The game naturally divides into 2 parts: headquarters stuff and track stuff. The game is also naturally time-driven; that is the main inviolable constraint both in the headquarters and at the track.
At HQ, you have a finite number of staff, each with finite time and energy, because there’s a calendar of races that will impose a rhythm. At a certain point you need to load up the trucks and go to the next race!
At the track, the race weekend is strictly scheduled. If you need to do things like repair the cars, you can to some extent, but the next session won’t wait for you.
Both environments can have a fairly high level of pressure sometimes – easily forgotten when all we see from the outside is the sanitized view through the camera! Pressure can bring out the best from the team in a rush of adrenaline, but it’s also where corners might need to be cut, and where mistakes might happen.
The third natural constraint in the world of privateer F1 teams is money – if you don’t balance the books, things don’t last long at all! As the boss, your role is all about hiring the right people, supporting them with the resources they need, managing their efforts, and keeping the lights on so they can keep working miracles.
By hiring more/higher calibre staff, you can give yourself more time to do things to the standard you’d want – but obviously this trades off against higher operating costs. The main sources of money are prize money, sponsorship, and TV money – all three of which are heavily influenced by performance. However, there’s been notable exceptions through the history of the sport, where people have been able to punch far above their weight through individual genius.
Lotus and Tyrell are nice examples of technical genius being able to overpower financial muscle. More recently, Eddie Jordan has been an amazing example of finding ways to land seemingly insane commercial deals to fund a climb through the rankings.
Part of making this a compelling game in the context of historic F1 is that all these constraints will need to evolve. It wasn’t until the late 1960s that the first sponsor logos started to appear on cars; the payroll of a 1970s team would be very different to a 1990s team, and they would spend their days doing very different things, with very different equipment.
Often these things came in as step changes – one team made a breakthrough, and the rest would scramble to follow, or risk being left behind. I want to try and make a compelling mechanism for introducing these breakthroughs in an organic way.
A lot of the game will be about making investments in experiments that your staff come up with as ways to move the team forwards. A lot of them will be dead ends, but the ones that pay off will give you a massive leap forward ahead of your rivals. At the same time though your rivals will be trying to make their own leaps forward, and sometimes you’ll be trying to reverse-engineer and play catch-up. It should be a messy world of uncertainty, but that’s what makes it fun and rewarding!