This is the main menu screen of the game
The only buttons that are functioning are the New Game, Quit and Continue. The two first are obvious, the third just loads a preset save game file. This will be modified so it will load the last saved game file. After that the Load Game is just a simple step over the Continue button. Let's click on New Game. *click*
A wild rudimentary New Game Menu appears. The player profile screen that lets you enter some details about you and...
...the team selection screen. Still not much to look at and not with as much info as i intend to make it display. We see that Febrari has good drivers but not a very good car (part performances are totally random at this point).
MagLoren Mercenary has a car of about the same level as Febrari but worse drivers... Anyway, lets choose Febrari. *clicks Let's Play*. This takes us to the team central screen.
Here we have a summary of important aspects of the team. Current/next seaosn drivers drivers and staff, sponsorship values, suppliers, RnD current project and next season car progress. Also we can see here the next race along with a summary of the driver and team standings.
Lets click the Drivers button to look at them
Ferdinando Alfonso is our first driver. I could swear that he reminds me of someone... Well it is probably random luck or coincidence...
Miki is our second driver. He is good too. While our third driver is ok.
The button Car Assignments lets us decide who drives which of the two team cars. Still a plain window for the moment...
Lets check another driver...
Cool... An 18 year old Levi Hammerton... He might do well...
Lets check our staff...
A good Chief Designer, but the low department infrastructure means that we can hire only up to 10 staff... We are a rich team so we can hire 3 more as this is a crucial department. And after that we will go to the facilities screen to upgrade the Design Studio building.
Hiring some staff for our factory too.
The same for the wind tunnel
and the assembly hall
commercial department looks ok
and we hire some race crew as well.
Before we go to the RnD screen, we can check our car parts in the Assembly screen
Lets check our external aerodynamic parts... From the vertical bar besides the various parts we can observe that only the Rear Wing, the Diffuser and the Underbody are of good quality. All the other parts are rubish... oh well... We probably wont have a good chance in the coming race, even though our drivers are good.
Internally...
we see that we lack quality in suspension, cooling and fuel system. Obviously we dont have time to greatly upgrade all these. Remember we have a bad Design department that can hold only 10 staff at maximum...
The driver aids are currently all considered illegal, so we will not spend time researching them. Besides, this screen needs work too
So, lets go to the RnD screen to see what we can do...
we have added to the research queue the Nose, Deflector, Front Wing, and Suspension. Notice that each part has a value of "Available Data" meaning that if the current part isn't studied a lot, then we will waste our money and manhours researching an upgrade for it. We will not get the full potential for its upgrade,
Another important concept is that each part has a maximum improvement potential. This is determined by the design of other parts. Generally, the mechanical package of the car affects the aerodynamic parts, by asking our designers to maximize aero performance but also fit the parts into a drivable car.
For example, the front wing performance is restricted by the quality of the brakes, because air has to pass through not for downforce but for brake cooling.
This way, an initial bad car design can't achieve 100% performance, no matter how much money we can throw to it.
To continue with our game, we can see that our low staffed department will take over a month (this is just an estimate) to complete the first project. Lets take out the wips nad make them work overtime.
There at most we can shave-off about 12 days off research... It is something... The Completion moved from 2/2/2013 down to 22/1/2013
Lets look at our sponsors...
Here i have filtered out any other sponsors and we can see out 5 sponsors only. Our performance affects their attitude, even though our highly famous team makes things a lot easier. If their interest dromps, we can assign staff to bother them until they increase their interest and we can invite them as VIPs to races (unless another team beats us to it).
Our suppliers...
Teams that have works engines (as our Febrari or the Mercenary team) will not have the option to change engines, ever!
Remember when we said that our facilities were not good enough? Lets go to the appropriate screen to fix that
Just pressing the upgrade button to a few 1 star facilities and buildings makes our budget go down a bit, as you can also see in the following plain screen that breaks down our finances, under the upgradeBuildings and upgradeEquipment entries
Time to check the season's calendar, right?
