Race Department Formula One career season 2004
Welcome to the Formula One career season 2004 presented by RaceDepartment. This game is powered by Grand Prix 4 made by Geoff Crammond & MicroProse.
Joining
You can join whenever there's an empty seat (see the driver lineups further down), giving following information:
Driver name: (forename) (name)
Nationality:
Sponsor type: (quali) (race)
First buys:
Activity
Activity will only be checked if there's someone on the waiting list. In that case, repeatedly missing the market place means you'll lose your seat. Else there won't be any penalties, however it's in your own interest to show up and make buys, otherwise you'll hardly have any success.
Helmets
You're allowed to use your custom helmet. The template for painting can be found HERE.
Send me your painted helmets in .psd format via pm.
If you want, you can also use a helmet of a real driver. Just tell me which one in this case.
Liveries won't be updated, simply as that would take too much time.
Race weekends
The races will be simulated with GP4. Every GP has the qualifying and the race. The weather will be set accordingly to the real-life conditions of the respective GP. Qualifying is currently run in the 1 lap format.
Unless stated otherwise, races are currently run once per week, on Saturday/Sunday.
Contracts
Negotiations for new contracts will start close to the end of a season. To receive a renewal from your current team, you should have
a) reached the objective set by the team, or at least be very close to it, and
b) have scored at least half of the points that have been necessary to reach the objective.
Even if you didn't match the objective, it doesn't necessarily mean that you won't receive a renewal offer.
The better you're placed in the driver standings, the better the offers that you'll receive will be. Past achievements will play a role. In your first year with a team, they're more forgiving when failing to match the objetive. When receiving an offer, you have 3 options: accept, decline, or wait. If you get an offer, and decide to wait, don't wait too long, else the team may approach other drivers. You'll be informed if a team withdraws its offer.
Each driver can contact 1 team (current one or another one), letting them know that they'd like to drive for them the following season. You do that in the contract pm I have with each of you. This doesn't guarantee you a seat for that team though. You should keep following things in mind. Don't approach a team that isn't within your range of objectives. If you barely scored any points it's not much use contacting a top team. If the current drivers of a team achieved the objective it's unlikely that the team will sack one of the drivers, you only have a chance if one of the drivers leaves himself.
The length of the contract is 1 year, always.
Point System
Will follow the point system used in the respective F1 season, currently with points for the top 8.
10-8-6-5-4-3-2-1
Cash System & Rewards
Newcomers start with 500$ (+ 50$ for every missed race if they join mid-season).
At the end of a season, every driver is allowed to carry over 1000$ plus the reward for the position in the final standings to the next season. You can decide yourself when you want to start saving money.
Left over money will be stored in the drivers bank account, which is limited to 1000$
After half of a season, the drivers in the bottom half of the standings are allowed to use 500$ of their bank account to make buys. This is to give them a chance to close up a bit to the top.
The WCC reward that the teams get can only be used for car upgrades.
Sponsors
You can choose sponsors (one for quali, one for race) to gain extra money during a race weekend.
It's allowed to change one sponsor during the season, that means either quali or race, at the cost of the new earnings. That means, that if for example you want to change from quali A to quali C, you have to pay 100$, or from race D to race B you have to pay 300$.
Market Place
Between the GPs, you can buy upgrades for car and/or driver with the earned sponsor money. You're not allowed to buy (driver)upgrades for your teammate. Buys have to be posted in the thread.
The skill & variation buys always have to be a multiple of 5/10. This is to make it easier for me to update the performance file.
BHP and cof values have to be whole numbers.
It is allowed to increase/decrease your team's cof/BHP values. This will only affect your own car, the teammate's values won't be increased/decreased.
Team objectives
F1 Career wiki
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