse of the car, determines primary power/acceleration and fuel usage
-ERS: Stores and deploys extra energy to use for general laptime, or for extra acceleration for passes
-Gearbox: Gearshifts, faster gears, better acceleration


Aerodynamics: These are the parts you will be doing the work on. You'll get a set to start the year, but you will need to produce more as you come up with new designs and have parts fail from damage or just general wear and tear.
-Chassis: The main hub of the car that all the other parts bolt onto. Controls engine cooling and high speed cornering
-Front Wing: The wide flexy bit on the front of the car. Controls general cornering ability and tire cooling
-Rear Wing: The big boy on the back. Controls your speed/DRS and dirty air
-Sidepods: The big intakes along the sides. Controls engine cooling and medium cornering
-Underfloor: The underside of the car and key part 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

These are the stats that determines how you will perform on track in the applicable situations

-Overall Ranking: This tries to assign an overall combined value to your stats compared to the rest of the field.
-Top Speed: Determines how quick you can get going on the straights, this is mainly useful for passing ability against other cars.
-DRS Effectiveness: The higher this is, the quicker and faster you can get going in DRS zones, this is useful for qual laptime and for completing passes.
-Low/Medium/High Speed Cornering: Every corner falls into one of these three types, the better you are in it's matching stat, the quicker you get through the corner and more speed you carry. This is the primary determinant of your laptime.
-Dirty Air Tolerance: Serves to improve the effects of following other cars. Increases the effect of slipstream on the straights and reduces the time lost following another car through corners and allows you to follow closer.
-Tyre Preservation: This is brake cooling from previous entries given a new name. This will help keep your tires cool and also reduces the wear per lap your tires take.
-Engine Cooling: With component failures being a major item this year, this is much more important. Reduces the rate of decay on your powertrain parts and keeps your engine cooler so you can push harder for longer and survive being in traffic better.

Each part has it's own set of stats, these are what contribute to determining your car performance

There are several stats and they are reused as necessary, so I'll just go through the categories and items in them, and which of the Car Performance values they contribute to

Velocity:
-Drag Reduction: Top Speed
-DRS Delta: DRS Effectiveness

Downforce:
-Low Speed: Low Speed Cornering
-Medium Speed: Medium Speed Cornering
-High Speed: High Speed Cornering

Cooling:
-Tyre Preservation: Tyre Preservation
-Engine Cooling: Engine Cooling

Airflow:
-Airflow Sensitivity: Dirty Air Tolerance
-Airflow Front: Low and Medium Speed Cornering
-Airflow Middle: Medium and High Speed Cornering

Durability: Weight, Part lifespan, speed (acceleration), and cornering.

Powertrain parts and Aero parts both have % lifespans attached to them, these act a little differently to each other.

For powertrain parts, the more they degrade, the less power output they will provide and the more at risk of faults that will further reduce power they will be. It's up to you how much risk and how much power loss you can tolerate, but anything with yellow warnings is a fairly minor impact, harmful but not hurtful.


Aero parts will last for a minimum distance at which point, there becomes a CHANCE that they fail post race inspection with low risk. There is no penalty associated with this, the part is simply discarded and you must install a new one of the same or different design, it's a system to force continual part production. At "maximum" distance, the part is still as functional as it was at 100%, it just means it has maximum chance to fail inspection. If a part gets damage during a race, then regardless of lifespan remaining, it must be discarded.


Design: This is the method by which you improve your car for the current season. Each design you complete will create a new version of that part you can build on completion. You do not have to build/use the latest design if you don't wish to and can have multiple versions of the same part with different slider settings and benefits.


Research: This is the method by which you improve your car for the next season. Your primary usage of this should be to offset regulation impacts (you can view the impact and your progress against it in the board screen under rules and regs). Your secondary purpose should be to put more focus in stats you are lagging behind on and less in ones you're doing well on.

