Choosing Your Team Mate In F1 2020, First Look At Driver Ratings

We got the first glimpse today of the ‘My Team’ functionality of F1 2020 when the F1 Web site published some details on driver ratings. Driver ratings, contract terms (cost, salary, buyout) are things you’ll be using to hire yourself a team mate.

This is an interesting topic for me because I’ve been editing and using A.I. parameters since NASCAR Racing (1994), where I would read the top-20 result from the past weekend in Autosport magazine back in the UK (no TV coverage at that time), and edit the A.I. to give myself a realistic race result. I also worked out the statistics for some of the A.I. in rFactor 2 that you can use, such as the 2012 Formula 2 content (this being a good example because there’s a full field of drivers included). You’ve got to put a fair amount of logic into it, and if a driver always qualifies poorly but finishes well you need to not only give them less qualifying and greater race pace, but you need to consider their reaction time at the start and aggression when passing, too.

So it is with that knowledge that I look at these driver ratings and wonder exactly how this is going to work:

(More driver rating cards will be published on formula1.com prior to game release).

Based on their own descriptions (below) it is Pace and Awareness that should affect how things actually end up in a race situation as in this age of DRS being an effective ‘overtaker’ is far less important. I look at the figures above with some confusion seeing Lance Stroll (who I don’t think is as bad as many seem to) scored with 83 pace and Pierre Gasly at 80. It seems to me that they have balanced the A.I. not only with the driver numbers but the outright pace of the car, too, so that Gasly may well beat Stroll because his car is faster…

Except, the drivers change teams, don’t they? I’m really worried that they have gone about this backwards. If Lance Stroll is in the Alpha Tauri does he then destroy Sergio Perez in the Racing Point? Should he?

Then again, Codemasters could literally have just plugged these numbers in after plucking them out of the air, and they may actually make no difference when the driver remains at their default team(s). They might just become this driver when you hire them for yours…

Experience – A higher experience score will help players collect a greater number of ‘Resource Points’, used in the game to buy car upgrades.

Racecraft – A higher racecraft score allow the driver to unleash more effective overtakes.

Awareness – A higher score here will mean the driver is less likely to lose control of their car when the going gets tough.

Pace – Quite simply, the higher the pace score, the more rapid a driver will be throughout a race.