Everything’s Changed – F1 Manager 24 [Cadillac – modded series]: S01/R01 – Australia 2026

Everything’s Changed – F1 Manager 24 [Cadillac – modded series]: S01/R01 – Australia 2026

[Music] [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] [Music] Heat up here. [Music] [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat [Music] up [Music] here. [Music] Heat up [Music] [Music] [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Test test. One, two. One, two. Can you hear me? Heat. [Music] [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Hello again. I am Jamal and welcome to the start of a brand new F1 Manager series. F1 Manager 26, I suppose you could nickname it. Uh, we are starting a brand new career file. Uh, this Nissan file was a little bit corrupted. Um, and we are jumping in at the start of the 2026 season. So, as you can see, Cadillac have arrived. Uh, we also have arrival of Audi. Uh, Ford have arrived. Honda have moved to Aston Martin. We have uh a new engine manufacturer with Audi. They will be running their own engines. Despite what the game will tell you, they are actually on the back end running Audi engines. We have new driver lineups. We have new liveries. And uh I think now is a good time to jump in. [Music] On top of that, we also have an updated version of the realistic racing mod combined with some other little changes under the hood as well. Uh we have some changes to uh driver mentality. They can now only be affected by up to two points either way. So, uh they’ll either be uh + one, plus two, 0, minus one, or minus2 depending on their current state. that will apply to drivers and staff. Uh so mentality has been significantly reduced because that was kind of game-breaking with its baseline of plus 8. And we have brand new tire suppliers as well, which means on top of that, I’ve also introduced a new tire performance mod as well. There’ll be a full list of mods added to the video description once this live stream’s finished. I’ve got to compile and collect all the different links that I need to put in, but uh they will go in there um into the video description and then I’ll make sure I add it to the next few uh races as well. Uh so that uh if you want to try and recreate this on your own PC, uh you’ll have all the links. I will warn you, some of them are Patreon uh links, so you will need a subscription to Mr. Only uh to get a couple of very specific mods, but the vast majority of them are available for free. Oh, Marcel, thank you very much. That’s very generous of you. Right, uh let’s have a quick look at where we are, shall we? Uh we have uh the brand new lineup that has officially been announced. Valkyrie Botas and Sergio Perez right uh driving for Cadillac. We have uh a wonderful Cadillac livery uh which uh is uh a Mr. Only mod. I’m not sure if this one is locked on his Patreon or not. It’s a mighty mod that comes with three different variations of delivery as well as driver suits, uh, engine engineer overalls, etc., etc. It does come with helmets as well, but unfortunately only one helmet and it’s mirrored on both drivers. So, that will get a little confusing potentially at times. But this is the driver suit and car, and it is absolutely gorgeous. And this is what we’re going to be driving this year and probably for the next couple of seasons as well. And then uh we will look to move potentially to another team. Uh but uh yeah, we’re going to spend at least the first two seasons racing with Cadillac as we help them to establish themselves. Uh let’s take a quick look at the actually no, let’s uh let’s wait a day and we’ll check the email. So you can see the driver lineups there and then we’ll dive into some of the other stuff. Uh in terms of our facilities, uh everybody’s performance has been reset because this is 2026. I’ve gone under the hood and tweaked everyone’s starting balance. So uh everyone has a similar level of starting balance. We have a $7.5 million starting balance. Most of the teams have $10 million apart from I think H who are uh famously uh stingy when it comes to investing in a team. So they have a $5 million um uh starting budget, but that’s after engines have already been paid for um or at least the initial payment of engines has already been paid for. So they have $5 million starting cash. We have 7 and a half. Every other team has 10. Uh kept it nice and balanced. I have tried to balance out the performance of everyone’s facilities. Uh we have some basic level facilities. Level two factory and design center. Everything else here is level one. Uh a level two team hub and race sim. A level one scouting department. Level one across the board here. Other teams have got levels two and three for the most part. Some of the smaller teams have got maybe the odd level one in there as well. Uh but we are very much slightly behind. And in terms of current performance, we are definitely at the bottom of the pile in terms of performance. I think