Here is the baseline time and cost of working on/producing each part. Note these can change due to multiple factors (modes selected, sponsor effects, facility upgrades, etc)

Expertise is the primary driving factor in your car's stats and it's growth, which makes it important to understand how it grows, how regulation impacts it, and how to manipulate it. Both design and research are your primary methods of manipulating your expertise, but both work slightly differently.

The values that you have for every stat on every part of your car are 80% derived from your expertise rating, staff and facilities make up the remaining 20%. Every individual stat for every part has it's own expertise value, it is not shared within or between parts. Meaning that the Drag Reduction expertise on your Rear Wing has no relation to the Drag Reduction on your Underfloor, nor does it have relation to the Airflow Sensitivity on your Rear Wing. Those would be 3 completely separate values.


When you do design work, you will gain expertise in each stat for that part as a side effect. This is not visible to the player directly, but is why after you design a part, you will see a small improvement to the next design (this is what the circled values are in this specific example, expertise gain from previous design), even if your facilities/staff are all the same.


When you do research, the value you are seeing added to each stat is what is directly adding to your expertise for the following year.

To complicate things, there are 3 things to track for each expertise value that all factor in at different points.

-Current expertise: This is your expertise value within the current year at this very moment in time.
-Regulation expertise: This is a negative percent of your current expertise that will be removed at the end of the year as listed in the regulation impacts.
-Research expertise: This is an expertise value that will be added to your expertise at the start of the following year.

Current Expertise is never directly viewable, but you can always go to the regulations overview screen on the board to see the other values. And if you're good at math, you can determine your Current Expertise from the Regulation Expertise.

For example, say you are at the end of 2024. Your current expertise is 60%. All parts are getting a -10% impact. This means your regulation expertise is -6% (10% of 60%). You have done some research and have a research expertise gain value of 5%. As you go from Dec 31 to Jan 1, your current expertise will start at 60%, then regulation expertise will subtract -6% from it and take it down to 54%, then research expertise will add 5% to it, and you will start the year with 59% expertise. If you instead had 40% current expertise at end of year, then the regulation expertise would be -4% instead, taking you to 36%, and the 5% from research taking it to 41% to start the year. If a part or stat has no regulation impact, then nothing will be subtracted and you will only get the positive gains from any research.

In general. Expertise gain is calculated at a daily rate from the parts you have in development. This means if you have a Floor and Suspension being designed, the expertise stats from those parts will be increasing, but the expertise of your Wings, Chassis, and Sidepods will remain the same. Because the gain is daily, it also means that the number of times you put a part into development is not as important as the number of days it is in development. The same part worked on for 40 days, whether that is done in one job, or split into two 20 day jobs, will see the same amount of expertise growth.

This applies to both Designs and Research, though each impacts a different one of the 3 Expertise numbers. Designs will directly grow your Current Expertise, and thus be immediately usable within the current racing year if/when you do a follow up design of the same type. Research will add these daily gains to your Research Expertise, and you will not see the effect of it until the start of the following season.


Expertise also grows on a curve. Doing 30 days of work on a part that you have 25% expertise in will see much larger number gains than doing 30 days on a part you have 70% expertise in. This is to help serve as a catch-up mechanism for teams behind in development. This also means that you will see slower and slower growth in your numbers from expertise due to diminishing returns. This means it's effectively impossible to achieve maximum expertise and perfect parts.

Expertise gain with design is more of a byproduct than the purpose of doing designs. For the most part when you do a design, no matter how your tailor the part's strengths and weaknesses with sliders/presets you will see similar expertise growth across all stats. So it serves as a solid general purpose expertise growth method.


Additionally design has the advantage of "Intense" mode. While Normal and Rushed designs will gain expertise at the normal daily rate, Intense will provide expertise growth at 1.5x the rate for 3x the cost. So the more runs of intense you can budget into your cost cap, the better. And just as a reminder, the gains are daily, so if you use Rushed mode, you will complete a design faster, but it will spend fewer days in development and you will gain less expertise growth from it than even normal would provide.

Research on the other hand is specifically for the purpose of increasing your expertise. The main usage you will do research for is to offset the Regulation Expertise loss. The daily gains you get in expertise in research are higher for stats impacted by regulations than if you did a design on the same part.

