The first season was respectable, 5th place and 20 points which under the 1989 rules is quite a lot.
At the end of the seasons our only top driver, the mischievous Piquet left, and finding a replacement for him turned out to be a huge problem because wages have almost doubled it seems. Nobody wanted to drive for us for under 1 million, top drivers not even for under 1.5 million.
Fortunately I had saved a lot of money from my discipline to stick with a pay driver. After the season was over, I had a lot of money left and invested heavily in the headquarters and build practically everything simultaneously.
It is currently one of the greatest constructions sites in all of Great Britain.
But getting new drivers for my second season was incredibly hard, I was in negotiations with Berger and Piquet and even Prost, both turned me down in spite of insane wage offers. I am just glad that I built the scouting facility so I could eventually sign Martini. He seems to be a pretty decent catch, has both the team player / nice guy +15 and stable trait, and decent stats. And he costs about the same as the previous number 1 driver which puts me in a very good financial position for the next 2 years.
I also hired two talents, Schumacher and Barricello in the hope that I can keep one of the two. One thing I noticed is that there seems to be something wrong with Schumachers improvement rate as it is much lower than both teammates. Even with bonus he gets only 0.5% per week and I will probably have to dump him. All in all 1 million just to get rid of him withou 1 race, what a costly failure
Even worse, Barricelo's improvement rate (which is a spectacular 3%) gets halved when he is promoted. Is it possible drivers get more improvement per week as reserve driver? that would be really odd.
Anyway, here is the new Lotus (still with Schumacher listed). I gave it a green paint job, and put a lot of improvement in it. Hopefully it will be able to get to the podium a few times.
But since I have very low financial expense for my drivers, the pressure is low.
I actually did it
I fired Schumacher before the first race of the season, and replaced him with Mika Hakkinen.
I even paid a fine of 750,000$ to get rid of Schumacher. What a dissappointment.
In scouting when you move the mouse over one of the abilities you see an age related improvmement rate, and this seems to fluctuate wildly between drivers. Hakkinen has 2.78% and Schumacher had 0.45%. There was simply now way I could hold such a sluggish learner.
Ok, so one important hidden stat discovered. This is also very important because if a driver gets past 40 the stats actually decrease.
Michael, you had your chance in the pre season period, where you did not improve. Now pack your bags, take your 1 million $ and GTFO from our premises. We don't need you no more.