the maximum performance is um here on day one of the brand new series uh is Mercedes with about an overall of 45. I believe we are in the high end of the 30s. I believe so. Uh if we take a look at the attribute values, you can see here we have good acceleration. We are running Ferrari engines for the next two seasons. And then uh when it comes to 2028 or maybe 2029, I will introduce a Cadillac engine. Nobody is running the Renault engine even though it is available to purchase. The Renault engine will become the Cadillac engine uh going forward. Uh so everyone else is either running Red Bull powertrain engines for Ford engines or they’re running Mercedes engines or they’re running Honda. Uh or in case of Audi, they’re actually running an Audi engine. Uh so uh I’ve balanced the um engine performance as best I can. Uh so there are no massive emissions in terms of power and then I’ve tried to give certain edges to various different areas to different teams. So, Mercedes, they are predicted to have the best engine going into the new regs. So, they do have the best power engine and then everything is just slightly staggered uh in some cases. Um other teams have got better in other areas compared to Mercedes and Mercedes have the edge in terms of power. So, it’d be interesting to see how that shakes out as the season progresses. Uh but in terms of Arrow, you can see very bad. Very, very bad. Uh not good at all. And here you can see our values compared to the grid average. Really not good at all. So, uh, yeah, we’ll see how this all shakes out. Let’s, uh, dive into the chat for a bit. Uh, welcome to, uh, hashtag and to Marcel, Jeremy, uh, Limry, Johnny, good to see you. And uh Cory’s here as well. Victor, Farah, good to see you guys. Uh it has been a while. Uh but yes, I am back. And uh let’s uh let’s get cracking, shall we? So, we have a little bit of cash. Not going to spend it just yet. Uh let’s start off by taking a look at our internal car report. You can see the values we just looked at. They’re all bad apart from acceleration which is average. Uh we have Neil Holdy as our technical chief. Uh we can’t start research but we can get into designing which we’ll do in a second. Marco Peron is our sporting director. Uh this is the current state of our pit crew. Uh as you can see not particularly quick so we are going to have to work on that. And uh Ian Greg is our head of arrow. These are our allowances, six MAU hours period and 84 Winon hours per period. And uh there you can see uh the simulated results uh from season um the previous season which I had to kind of get through uh just to get to the start of 2026. So McLaren are the current reigning constructor’s champions. Lando Norris actually won the drivers championship. Uh, and then Ferrari came second, Red Bull were third. Then it was Mercedes, Williams, Aston, Alpine, Cadillac in eighth. They actually had a couple of really strong results while I was simming through race results. H Racing Balls and SA now renamed as Audi Sport. Uh, RB, as you can see, have also been renamed to Racing Balls. I did think about renaming them as Vcar, but then I thought, no, because I hate that acronym, I’m going to call them racing balls. So, uh, right, uh, first thing we need to do then is start getting our training and everything done. So, Neil’s a little miserable, uh, with me apparently, uh, mainly I think down to the facilities, low facility condition. Well, all facilities have been fully refreshed across the board, not just ours, but all of the teams as well. So, everyone starting with 100% on their facilities. The team should refurb theirs when they kick in to about 70% uh on their wear rate. Uh they should then start to try and refurbish them. So, we shouldn’t see any teams uh with ridiculously bad facilities unless they’re having significant financial issues. Speaking of uh this is our um incoming here. So you can see we have uh 4 million per month from the board. Uh we’re getting 3,700 uh,000 from the uh Formula 1 management as prize money for finishing where we finished last season. Can’t really do much about that, but we do have some quite high costs as well. So we’re not earning a lot. You can see we’re going to get maybe 2 million a month. just over um as in terms of payments and as things go forward some of those costs may well increase anyway. So uh our driver lineup is as you can see Valtry and Czecho. Uh Mark Slade and Javier uh are the two uh race engineers. Uh, I signed these guys halfway through the previous season so that they had six months to try and build a relationship with the drivers because that kind of ties in with the amount of time that um, whoever the base engineers are uh, at Cadillac will have with the confirmed driver choices of Valkyrie Botus and Sergio Parrot. Uh, so um, that’s why I signed them a little early. Uh, and same for the other guys um, the engineering staff. I signed them with 6 months to go as well. Again, just to give