If you had a part that was losing 7% of it's stats to regulations, it would take fewer days of research to gain that 7% back than it would to gain 7% from doing designs. This is because research looks at your theoretical next year expertise value (Current Expertise-Regulation Expertise+Research Expertise) and uses that value to do it's daily gain calculation. If you have 70% current expertise with -10% regulation and no research, that means it's going to calculate your gains as if you had 63% expertise and be higher up on the growth curve mentioned before.

Once you have your regulation impacts taken care of, the 2nd main purpose you will use Research for is to grow specific stats within parts without impacting performance related numbers on your actual car parts. So if you're slipping behind in your Dirty Air Tolerance compared to other teams, you can put more focus into that without causing any loss to your present cornering values.

Now we know the various parts, stats, and the key background value that make up your numbers. The next thing to look at is a quantified relation between the parts and how much they contribute to your cars stats. Some parts are better than others for different areas, some will be better for speed values, some are better for cornering.


This year the game gives us a helpful popup when you hover over car stats so you can see what parts contribute to each Performance stat with it's typical arrow system. If you look through the list, you'll see all parts are positive contributions. There is, for example, no drawback on your top speed for adding more downforce for cornering. But lets take this example one step further and show the difference between Rear Wing and Chassis's contribution to DRS


By putting exactly 25% in both Rear Wing and Chassis DRS Delta, the part stat that solely contributes to DRS Effectiveness, we can see that the Rear Wing is contributing roughly 2.3 times more value into the DRS. Which means if you are looking to boost your DRS power and your Rear Wing and Chassis have similar stats, it's much more worth it to perform work on your Wing as you will receive a larger benefit for the same amount of work/time.

We can perform this kind of check across all the parts to create a colorful table depicting which parts are most suited to which tasks

If you've been around since 22, you can see the devs took another swing at balance. And unlike previous years, there's no clear winners for singular "best part" here. Most parts very clearly specialize, but each one has one or two things it is very strong in and you will need good parts all around or you will be weak in one area or another.

You know where car performance numbers come from, let's break down where the numbers into the part stats come from. There are 5 sources

-Expertise: We went over this already, this is Current Expertise x 80%
-Staff: Your Technical Chief has a skill for each part, and your Head of Aero has a skill for every part stat, you take each of these stats and multiply them by 5% (meaning this is up to 10% total)
-Facilities: Design Center, Suspension Sim, and Car Part Test Centre all have values they directly contribute. Up to 5% for most stats with full upgrades, 10% for Tire/Engine Cooling
-Wind Tunnel and CFD: Each of these buildings will tell you how much you gain per unit spent, just multiply the numbers and add to the total

An Example

Here I have a Chassis with 49.09% Drag Reduction. This number breaks down like this going bottom to top from the list:

0%-CFD and WT were not used on this part
3%-Design Center boosts Drag Reduction on Chassis
4.8%-Tech Chief has 96 rating for Suspension
4.25%-Head of Aero has an 85 rating for Drag Reduction
37.04%-Expertise. Take the final 49.09% value and subtract all the above, the remainder is from Expertise. Because Expertise is multiplied by 80%, we know that we were sitting at 46.3% expertise when we made this part. (37.04 / .8)

I've talked a little bit in reference to the design focus sliders already, but here I will explain what they mean and how they work. There is a difference between design and research in the mechanics and function. First we will talk about their usage in Designs.

When I talk about sliders, I'm talking about these things

Note that the lifespan/weight slider is not circled. It plays by it's own rules and is disconnected from the other stats and sliders. You can lower it to give some extra performance to a car at expense of how often it will need replacing, or vice versa. Keep that in mind if I talk about "all sliders", I am never including weight.

