F1 Manager 2023 Design and Research Mechanics

F1 Manager 2023 Design and Research Mechanics

F1M23 (V1.3) Explanation of mechanics behind car design and research.

Intro and Major Changes from F1M22

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
• Times for doing design and research have been adjusted, everything sits between 30-45 days before engineer counts and rapid design
• Parts now have durability, and you will be constantly making parts
• Slider positions now make ZERO difference towards expertise gain when used in Design, all stats will gain at 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.
• Moving the sliders now has no impact on the time a part takes or costs, right or left
• 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
• Stats now are interconnected more and balanced between the parts. So a godly floor and bad other parts may have less 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

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

Chapter 1: Parts and Stat Basics

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

• Top Speed: Max speed your car can achieve. As last year, the max range on this is only about 10 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. Nearly all of this stat is determined by engine choice
• 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 you shouldn’t let it fall too far behind the field either as even the fastest cars need this for good Qualifying
• 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 .5 seconds, 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.

Parts

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

Part Stats

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: Acts as a multiplier to overall Low and Medium Speed Cornering*
• Airflow Middle: Acts as a multiplier to overall Medium and High Speed Cornering*

Cooling

• Brake Cooling: Improves Brake Cooling
• Engine Cooling: Improves Engine Cooling

Durability

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

*These stats are interesting as they do not actually effect anything on their own. The higher these %s are, the more the other parts with downforce stats will improve cornering performance. If you have very high downforce, but your airflow is poor, then those big numbers are multiplied by a small number, and vice versa if you have high airflow and low downforce.

For a great example from a fresh career file, the Williams has parts with High Speed Downforce that rivals Red Bull, but their car performance in that area is well below the Red Bulls. This is because their Airflow stats on the relevant parts are well below what Red Bull is capable of. So you can pump your underfloor downforce up to the maximum, but if you do not improve the sidepods, chassis, and suspension, you will never realize those improvements fully.

**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”.

Time and costs

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

Part	Time	Cost
Chassis	30 days	$700,000
Front Wing	45 days	$1,600,000
Rear Wing	43 days	$1,450,000
Sidepods	35 days	$1,000,000
Underfloor	43 days	$1,450,000
Suspension	40 days	$1,300,000

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%)

Chapter 1 Notes

• Your most important and impactful parts to pure pace are, in order: Underfloor, Front Wing, Rear Wing
• Sidepods, Suspension, and Chassis are not vital, but should not be ignored as they act as multipliers to the other parts
• The most important part/car stats for pure pace are the Downforce/Cornering ones of Low, Medium, and High speed
• Airflow Front and Middle are multipliers to the above and should not fall too far behind the field as you need high Front for Low/Medium corners and high Middle for Medium/High corners
• 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
• 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

Chapter 2: Stats and Their Sources

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.

Car Performance Stat Relationships

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 rough approximation of how much each part can contribute in a single run to car performance on the high end

Every part has it’s role to play

Individual Part Stat Calculations

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 (This was 80% in last year’s game)
• 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 (5-10% bonuses)
• 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 (looks to be 5-10% with high skill staff)
• 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 all tie into the focus sliders in step 2 of design which we will cover later.

Individual Part Stat Calculations-Research

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:

Current Expertise Level x Regulation reduction + Facilities and Staff + Previous research
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.

Chapter 2: Notes

• 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

Chapter 3: Expertise

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.

What is expertise and how does it relate to parts

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 that Rear Wing’s drag, it will not benefit the value for any other Rear Wing stat, nor Drag reduction for any other part.

Expertise and Design

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 expertise gain on the part with just 1 engineer working on it.

IMPORTANT CHANGE FROM LAST YEAR: Focus sliders make 0 difference to your daily expertise gain. It does not matter what you set them to, every single stat for a part will gain at the daily rate.

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)

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 slightly less than 1.5x improvement than 40 days of normal design.

The calculation for these daily gains appears unchanged from last year, where expertise is a % value between 0 and 100%

(1-[Expertise])/1000Here'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.