them a little time to bed in cuz they’re not going to go into the team completely cold. This is a project that’s been building for a while in terms of Cadillac and I wanted to try and reflect that a little bit if I could. Uh, can’t put Colton Herter in because he’s not in the game and I couldn’t get him in uh through a mod file without it conflicting and overwriting the Colton Herter uh because we’ve got the uh the base of the uh 2025 DLC mod. So, uh, instead I decided to go with Logan Sergeant as the main reserve and I’ve allocated Jack Crawford, uh, as a secondary reserve as well. Uh, all the other teams have got who they had before with the occasional transfer that the game has just done between last season to this season. Evening Wayne, good to see you. Uh, evening, Dino, if I haven’t said hello. So uh let’s start by allocating out training. Uh here you can see the minus one modifier uh for being in a moody git condition. Uh the worst it will be will be minus two. The best it will be will be plus two thanks to the uh mentality mod we’re running. Uh let’s take a look at his stats. He is a little weak. Well, across the board really, but it’s a little weak in overtaking, smoothness, adaptability. They’re the main three areas. So, let’s see if we can find that. Looks like that might be the one, but we’ll click through. Smoothness and overtaking, smoothness, adaptability. There, this is the one. Uh, this is the one. We’re going to put him on wet track training. Uh Jack, we are going to take a look at him and let’s see. Uh again, pretty reasonably balanced. Might end up putting him on the same. I’m going to leave him on this for now. Short run pace to boost cornering, braking, adaptability, and accuracy. Uh let’s do the main drivers. I might just leave them on balanced. Uh Valky’s weakest area, smoothness, adaptability, and overtaking. [Music] Uh yeah, we’ll leave him on balanced, I think. Let’s take a look at Czecho. Czecho’s slightly better. And his adaptability is actually quite bad. Uh so let’s see if we can give him a little bit of a boost in that area. Let’s go with this. Boo’s cornering is smoothness is adaptability in reactions. Unless wet track is better. No, we’ll go with that one, I think. So, we can work on the smoothness as well. Uh, let’s do our engineers. So, let’s take a look. Uh, really strong feedback for Mark Slade. Uh, communications and composure definitely needs some work. So, let’s focus on that. and Jav. Uh, let’s take a look at him. Uh, he also needs to work on all areas, but we’re going to get him to focus, I think, on this one. Uh, the quicker we can get this nice and high, the better the relationship between him and Czecho will become. Uh, let’s do our main staff now. Let’s take a look at Neil. pretty well balanced. Rear wing is probably the weakest area uh along with chassis. So, let’s put him on arrow principles. Uh Ian Greg, uh drag reduction is definitely a weak point in his stats. So, let’s see if we can find something that will work on that. Let’s go with that. I think air flow intake. Uh Marco Peroni, our uh head of sporting needs to work on quite a few things. Uh we’re going to get him working on innovation to work on his training and his processes. And let’s do our pit crew training while we are in here. So, uh we’re going to go cumulative. We’re going to cancel all that out. And we’re going to do uh some pretty heavy focus on gym training for the first couple of weeks. [Music] Let’s see how quickly we can try and bring these guys up to snuff. Keeping an eye on that fatigue level. [Music] Going to kind of ignore car building for uh a good chunk of this season and just focus on skills and uh speed. And then we’ll pay pay more attention to car building as the season starts to draw to a close and as we move into season two. Might need to give them two days off here. Let’s just go with a one. [Music] There we go. Uh, so I have not really played about with the tire model at all. Uh, I did a quick few lap test just to see if it was doing what I was expecting it would do and it was, but beyond that I haven’t used it. So, this is going to be very much a learning experience trying to figure out the best way to get through practice sessions. Uh, there’s going to be it’s basically it’s reduced the life of the soft tires um and the medium tires. Uh, the soft a little bit more dramatically than the mediums. Uh so there’s definitely more of a need to consider hard tires as the season progresses until we can certainly at least improve the tire um cooling on the car. Otherwise, we are going to burn out our tires pretty uh pretty quickly, I think. Right. So, we’ve done our training. Uh we’ve got six engineers. We don’t have any scouts. Let’s add in one scout. Don’t need to do a lot of scouting at this stage. Uh, and let’s spend uh let’s spend a little bit of money here. Let’s start upgrading our basic facilities around here. and we’ll slap an upgrade in there. That leaves me 4 and