Let's look at an example of a couple slider positions and what happens

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We set one high, one low, and 2 mid. Ignore the top and bottom values of Expertise and final stat, that's a distraction. As you move a slider right, you see it's respective Design Focus value gets a positive value. At the same time, it subtracts a value from all other stats. So Drag Reduction has a positive value in it's Drag Reduction line, and Engine Cooling and Airflow have a negative value in their Drag Reduction lines. The inverse happens when you move a slider left, it will subtract from itself and add to the other stats.

These values do not sum up to perfectly negate each other, so the +4.65% in Drag reduction does not mean in total -4.65% will be removed from other stats unless all stats are starting from the same value. Let's look at another example with extreme settings to make this more clear.

First, let's look at Airflow Middle's impact on itself and all other parts. It is adding 14.33% to itself, and subtracts -4.60% from Airflow Front, -4.20% from Engine Cooling, and -3.19% from Drag Reduction. So it is adding 14.33% to itself, and subtracting a total of 11.99% from others

Second, lets look at what the others are doing to Airflow Middle. Engine cooling is adding 3.73% to Airflow Middle, Drag Reduction is adding 4.44%, and Airflow Front is adding 6.16%, these three numbers add up to...14.33%. If you inverted one of the sliders by putting it all the way left, the effect it has on the Airflow Middle would also invert. If you put Drag Reduction to the left for example, it would subtract -4.44% rather than adding it.

The reason for this is that sliders have more impact when a part's stats are lower than when it is higher. So Airflow Middle, being at less than 20% to start with, will be impacted more by sliders than Drag Reduction, which is nearly double the value to start. The usage of this is if you have one stat that is far below the others, you can boost it more with sliders than you will hurt your other stats. Or if you have one stat dominating the rest, you can take a small penalty to it and provide an overall gain with what it adds to the other stats. Best thing to do is play around with the bars and watch your car's performance to find which placement gives you what you're looking for.

The most critical additional item to be aware of is the sliders ONLY relate to the part you are designing, these + and - values do not translate to future part designs. If you are starting from 30% on a part design, and you boost it with sliders, then you go to design another of that part, you will be starting from 30%+Expertise gained from first design.

Also, you do not have to use your latest designed part if you don't want to, and/or you can have a collection of parts with different slider specs for use at different circuits. So you could design 3 underfloors, one with a slider focus into low speed corners, one for high speed corners, and one for top speed if you wanted.

Thirdly, if you want to use the sliders, but don't know where to start, you can just select a focus preset at the top of the window and it will cycle through different settings for different purposes. These are the options the AI is also limited to selecting, they cannot do custom sliders.

Sliders for research work slightly differently from Design. While design sliders provide temporary part specific boosts for short term (current season), research sliders are intended for your expertise gain and long term goals (next/future seasons). You will want to do a mixture of each depending on what is demanding more of your focus.

Unlike in Design, changing the sliders effects other stats equally based on slider ratios, there's no weird relationships. The base value you see under balanced sliders will be adjusted based on the ratios you set between the sliders.

As you can see, if all stats would gain equal amount of value, moving two of those sliders to the same point still keeps them even. But by moving those two left, leaving one middle, and moving one right we've reduced the gain by ~33%, increased by 10%, and increased by 55% respectively. While design allows you to significantly push advantages each part provides in giving certain stats, the power of research is that you can put extra attention into stats that are lagging behind other teams without directly impacting your car's performance to the same extent.

You will also notice any parts/stats getting impacted by regulation impact by looking for stats with (!) next to them. And will be told the % reduction it will be hit by. Unfortunately, this only shows the multiplicative reduction. If you want to see the actual reduction the part will recieve, you will need to go to the Board tab, then Rules and Regulations, and look part by part


A common question is "when do I start doing research". That is something that is up to you and you should consider your own situation. Putting time into research will not improve your present car, but of course ignoring research will hurt your car in the next year. Consider what your board has set for your target goal and your placement vs the AI teams and use your best judgement. Lacking that, the common answer for when to swap from design to research is typically When you hit the summer break.

Otherwise, your priority when doing research should generally be the following

1. Offsetting regulation impacts, by putting focus into the areas getting hit by them. Ideally you'll want to be gaining back everything regulations are going to take from you.
   