Expertise and Research

Research is much more straightforward, except that the focus sliders come into play here, but we will cover that in detail later. 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 only method to control your expertise progress directly.

First we'll talk a little about regulation impacts. Each year there will be regulations that will take 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 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 system and there will be a chapter devoted to it later.

Chapter 3: Expertise Flow

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.

Event	Current Expertise	Regulation Expertise	Research Expertise
You start your career with a Current Expertise on a Rear Wing Drag Reduction of 45.	45	0	0
You design a new Rear Wing and gain 2% Expertise on completion, this is fed directly into Current Expertise	47	0	0
Regulations come out, and Drag Reduction is taking a 10% hit across the board	47	-4.7	0
You complete a research on Rear Wing to gain 6% on Drag Reduction research benefit	47	-4.7	6
You design a new Rear Wing and gain 2% Expertise on completion	49	-4.9	6
End of Year has come, your Regulation Expertise penalty is applied and cleared	44.1	0	6
Start of Year begins, your Research Expertise bonus is applied and cleared, your new car will start with this value on it’s Rear Wing Drag Reduction	50.1	0	0

Chapter 3: Notes

• 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 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 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 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 only way to control specifically where you are allocating expertise gains via slider focuses

Chapter 4: Focus Sliders and Design

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, presuming that’s even possible this time as the AI looks to be much better at keeping up with the player.

What are sliders?

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.

What do they do? (Design)

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.

Important takeaways

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.

Chapter 4: Notes

• 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, nor 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

Chapter 5: Focus Sliders and Research

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 only method where you can adjust things to get better than just default rate gain on any particular stat, and regulation hits are rarely equal across the board. If you are taking a huge hit to your Airflow multipliers, 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 140% higher than what they were before, while the other stats are now 30% 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. 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.

What to takeaway

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.

Chapter 5: Notes

• 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 only method to control your expertise distribution
• Keeping your sliders “balanced” by moving equal amounts left and right will only have minor impact on your total gains, but 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

Chapter 6: CFD and Wind Tunnel

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, functioning very differently in each area. The further up the field you finish in the previous year, the fewer of each you will receive in each period.

Using CFD and WT hours in 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.

• 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.

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” So I can’t really show you a picture example of the specific impact it has.

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 an enormous boon when applied to your 3 core parts (floor, front wing, rear wing)

Using CFD and WT hours in research

And now for something else entirely! Research operates in a completely different manner with CFD and WT resource investment. To start with, your facility level means absolutely nothing. 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.

Secondly, CFD/WT does not act an additive bonus to your research, instead it is multiplicative. If you read last years guide, you might be having flashbacks, but math comes later.

Lets see an example before and after applying hours.

Ok, before anyone panics looking at those numbers and realizing I said it’s a multiplier, this is Williams and they have just a pile of hours from being dead last and I tossed every one of them into this one thing. This is effectively a catchup mechanic for both player and AI and the higher up a team finishes, the less hours they have to use.

The multiplier is effectively linear as you increase hours and is an extra 3% per unit you apply to either CFD or WT. As mentioned, these gains are calculated daily, so because the daily gains are increasing at a higher rate, the diminishing effect kicks in faster and harder each day. With 10 units of each into a part (20 total), rather than getting an extra 60% in total of gains, you will be around 55%. And with this Williams massive injection of 161 units, rather than anywhere remotely near 483%, it is instead “only” around 410%

Chapter 6: Notes

• 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 used in Design are Additive and will give bonuses directly to your designed part based on how many units you spend and what level your relevant facilities are at
• This additive bonus does not carry to future parts
• CFD/WT hours used in Research are Multiplicative and will multiply your research results by 3% daily per each unit you spend. Facility level has no effect on this in any way.
• Using hours in research effectively makes them “permanent” and will carry year to year in expertise subject to regulation penalties
• If you break the cost cap, you might suffer an ATR penalty (Red Bull starts with this, unclear if it’s one of the cost cap penalties available in the game if you break it)