a half million to spend and I’m going to stick an upgrade on the team racing simulator. I think 1.8 mil left and that’s pretty much all we can afford. So, let’s do our sponsor negotiations. So, uh, we have a choice of three. Uh, we’re going to go with American Express to get a nice engagement package. This will also give us 8 million to add to our immediate bank balance. And let’s see what else we want. We’re going to want a little boost to our race day performance. That’s going to give us a touch more. Uh, I think focusing on uh engagement is going to be probably key for us. Uh, let’s go with Pirelli. They are now just a basic sponsor. They no longer supply tires for Formula 1. At least not in this file anyway. Uh, do I want Kit Kat? It would give me a wind tunnel advert. And they’re usually around 4 million a pop. So, I think we’ll go with a Kit Kat. Have a little break. Have a little Kit Kat. Uh, facility effectiveness would be kind of useful. Don’t really want to do Let’s see. Yeah, the money involved is very similar between GM and T cell, but that will have two driver marketability boosts as well, although that will impact driver performance slightly. Uh I suppose we should have GM really given that they are funding this project, shouldn’t we? I need Revolute. Now Revolute are the title sponsor for Audi. So uh you will see them in game just not in our list here. So, that’s our list of uh sponsors we’re going to go for. That’ll give us a funding package of just under 87 million uh with 15 and a half up front, which is quite nice. Uh so, we’re going to confirm that their preference is facilities. That’s good. Uh once again our uh livery for our race drivers and our car pre-baked. So no uh no sponsors to place. And let’s advance time. One day 3 days wasn’t quick enough. Perez and Kit Kat reunited. Yes. Okay. So, uh, this is the F3 roster for 2026. Uh, Premma have Roman Bolinsky, Bruno Delpinoho, and, uh, Caitlyn Nui. Trident, Noah Strongstead, Callum Voicon, Lawrence Van Huben. Uh, ART have Taylor Barard, Tuka Taponan, uh, James Wharton, uh, Hi-Tech, Kushmayini, Joshua Dufek, and Brandon Pedaua, Vanasport, and MP Motorsport. You can see uh who some of these drivers have been signed by. That’s just a a uh a non-signed driver. Uh it’s F3 uniform as is Kushminis. Uh all three of these guys don’t have a a sponsorship, but obviously these ones do. We’ve got Mercedes, Aston, uh McLaren, Ferrari, Red Bull, uh Williams here for Christian Manel. Uh, and then moving down, you’ve got Campos and Rodin. We’ve got an Alpine sponsorship in there. An RB Racing Bulls sponsorship. Um, we have a Harsh driver or a couple of harsh drivers just here. Uh, nobody officially driving for Audi, it would seem in F3 anyway. Uh, the F2 roster. Uh so we’ve got uh Stan Mini uh Paul Aaron and Victor Martan. Uh Martan driving for Mercedes it would seem a couple of Alpine drivers and uh Road Stac is at Aston. Uh Roodin have got two McLaren drivers. I’ve got Williams and Ferrari at high-tech. Uh there is a Saaba driver, the Saur Academy driver, Oliver Gera. Uh we don’t have Audi overall showing for these guys it would seem unfortunately. And then a couple of unsigned F2 candidates in Dennis Harren and Enzo Victor Pali. Few more down here. Jack Crawford driving for us. Uh a couple more Red Bull drivers. Another Sala driver/ Audi driver we suppose we should call him now. And another Ferrari driver. So now it’s time for the uh 2026 main rosters. So no change at McLaren. It is Pastri and Norris. Norris the current reigning world champion. McLaren the constructor’s champions. Uh then we have Sha Llair and Lewis Hamilton for Ferrari. Down at Red Bull, it is Max Versappen and Isaac Hajar has been promoted to Red Bull. Uh George Russell and Kimmy Antonelli uh remain at Mercedes. Williams have Alex Albon and Cara Science. Yuki Cenoda has replaced uh Lance Stroll at Aston Martin. It’s the dawn of the Honda era at Aston Martin. Now, Alpine have uh Gazzley and Colinto. Uh Botas and Perez for us here at Cadillac. H have Ollie Bman and Estiman AON. Arvid Limblad has been promoted to replace uh the uh uh the departing Isaac Hajar who’s gone to the main team. Liam Lawson remains in the second seat. Uh I do have a slight issue with helmets for these two. Uh we do have an official helmet for Avid Limblat that’s been created. Uh but unfortunately it’s also overwriting Liam Lawson’s helmet. Uh so these two both share the same helmet design. I’m hoping we can resolve that as the season progresses. Uh and then Audi, we have Nico Hulenberg and Gabriel Portiletto uh showing the Sala overalls, but they do have uh Audi overalls in game. All right, we have a memorabilia room upgrade complete. Let’s get started on our uh car development now, shall we? Now that we have uh some money in the bank. So, let’s start. Drivers are suddenly looking a bit happier with the investment in the team. Engineers looking a little bit happier. Uh what about our engineering