These screens will look a lot better once we complete a race Right now the races have equal chance to appear on any date of the season. I have let them be like that for now. But of course there is a system so the game can make a race to appear in roughly the same period of the season. We simply can't have Monaco appear in October...
The news screen shows us the welcome message of our team and the RnD projects we added before!
Pressing Continue the game moves forward until next Friday or if an important evemt comes up that need your attention (like a response to contract offer or part upgrades etc). If you want a daily progress you simply click the date on the top right.
lots of activity and some staff resignations for us... :'(
Lets check our RnD progress
Our research seems to slow down even on full overtime... It is expected as some of the Rnd stages are also affected by other department in a slight degree... (such as building a prototype is affected by the Manufacturing dept)
But oh luck... look
by some miracle, (maybe a breakthrough?) we researched a new nose for our cars a week earlier... Lets see its details...
the new nose is 2% better in performance but a bit heavier. Anyway... i think it is better to add it to the car design
A new deflector too... lets add this as well
Some more upgrades to queue but we probably won't be ready before the first race of the season
On Friday before the race weekend the game stops us to the assembly screen once, so we can make a final review of our cars...
You see we have upgraded nose, front wing and deflectors. We can try with these... But it seems that the race will not be easy for us...
Loaded the monaco race. I have been using it as a generic track since it was on of the first i made. Probably not a good choice because generally it is hard to have overtakes and many cars retire espexially when slower cars constantly block faster ones that cant find opportunity to pass them... We'll see
In Q1...
things dont look very good... Ferdinando shows already that we will have a hard weekend, while Miki is slow but 1.5+ seconds faster than his teammate...
lets send out Ferdinando with the softer tyres and see if we are lucky
tough luck... he move up from 23rd to 18th place... So unless he drives extremely well (hard with the kind of car we gave him) he probably is out of the Q2...
he improved his time a bit but still he is out of Q2
After the first Q2 stints...
even with the soft compund Miki is 1 second slower then the 10th place time... I gues this is all we can do fo now...
Miki ended up in the 13th place and 2.189 seconds slower... The Green/Yellow Source Madagascar cars are amazing indeed 
Final quailification standings
we start from the 13th and 18th places. We can hope to at least finish the race, or maybe some accident or Safety Car can help us gain something...
Just started the race... We can see the automatically generated race strategy. We can change it but later, after we see how the tyre wear will go.
Lap2... No overtakes or any event yet...
Lap3... Current car tyres in use... Oh! And DRS is enabled... Alfonso though is unlikely to make use of it since he is already 1.5 seconds behind his front car...
Green RDS lettering means that Miki will have RDS active in the RDS Zone as is revealed by the green square and the pink colour of the drivers' names in the next screen
Lap17... Fastest lap by Rolf Shoemaker for Toyomi...
Lap24... Alfonso will pit in... (and fastest lap by Bruce Benner)
an abysmal pit stop. 5.3 seconds... Maybe our race dept needs better morale or better staff too
almost the same for Miki... 5.9 seconds
Lap 42... seems that Miki is not wearing his tyres a lot. So we push the next pitstop to the 50th lap and make him put soft tyres again.
Lap67... At last.. after laps and laps behind the much slower Zeb Wettowel, Kimi overtakes him and moves to 11th place!!! Still not much hope for points... At least we should finish the race
Lap73... The battle for 2nd place ends in disaster for Toyomi and Labaezin. Shoemaker and Bradley have a contact and both retire! Miki is 9th and into the points totally unexpectedly!!!!
So the race finished with no more surprises...
Lets see the championship standings screen now
So that is that for the first 3 and a half in-game months... I hope you enjoyed this little playthrough as i enjoyed making it!
Any comments/suggestions are welcome and encouraged!
The IRM team
Looks awesome man, been waiting a long time for a good F1 management game, impatient to try that Demo when it comes out :)