New Manager's Guide - Open Wheel Formula

This guide is designed to help new managers get the most out of their drivers. It covers everything from creating a new driver to setting up your garage, refining your driving style, training effectively, managing employees, handling finances, optimizing race setups, and planning for future success.

1. Overview

This guide provides a step-by-step approach to managing your driver’s career, including:

2. Starting a New Driver

New Driver Notes

You don't need a new account to create a new driver. However, if your current driver is 18, you must retire them before creating another 18-year-old driver.

The age of the driver in the beginning determines how many skill points you get to assign while creating the driver. Starting at 18 you get less skill points, but you will gain more through training. The older a driver gets the slower they can train their skills.

Note: The most optimal day to make a new driver is day 70/77. Doing so will mean you get the 500k bonus from your uncle to kick start your drivers career. You could also use this to jump straight into a F4 regional or National series.

Retiring Your Current Driver

Click Driver in the left navigation and select End Career at the top. Alternatively, use the retirement link ("Retire Driver Now!"). Note: This action is irreversible.

Process to Create a New Driver

  1. Click your profile image in the top right and select Create Driver (do this twice).
  2. Choose Circuit Racing as your career path and Open Wheel Formula as your specialization.
  3. Select your country, enter a driver name, and click Next Step.

Driver Age & Attributes

Age: Set the driver’s age to 18 for optimal training potential (drivers age 1 year every 77 days). If you can’t set the age to 18, it may mean you have another driver within 5 years of that age.

Attributes: On the Driver Attributes page, invest all points into:

New Driver Attributes

3. Garage Setup

Accessing the Garage

The garage (found in the left navigation) is where you configure your cars for different racing series. You can access the garage here: Garage.

Building a New Car

Building a new car is free. For F4 cars, from our testing we suggest the configuration TAT2 F4 - HON F4 - PIR is a good choice, however there is not much in it between the configurations for F4.

  1. In the "Formula 4" dropdown, click Build a new car.
  2. Enter the recommended build configuration.
  3. Click Create car!
Build a new car

Configuring Tyre and Repair Settings

Explanation:

Finally, click Save Usage and Save Settings.

F4 Garage Settings

4. Driving Style

Customize your driver’s racing style by clicking Driver in the left navigation and then Driving Style, or by visiting this link.

Since new drivers (starting at 18) are less experienced, avoid overly aggressive settings that can lead to mistakes and DNFs. Use the recommended settings as shown in the image below, and keep tyre aggressivity at 100 for extra speed early on without the risk.

If you want to understand more in depth as to what each individual setting does on this screen then visit this link.

Driving Style

5. Training

Why Training Matters: Training is crucial for developing a driver with the potential to reach F1. It impacts race performance, sponsorship deals, and even car setups. Getting the important skills such as intelligence trained first is key, as the older your driver gets the slower his training gets till 33. At 33 your driver cannot improve his skills anymore.

Driver with intelligence 100 trains two times faster than driver with intelligence 50.

Training Strategy

  1. Starting points: When creating our driver we should of set our attribute points into personal skills all to 80. Intelligence, Charisma, Man Management.
  2. Intelligence: Next, we focus on getting intelligence to 100 through regular training and extra training.
  3. Other Personal Skills: After taking intelligence to 100, we then train Man Management to 100, followed up with Charisma to 100 after. If we train man management first then the employees will become more efficient and you will train faster.
  4. Driving Skills: Following other personal skills we then take Pace and Racing Line both to 100 through a mix of regular and extra training.
  5. Mental Focus + Other Skills: Once pace and racing line are 100 we then put out main focus on increasing our 5 mental skills. "Bravery", "Concentration", "Composure", "Reactions" and "Patience". At the same time though we should also consider doing the occasional training for other skills such as fitness. You can see a list of what each skill does for the driver at this Link
  6. Driver ages to 26: Once your driver reaches the age of 26 it then becomes key to start training In-Race Adjustments through your regular training while again still training other skills with a secondary focus on your mental skills.
Training Flow

Training Options

6. Employees

Role of Employees: Employees are crucial to your driver’s development. While an employee is employed by any driver their attributes will slightly improve as a result of gaining experiences with using the skills.

Click the following link to see what each employee type does: Link

Sometimes one employee can handle both roles, which is ideal. Check the Employees Market to view available options.

Example of good employee

Who to hire?

For the start of your driver since we are training personal skills we want a personal coach. Ideally hire a personal coach with the highest personal coach skill. 90+ is ideal.

Mentioned below in the finances section are race engineers and PR managers. These are not essential for your rookie season. Once you make the jump to a F4 regional/national series you could higher a Race engineer, but it is only worth doing this if you have the spare income to do so. With the PR manager you need to make sure the benefits from better sponsors pay for his wage and more otherwise you will just loose more money.