staff? Yeah, Neil’s cheered up a bit. That’s good. So, uh, let’s take a look at the car in a bit more detail. So, let’s go into the warehouse. Let’s see just how bad things are. Yeah, chassis is appallingly bad. Uh, kind of expected that. Front wing uh is also bad in the downforce areas, but it’s pretty good here in terms of cooling and air flow. That’s uh interesting. Rear wing. Let’s take a look at the rear wing. Uh really good in drag reduction. Terrible in downflow uh downforce. So some work will be needed there. Side pods pretty abysmal. Under floor absolutely abysmal completely uh across the board. It is the worst in the field. Evening build and suspension. Uh also worst across the board in every area there. So uh we have some very definite areas that need immediate attention. Let’s uh start by slapping some hours in, shall we? Uh we have enough hours for me to split, if I can remember how to do this three ways. [Music] It is going to be 28, isn’t it? Uh, so there we go. We’ll split three ways with our hours. Uh, so everything’s bad. Everything is bad. But downforce is really bad on this car. So, we’re going to up the downforce a little bit. Going to slightly up the dirty air. We’re going to have a a slightly negative impact on drag reduction, but we are going to take a little bit of life. out of the car or out of the part as well. Just a couple of clicks and let’s go with that. So, this will make us fractionally slower but will give us better gains elsewhere. And we are going to go with an intense build on this one for $3 million. [Music] Our suspension is also appallingly bad. So, let’s uh get some hours into this as well. Uh tire wear is pretty good on the car, but it could be a lot better. Actually, no. Tire wear is terrible on the car. I’m thinking of drag reduction on the on the wing, aren’t I? Uh we’re going to need to boost down force just a little bit. Let’s uh just get a slight in uptick on the front air flow just to try and balance the uh downforce a little bit better. And we’ll take two clicks off that as well. Again, we’re going to lose a little bit of speed, but we’re going to claw it back in downforce and a lot of savings here in tire wear, which we desperately need. Uh, again, we’re going to go with an intense build on that. And our side pods were also pretty abysmal. Uh, so let’s focus the rest of our hours here. Okay. So, we want to boost engine cooling a little bit. Uh, I’m going to leave our downflow like that. I think I was tempted to roll that back, but I’m going to leave it like that because we have upped the uh the front arrow slightly. So, we want to balance that out with some improvements in the middle to the rear as well. And we’re going to take a lot of life out of those. Try and strip some extra weight out. And again, we’re going to go intense. [Music] Who do I think will win in real life? Uh what this season? Uh I think I think Oscar uh has it in his hands to uh to win the title this year, but you can’t count out Max. Uh, just remember 2007, Hamilton and Alonzo took points off each other and Reichen came out from and snuck out from underneath to win the championship by a point. Uh, it’s not impossible that the staff could come back into it. There’s still plenty of points available. All right, we have 8 million left. Let’s look at investing a bit more into our team. Let’s stick another upgrade on our memorabilia room. And let’s stick an upgrade on our car park test center. And that’s a lot of our money gone. Almost all of our money gone. All [Music] right. Can I afford an upgrade? Yes, I can. Need to get that up to level five ASAP. [Music] [Music] can’t afford to upgrade that uh for a while now. So, whatever money we have left is pretty much I think allocated here. We’ve gained a point in overall rating for in Greg. That’s nice. Uh let’s see how our staff are feeling now. Uh so we have enthusiasm out of Vtery and Czecho. Uh neutral for Javi. Unhappy with car performance or very unhappy. Mark Slates a little bit more positive but still very unhappy with the drivers. Really? Okay. Uh, and then wow, everyone’s very unhappy with the drivers. I don’t know if this goes into uh our reserves as well, but yeah, our driver choice. Well, it’s not even our driver choice really. Cadillac’s official driver choice not popular with the Cadillac staff apparently. All right, an improved race sim will help develop uh the skills for Logan and uh Jack a little bit better and hopefully stop the decline from Czecho and Valkyrie. Uh so here you can see we’re now plus ones with Valkyrie now that he has an enthusiasm even if it’s slight. Yeah, Javi has uh downgraded again. Complete the under floor sooner. No, I’m not paying $400,000 to save 8 days, uh, when time is not really an issue and money is. So, we’ll stick to the original date so that we don’t go into debt. Evening Mike Mark Slade goes up by a point and we are about to hit the end of the month. Uh let’s go to the facilities upgrade to level four. [Music] Okay. How have our affiliates improved at all? They haven’t. Uh they never seem to in the first month and nor have our main drivers either. Okay, start of a new month. So, we’re back up to 2.2 mil, but we’re not going to spend that. We’re going to save that for building the parts that we started cuz they will be coming due soon. Uh let’s go with uh some pit stop training on time again. Let’s take this day out. How are we looking after a solid period of training there? Fatigue at 24. Uh, okay. So, let’s start to work on the skills a little bit more specifically now. So, we can get those nice and balanced. and let’s give him two days off here. Uh so we have a weakness in car release compared to everything else. So, let’s start working on improving car release to bring that in line and the wheel gun and new tires on and these tires off. That gives us a bit better balance. Still need to do a little bit more of that. So, uh, we’re going to go with these tires off. New tires on. Wheel gun. Car release. And there we go. We have achieved a modicum of balance. Very nice. So yeah, car building is definitely falling behind, but we needed to do that anyway. Chance of mistakes down to uh less than 9%. Uh we’re about 2 and 1/2 seconds per stop at the moment. That needs to improve. You think the people um the fact people rate Max’s Genesis is higher than Lando shows the gap between them? Yeah. Um Lando I don’t think has the mental strength uh that you know Versappen has but I mean Versappen’s a full-time champion M um you know Lando hasn’t come close to winning a title really. Uh so you know he had a bit of a fight last season. He’s in a fight that he’s losing again this season. Uh Oscar’s a bit of an unknown. He’s been completely unflapable until Baku this season and Baku he just completely fell apart. So whether he’s starting to feel the pressure now, I don’t know. Uh we know Max is proven track record. So I think it could be a very interesting end to the season. I really do. All right, our car part test center is now level two. That will give us a nice little boost on some future parts, uh, including, uh, our rear wing with our DRS delta there, and our chassis as well, which we have, neither of which we’ve started on yet. Hospitality is up to level two. Can’t afford to upgrade that. And here we go. Our first designs are ready. Let’s go to manufacturing and get those into production. We’ll start with just two for each just so we can get them started and then we’ll look to allocate additional funds for extras on top of that. So, how much have I got left? Oh, 156. So yeah, there we go. It said a lot that even though Oscar had a terrible weekend, people focused on Lando underperforming. Uh yeah, I I mean there’s definitely at least in this country, it’s definitely a um a bias towards British drivers in the media. Um, people are always going to want their hometown heroes to be the successes. All right. Uh so yeah, things have uh devolved a little bit with the uh with the team. They’re all griping about car performance. Well, we’re about to improve it with some brand new uh add-ons, but uh yeah, our car’s not going to be great for a while, and we have problems with the CFD SIM. Uh, so let’s shut it down for 6 days. We’re not designing anything at the moment anyway. And I’d rather make sure that it’s not going to have a major issue that’s going to shut it down for a long time and a lot more money. And let’s do our first sponsor plan of the season. So, let’s have a look. It’s quite a high engagement threshold to hit, but it’ll be worth 6 million. Oh, very nice. That’s a big package. Uh, so we are going to have to put Perez in and our factory. We’re going to have to hit all of the highest ones we can. And even then, I don’t think we’re going to hit it. Oh, no. We are just All right. So, can we downgrade a couple of these? Uh [Music] they have a preference for facility activities which are these ones in white. Uh so let’s go with a CFD [Music] and a wind tunnel. Uh just short. So we’ll throw the weather center in there as well. And that gives us the clearance we need. The only real issue I have with this is that we’ve got to put Perez in, which is going to affect his rating in the first two or three races, but it’s the only way we’re going to clear that engagement level. Can’t sub him out, unfortunately. Not this time. kind of irked you how Lando said it wasn’t a missed opportunity when it clearly was. Um, yeah. I mean, it was a missed opportunity. I don’t think it was a glaringly missed opportunity. I don’t think McLaren were truly on top of things that weekend anyway. Um, I mean, it was chaotic qualifying. Six red flags, uh, which was just insane. Uh, I’m I think Lando should have done better, but I don’t think he was ever in contention for the win, even if he’d started at the front. But he definitely had the opportunity to at least pull back a few more points, [Music] right? Uh, we are 11 days