F1 Manager 2022 Effects of various things on laptime

Valid for version 1.6, several of these things may (and absolutely SHOULD) change in later versions

Intro and Explanation of Tests

*Guide presently under reconstruction and additional testing!

This guide is to help people understand how much impact and stress to put into various elements that go into laptime. All tests are controlled as much as possible to only be testing the relevant areas, so setups/knowledge levels, tires, pace, fuel, parts, etc. Unless otherwise stated, all tests are run at Bahrain under race conditions, by pitting on lap 1, then looking at laps 3-7, Mercedes is used as the vehicle. This is run 3 times for anything that is not predetermined (RNG is set seed if certain variables don’t change) and results are looked at, outliers removed, and numbers averaged together. I use both actual lap times and best segments. Actual results may vary by track a little bit due to track length/layout, tire wear/type, weather, fuel amounts, etc. but should hold generally true with slight variation.

Driver Skill

tl;dr: Skill points have about .013 per point in Pace ratings. Which works out to ~.04 seconds per overall rating on average. If you want to increase driver 1 lap speed increase only pace ratings

There are 3 areas of driver performance, each with 3 ratings.

Pace: Cornering, Braking, Reactions. These directly impact your lap times, the best lap a driver can run will be determined by these as it dictates speed through a corner, how early they brake for corners, and how quick they get back on the throttle.

Consistency: Accuracy, Control, Smoothness. These indirectly impact your laptimes, by reducing mistakes, and elongating your tire life

Racecraft: Adaptability, Overtaking, Defending. These situationally impact to your laptimes, helping you drive better in rain, and reducing the amount of time spent fighting with traffic.

Overall rating is approximately an average of all 9 ratings, there appears to be some weighting towards Pace > Consistency > Racecraft

For the purposes of our testing skill, we’re considering 3 sets of numbers. Overall rating, Pace rating(averaged), and Pace+Consistent rating(averaged)

Test results (skill average is after bonus Performance factored in):

Driver	Overall	Pace	Pace+Con	Average lap	Best lap	Time/OVR	Time/Pace	Time/P+C
Hamilton	90	90	92.2	1:40.498	1:40.413
Russell	86	88.3	90	+.166	+.142	.042/.036	.098/.084	.075/.065

Driver	Overall	Pace	Pace+Con	Average lap	Best lap	Time/OVR	Time/Pace	Time/P+C
Hamilton	90	90	92.2	1:40.451	1:40.288
De Vries	74	82	78.6	+.313	+.329	.02/.021	.039/.041	.023/.024

Driver	Overall	Pace	Pace+Con	Average lap	Best lap	Time/OVR	Time/Pace	Time/P+C
Hamilton	90	90	92.2	1:40.395	1:40.144
D. Schumacher	47	49.3	50.8	+1.701	+1.783	.040/.041	042/044	.041/.043

Driver	Overall	Pace	Pace+Con	Average lap	Best lap	Time/OVR	Time/Pace	Time/P+C
Russell	86	88.3	90	1:40.780	1:40.621
De Vries	74	81.7	78.4	+.192	+.174	.016/.015	.029/.026	.017/.015

Driver	Overall	Pace	Pace+Con	Average lap	Best lap	Time/OVR	Time/Pace	Time/P+C
Russell	86	88.3	90	1:40.634	1:40.489
D Shumacher	47	49.3	50.8	+1.538	+1.511	.039/.039	.039/.039	.039/.039

I was suspecting something of a curve possibly existing for legendary skill drivers, so did a little skillpoint hack test (thank you Marco for the edit!)

Driver	Overall	Pace	Pace+Con	Average lap	Best lap	Time/OVR	Time/Pace	Time/P+C
Russell	96	100	100	1:40.080	1:39.925
Hamilton	90	90	92.2	+.382	+.395	.064/.066	.038/.040	.049/.051

Conclusions: The only generally consistent comparison values here are the pace ratings, working out to about .04 seconds per averaged difference, which means .0133~ per point invested into the pace settings. However, the catch is that without points in consistency you will have more lockups, crashes, missed corners, variance in laptime, and tire wear. So of course, don’t ignore those stats.

Other notes: No, I will not try and do this testing with a wet race to try and determine the factor adaptability plays on laptime, just assume more of that skill means better wet weather laptimes.

Practice, Setup, and Bonus Points

tldr: Bonus points are worth ~.12 seconds per lap plus extra consistency from bonus points. Each practice goal itself is worth ~.3 seconds if you max it out so you get ~.9 to 1 second by getting all high scores, which ONLY applies in qualifying and not the race. Setup does NOT need to be “known” by the driver to get the benefit. Setup does not matter for the race at all besides the bonus points.

There are 3 areas of Practice goals:

Track Acclimatization – This increases based on total time on track consecutively, number of laps or speed is irrelevant, doing 25 laps in a 30 minute stint will gain the same as doing 20 laps in a 10 minute stint. The rate it gains increases every 5 minutes on track, until the rate it gains caps after 15 minutes. This timer resets if you pit, lockup, or spin. It is also separate per driver. So the longer you go without stopping or spinning/locking up, the faster this gains. You also need to do 30 minutes per practice session for most XP gain, and 30 minutes equates to 24%. If you go an entire session with no spins or lockups, you can get around 70%

Part Knowledge – This gain is shared for the entire team who has the same part installed regardless of who is driving. Similar to Track gains, this is based solely on time spent in practice, but does not have any rate increases for doing longer stints. When you install a new part, that part starts at 0% knowledge, so you will not see the overall knowledge number increase for some time until the new part catches up.

Setup Confidence – I will not be explaining how to get a good setup, other guides are available to assist. But this is shared for the car itself, so if you put in your reserve driver, you can use them to setup the car and the confidence level will pass equally to them.

It is really difficult to separate the 3 practice goals apart from each other to tell how much difference one makes from another, but here’s my best effort. Bonus points do not matter here, as I used cheater all 100s Russell and he gained 0 stat bonus, they cap at 100 if they can.

(Track/Parts/Setup, ? means they did not practice with the setup, they do show listed confidence in setup for race)

Goals Score	Q results	Race Average	Race Best
100/68/98	1:31.224	1:40.131	1:40.008
0/62/98	+.333	0.000	-.030
0/6/98	+.457	0.000	-.030
0/0/98?	+.439	0.000	-.030
0/0/14?	+.735	0.000	+.041

Conclusions: It’s a little bit inconsistent, but my analysis is that each set of goals is worth about .3 seconds, but is entirely irrelevant for the race itself, they only apply for qualifying for some reason. I’m going to hope this is a bug. For setup itself, clearly the driver doesn’t need to have a defined confidence level in it, and also the bonus points do appear to apply if you’ve already gained them, so if you feel like you can tweak it better, by all means do so. After each qual session you should get a defined confidence level again, so extra chances to tweak.

Extra notes: Here’s a nice site for helping you dial in your setup if you have as much pain as I do trying to fiddle with it manually when I know exactly which way I want things to move.

(this will be inserted once I’m not fiddling with guide, it delays the time it takes to save)

Pace and Fuel Modes

tl;dr: Setting pace slower is about .5 seconds slower per step down, and .35 seconds faster per step up from Normal. With fuel it’s much more complicated, but is about .75 slower to conserve, and .3 faster to push

Pace and fuel are your primary method, along with ERS to setting your overall race speed and have the largest effect on your laptimes besides driver skill. This section will look only at the settings and adjust to negate measuring the fuel/tyre wear difference between the modes.

Pace: 5 settings, conserve, light, standard, aggressive, attack. The lower the mode, the less your tyres overheat, the less your engine overheats, and just generally the car as a whole is preserved more. It’s of course the flip side for high modes, your tyres will get quite hot, your PU parts will degrade faster, and the car is more on edge and likely to spin or lockup.

Fuel: 3 settings, conserve, balanced, push. Higher settings, more time on throttle, enter corners later, come out of corners earlier. There will be a section on fuel/fuel delta/fuel usage further down. Straightforward in theory.

Below are the results for pace and fuel modes:

Pace:

Mode active	Average Lap	Best Lap
Normal	1:39.470	1:39.288
Conserve	+1.011	+1.032
Light	+.553	+.497
Aggressive	-.358	-.399
Attack	-.723	-.738

Fuel:

Mode active	Average Lap	Best Lap
Balanced	1:39.470	1:39.288
Conserve	+.805	+.762
Push	-.319	-.345

Conclusions: There is some adjusting done here because fuel level makes a measurable difference fairly rapidly, so we need to lower the high mode times a bit and raise the low mode times a bit. So for pace, it looks like if you drop your pace down you’ll lose half a second for each step down you go, and you gain less than that if you increase your pace it’s .35 per step roughly.

Fuel was significantly harder to test and I had to try multiple methods until I found one even reasonably consistent, this one I’m giving a range between about .6-.75 slower for conserving fuel, and .3-.4 faster if you are pushing fuel.