Instead of hiring outside of a personal coach you could save your money each week for more extra 1 day training.

Employees Retiring

Note: Each employee has a contract length. Once that contract comes close to ending you need to renew it with them. Once that employee hits 61/62 years old they WILL retire. The cost to renew a employees contract is dependant on the length you renew it for.

When it is coming towards the employees age of 61/62 you need to consider if you want to keep that employee for much longer while looking for a replacement. Employees age on day 1 of each season and when your employees hit 61/62 years of age there is a chance they then will tell you they are retiring at the end of the current contract.

That means that the best way to approach this is try make the current contract of an employee aged 60 come for renewal as close to the last day of that season and the renew their contract for as long as possible. If on day 1 there employee page does not say they are retiring at the end of the current contract then do the same for the new season as they will retire hitting 62 years of age.

Retiring Employee

7. Finances

Managing your finances is key to funding training, hiring employees, and supporting race strategies.

Always budget for staff wages and daily training costs as the only income for the entire season till the results and rich Uncle appears are sponsors.

8. Races and Setups

Your performance in F4 races relies on both race strategy and car setup. During the setup, both the Wings and Gears are the same as another driver. So you can use another drivers Wings and Gears if they tell you. However EVERYTHING else is different per driver.

Regular drivers are allowed to participate in up to 2 Formula Single races at the same time where as superlicense holders can participate in up to 3 Formula Single races.

Note: F4 cars hold a maximum of 40L of fuel. Do not go beyond this!

Setup Process

  1. Accepting a Race: You can visit this link to see what races are currently available. Once accepted, the race appears under "Your Races" with both Qualifying and Race sessions. You should only accept rookies quick races for F4 and normal F4 quick races once you cant accept the rookies ones anymore at the start as that is where you will get your rating the quickest. Single Races will lock up a race slot for 2 days, you can only have so many active races accepted.
    First Setup Second Setup
    • Set all "Driving Style" options (Risky Drive, Tyre Aggressivity, and Mechanical Aggressivity) to 1.
    • Choose the appropriate tyre set based on weather: use fresh Slicks if the track condition is below 30%; use Wets if it’s 30% or above.
    • Adjust stint fuel so it stays within a 40L limit to avoid running out during a stint. Also ensure tyre life stays above 30%. If you break either of these rules there is a chance of an incident during your stint and you will lose that stint and another leading to less setup data.
    • Use test run recommendations to adjust settings in 16-point increments initially. (e.g., from 50 to 34 or 50 to 66) Once you have a smaller red bar suggested that is only 16 wide then move 8 points into the middle.
    • Click Save Setup! when done. Then click on "Qualification Tactics" at the top to move on to the next step.
  2. Qualification Tactics: Qualification Setup
    • If there are two qualification runs, increase the "Risky Drive" setting on the second run (e.g., from 50 to 70) to potentially secure a faster lap.
    • Ensure the correct tyres are selected based on the weather conditions as mentioned above. Also if the race is going to use 2 sets of tyres then only use 1 set for qualification as normally you would use 2 sets in practice already. If you are only using 1 set of tyres in the race then you could use 2 sets for qualification, a new set for each run.
    • In qualification we also set both tyre agressivity and mechanical agressivity both to 100.
    • Click Save Setup! when done. Then click on "Race Strategy" at the top to move on to the next step.
  3. Race Strategy: Tyre Agressivity Change
    • Select appropriate tyres for race start and pit stops.
    • If a second pit stop is required, then you will need to set the Tyre Agressivity as highlighted below to 100 as it will be default 0.
    • Click Save Setup! to finalize.

Weather

Weather is a very important feature. It affects downforce of the car, especially when the track is not dry. The weather is always the same for everyone during qualification.

The race is a completely different story here. The race starts with announced weather, but this can change during the race. Of course you will get some weather forecasts, but that is not always perfectly accurate.

Weather Dry Weather Wet

Track Conditions

The track condition in the game is represented by four images which can be seen below

Track Condition

If you want to get the optimal speed out of your car during a wet race you potentially will need to make some setup changes after. For instance if you did you practice in dry conditions and then the race is in 100% wet tack conditions (see next section) then you will need to change the gears down and the front and rear wing up. Then the oppiste if its practice in wet and race is dry

The below are examples of how to change setup. (This is more a work of art to getting it perfect as the weather can change during a race. A race might start flooded but then clear up dry; and in that case you wouldnt want to change the setup)

Note: In MRC wet weather you put the gears down which is backwards to real life. This is just how it works.

9. Going Forward

Maintain your training schedule and manage finances carefully. Early improvements in your race rating unlock better sponsorship deals. Use your rich Uncle’s money wisely—invest in regional or national F4 series for higher ratings rather than spending all funds immediately as you will get more rating from a Regional or National series.

Good luck and drive to success!

Updates: