One engine, four games
The race simulator, the career, the season and the predictor all call the same model. That is deliberate: when four games each carry their own copy of the rules, the copies drift and the same driver ends up quick on one page and slow on another. A change to tyre wear here changes tyre wear everywhere, and the same test suite covers all of it.
What a driver is
Every driver has eight ratings. None of them is a single "skill" number, because the whole point is that different circuits and conditions ask for different things.
- Pace. Raw one-lap speed. Decides qualifying more than anything else.
- Racecraft. Passing and defending. Worth most where overtaking is possible.
- Tyre management. How much life he gets out of a set. Decides long stints.
- Wet. How much of the above survives when it rains.
- Consistency. How often a lap goes wrong. Drives mistakes and retirements.
- Feedback. How well the car gets set up around him across a weekend.
- Fitness. Holding form late in a long, hot race.
- Mental. Pressure, restarts, and the last ten laps of a close fight.
What a car is
Three numbers: power, aero and reliability. A car is never simply "fast" — it is fast somewhere. Each circuit carries its own weighting for how much engine and how much downforce actually pay there, so the same car can be second at Monza and eighth at Monaco without a single rating changing.
What a circuit is
Each of the 24 circuits has four character weights — engine, downforce, tyre wear and how hard it is to overtake — plus the real pit-lane time loss, a safety-car likelihood and a rain likelihood. Those are what make the calendar feel different rather than being 24 names on the same track.
The part that matters most: track position
This is the single most important thing in the model, and it is the thing most simple simulators get wrong. Cars hold a track order that is kept separately from their cumulative race time. Being quicker than the car in front does not move you past it. You change position by actually completing an overtake, by pitting, or by someone retiring.
An earlier build re-sorted the field by lap time every lap. The effect was that a quick car teleported past anything it merely out-paced: sent to the back of the grid at Monaco, one driver would finish fourth without a single overtake, and starting position barely mattered anywhere. With track position modelled properly, the same test finishes around fourteenth at Monaco and around eighth at Monza — which is the difference between the two circuits, expressed the way it should be.
A race weekend, step by step
- Form. Each weekend rolls a form figure for every team and every driver, so the same grid is not identical two Sundays running.
- Qualifying. Three segments, cars eliminated as they go, pace and the circuit's character deciding the order.
- The race. Lap by lap: fuel burn making every car quicker as it empties, tyre degradation and the compound cliff, dirty air behind a car ahead, DRS when close enough, pit stops with the real time loss for that circuit, safety cars, mechanical failures, driver errors, penalties and weather that can change mid-race.
- The two-compound rule. Enforced, as in the real regulations.
How we know it still works
Balance is not a matter of opinion here. Two headless test harnesses run the model over whole seasons and check that the output still looks like Formula 1. The targets we hold:
- Qualifying spread from pole to last of roughly 1.5–3.5 seconds
- 1–3 retirements per race
- Roughly 0.3–0.9 safety cars per race
- 15–25% of races affected by rain
- A championship that is not mathematically over before about round 17
- Every team scoring at least some points across a season
- Monaco producing far fewer on-track passes than Monza
- Predictor win probabilities summing to exactly 1.000
If a change to the model breaks one of those, it does not ship.
What this model does not know
It has no idea what happened last weekend. There is no live timing feed, no news, no upgrade schedule and no knowledge of a penalty announced this morning. The ratings are our own estimates, built to make the racing behave correctly, not scraped from an official source — there isn't one. Treat every number here as what the model believes, useful for comparing circuits and scenarios, and not as a forecast of a real result.
Try it
- F1 Simulator Game — one Grand Prix, lap by lap, with the pit wall in your hands.
- F1 Race Predictor — thousands of runs turned into probabilities.
- F1 Championship Simulator — a full 24-round season.
- F1 Career Simulator — one driver from karting to Formula 1.