Additional notes: Pace is mostly unaffected by your fuel level/delta so you will see more consistently approximately the gains I have listed for adjusting pace. But your fuel levels and delta will heavily, heavily impact how much actual gain/loss you see when fidgeting with your fuel mode, to the point where sometimes there will be no difference between two modes. It’s because of this testing that there will be an entire section on fuel usage and it’s impact to try and crack that shell.

Testing results

Old portion of the guide below.

All attempts at minimizing the effects of anything else and limit testing to JUST each area was done to the best of the ability there is in game to try and do so. Also keep in mind that there will be differences because some tracks are long, some are shorter, some have a lot of DRS zones, some have just little ones. Tire wear, fuel usage, etc. This works for your average track, adjust a bit using logic as track dictates.

Fuel

• I could go on a whole diatribe about fuel amounts making no sense, as having several laps of -lap delta will give even more speed boost (~.1-.2 per lap when “capped” at about -10% of remaining distance) and your ACTUAL kg remaining means nothing, but mostly if you keep the last 40% of a race on “normal” fuel burn, your driver will adjust and delta will recover, especially if you get stuck in a train (you will, that’s 90% of every race). But if it IS positive towards the end, then the kg remaining is more important because you can have laps of fuel delta remaining when that hits 0 and you are out of fuel. No, this is a mini diatribe, the full diatribe is 3 times as long.
• Further note on fuel, better drivers will burn MORE fuel as they get out of corners better, you may also need to back pace down to save enough fuel in time.

Tyre compounds

• Softs are .2 faster than mediums are .1 faster than hards new to new, but the falloff between them varies depending on track and by your driver’s smoothness. It isn’t much, New softs won’t outrun DRS of old hards if the cars are close enough in power, but it can help for pit stop differences.
• Drys lose double digit seconds in 1mm or more conditions, and vice versa for wets/inters in dry
• In 1-4mm wetness, inters are .2 seconds faster than wet, in 4mm+ wets are .2 faster than inters. Yes, even if the track is basically a lake inters remain only .2 slower. Also those tyres will last for easily entire races in any form of wet conditions (I’ve seen wets say 147 laps of duration) so full push mode unless your drivers have poor control.
• Wets will wear much more rapidly if used in 1-4mm range, inters and wets will rapidly degrade in dry conditions.

ERS

• Harvest will lose ~1 second per lap compared to neutral
• Deploy will gain ~1.5 seconds per lap if able to fully utilize the power
• Other modes gain ~1 second per lap if able to fully utilize the power
• All modes seem equal if battery is drained (besides harvest), EXCEPT for overtake/defend if there is a car nearby where they will use it more for position rather than pace.

DRS

• Is absolutely stupid and is also worth ~.5 seconds for a standard DRS zone, little more for longer, little less for shorter. So depending on track, you’re looking at typically between 1-2 seconds per lap gained on that alone, which is why the leapfrogging is so much faster.

Basic strat calls

Track position is absolute king, of course. 1 stop is generally the way to go to keep ahead and not benefit a DRS train of slower cars you’d have to work through.

Always try to be undercutting, then push absolute maximum while the rest of your prepit train pits, you might be able to pull away enough on your stop that they don’t get a tow.

TECHNICALLY, doing a full aggression pace race is faster, even if it means a two stop. But considering DRS is broken, the time gain is mooted because the slower pace cars can just fart around behind you and be VERY hard to get to go away unless you severely outclass them (or if Latifi decides to be your hero when you lap him), I’ve had success with this method, I’ve had races where just two stopping and taking the slower overall pace would keep me out of the train long enough to get away. Very track dependent, usually great on minimal DRS tracks, and bad for long/multiple DRS tracks

If you are a fan of pain, FULL ATTACK can be even faster at tracks with lower tyre wear rates. But even high skill drivers will screw this one up at some point in a race and lose all that time gain by spinning or running wide.

Regardless of what strat you do, your tyre choice doesn’t matter as long as you’re not taking them below 30% (1 second per lap time loss!) and you use two types.

With rain, you only want to swap tyres once, from drys to inters/wets, and then back to drys. With only .2 seconds between inters and wets, there will never be enough laps to justify going dry-Inter-wet or vice versa. And even if you’re fully pushing pace on them, they won’t wear enough to justify it either in almost every case.

ERS can be high risk, high reward, swapping to harvest mode in a train of cars that outclass you can quickly become a death sentence. Also the mode it is in dictates your drivers strategy more than pace or fuel will. They’ll still go for passes/blocks in Neutral or deploy, but they will only put in standard effort. Even with no battery, attack/defend mode will make them far more aggressive about it. In Harvest mode they become VERY conservative and won’t really go for passes or blocks unless they feel super up to it.