2. Boosting up stats you're lacking in. If you prefer making your designs focus on downforce, then this is how you can get a better baseline for drag reduction.
   
3. Personal preference. If regulations are covered and you're good on your other stats, pick your favorite and push the advantage.

The final item we will look at is your 6 time a year ATR allocation of CFD and Wind Tunnel hours. These are special blocks you can allocate to design or research. You do not need to have or to allocate them to any particular project, but you should always be sure to spend them all in every period. There is no wrong method of application, you can split them between multiple projects, or dump them all into one, as long as you use them.

CFD/WT usage has two applications. One only applies to designs, but the other applies in either design or research. Either way, the way you apply them to a project is the same

The first usage of ATR hours is another temporary boost to your part designs. The benefits provided will only apply to the current part you are making and will not carry to any future parts. The more you upgrade your CFD Simulator and Wind Tunnel facilities, the more effect each unit (1 Wind Tunnel hour or .1 CFD hour) will have.

Here's what 50 units of WT and 50 units of CFD is providing in temporary bonus. This is only a level 1 of each building, so it's not a lot, but it's an extra % gained from the 100 total units. The lower a team's finishing position the more hours they recieve. And the higher the facility level, the more boost each unit will give. In theory up to ~5% in all stats besides cooling/preservation. In practice, the most you will see from this will be ~2-3%.

And this is only applied to this part, so the extra 1% I gained here will not be applied to the following part, only whatever expertise is gained. And speaking of that, it's time to talk about the 2nd usage of ATR hours

This is where the true value of your ATR hours lies. Every unit you spend is like doing 1 extra day of normal work on a part. This applies to either design or in research, and the effect adds after you finish the work on the part. This is easier to understand with an example of research, as the numbers there are explicitly expertise related.

Underfloor takes 33 days to complete. And by adding 33 WT units, we have slightly more than doubled our outcome as if it's 66 days. You'll also note that Wind Tunnel itself does not offer any benefit to Airflow Sensitivity, and yet it has increased those numbers anyway. The added expertise applies to ALL stats. In the case of research there is no temporary bonus to be had, this second usage of ATR hours DOES NOT care about your facility levels. If I did this with a level 1 or level 5 Wind Tunnel, the benefit would be identical. But there's one more factor to this to add in, and that is when you adjust the sliders


Same floor with 33 days and 33 WT units. The main thing to note here is that all values have as before, doubled from WT usage. That means you can do a small amount of stacking multipliers here by combining focus sliders and ATR hours. It will process the additional ATR units using the slider settings you set them to. So if you really want to boost a specific stat, this is the way to go.

To reiterate, this second usage always adds days at the NORMAL rate of expertise gain. So it will use your slider settings, but if you are doing an Intense design for 44 days, and do 40 ATR units, you will gain 44 days of expertise at 1.5x and then an additional 40 days at 1x.

Also, while this gain also applies to designs, you will not realize these gains until you do a follow up part. So if you dump all your hours into your Floor at the start of the year, after it completes you will need to design a 2nd floor to actually get the benefit of it (which means that temporary gain may not have given you any real significant benefit).

This is a balanced/all rounder set of sliders that gives an overall boost without much penalty
The overall effect of this at base values is -5% to Drag Reduction and Airflow Sensitivity, +10% to all cornering, +15% to DRS, and +20% to Tyres/Engine. The higher your starting point is for your stats, the less effect there will be, so if you're at 50%, those values will only be about 2/3rds as strong, if you're at 70%, it's only about half as strong. Stripping weight will add effectively a FLAT 10% to any starting point whether it's 30, 50, or 70%, so in all cases you should always be gaining Top Speed over your start point.

Alternative setting options: Taking the suspension Drag Reduction to the left gives +2% Tyre Preservation and about +1% Cornering at the cost of -3% Speed. Taking the Fwing and Floor Airflow Sensitivities down to the left will give you about 3% more cornering and 1% more tyre life at the cost of -10% Dirty Air Tolerance