away from Melbourne. It’s too early for a weather report. Oh, the calendar by the way is uh as close to the 2026 calendar as I can make it. Uh obviously we do not have Madrid. Uh so Madrid has been replaced with Emila in this. Uh but apart from that it is the 2026 calendar. So uh we have Melbourne and China as our opening two rounds. We have a sprint in China. Then we go to Suzuka, Sakir, uh Saudi Arabia, Miami for the second sprint and then a sprint in Canada. Uh then Montreal, uh sorry, Monte Carlo, uh Barcelona, uh Austria, Silverstone will have a sprint week weekend in 2026. Uh Spa, uh Hungary, Zanvort in what will be Zambort’s final year will also have a sprint weekend in 2026. Then it’s Monza. This is where it should be Madrid. Uh but we don’t have Madrid in the game. Uh so I’ve put uh IMLA there instead. And then it’s Baku, Singapore, which is also a sprint weekend this next season. Uh Austin. Uh then it’s Mexico, Brazil, Vegas, Lasale, and uh Abu Dhabi. So it is the 2026 calendar in its entirety with sprints in the right place. apart from that one round here which should be the Madrid street street circuit. Okay, so we did have various signs of structural damage. Uh so we have got to refurb it for $72,000 but it would have been a lot more expensive if we had ignored it. All right, let’s uh have a look at the improvements that we’ve made to our car with those first round of upgrades. Let’s have a look. So, uh, change car car 2. There we go. So, we’ve lost a tiny bit, as you can see, in top speed. We’ve gained a little bit in acceleration. and no change to DRS, but we have gained uh some decent amounts in downforce. Uh we’ve gained a little bit of dirty air tolerance, almost a full percentage point. Tieware has been the big improvement along with engine cooling as well. Uh we’ve gained quite a bit there and we’ve stripped some extra weight out of the car. Evening Clark, good to see you. So we now we need to fit those to uh Czecho as well. [Music] There we go. So, both cars running the uh first round of upgrades. I’d like to start in the next round, but unfortunately money does not exist anymore. We will have a couple of million coming through in just a few days. Uh we have something in the inbox to deal with. Uh yeah, low stock. No, no [ __ ] Uh welcome to the 2026 season. A brand new season of Formula 1 is ahead of us with every team working tirelessly behind the scenes to create a championship winning car. Last year saw McLaren take home the trophy for the constructors with Lando claiming first place in the drivers championship. But this year is a clean slate and excitement is at a fever pitch. Are you excited? Are you at fever pitch guys? There are some brilliant drivers and brilliant minds in this sport and every single one will be battling for the crown this season. Who will come out on top is anyone’s guess, but one thing’s for sure. It’s set to be one of the greatest years of Formula 1 yet. We’ll see. Uh, yes, I know about that. Right. Have we gained anything with our two affiliates? Uh, a point in accuracy for uh for Jack there. And what about our main drivers? Nothing. Okay, training schedule and the start of the first uh three races. Let’s go with cumulative. There we go. We are nicely well rested. We’re going to go with a full day of gym training there and there. Oops. That’s a little high. Let’s go with that. That takes us back down to zero cuz you can clear 9% a day when you rest. Uh and then we go into Melbourne. Out of Melbourne, I’ve got very little space. We’ll get half a day of gym training in to get us back down to zero for China. And then after that, we’re going to start thinking about sticking in the odd bit of uh car building here and there before we really focus on it later in the year. So this is our leadup to Japan. Glad to be back in the Jimbo Mafia. Oh dear. Not sure if mafia is the right term, but uh there we go. 9% to zero. And that leads us in beautifully to Suzuka. And then let’s go with a full day of gym training. And rest day 24% should reset us down to zero or 1% the next month. There we go. That is our training for March done. Got very miserable looking staff at the moment. Uh so after post rain testing results uh we’ve actually slightly improved the high speed. Maybe we’ve definitely improved the tire wear and engine cooling. uh still pretty pretty slow when it comes to top speed and our downforce is still shockingly bad even with maybe that slight improvement there. Uh we have 2.1 million. Let’s get started on actually no let’s wait till after Melbourne and hopefully we’ll get a little bit more cash after Melbourne. When’s our next sponsor or our first sponsor pay uh payment coming through? Let’s have a look. It’s a way off yet, I think. There it is. 1st of April. Do I want to wait that long? I might have to wait that long. We got our tour center up to level five, so we will get the full 92 and a half thousand a week from that. This is our sponsor package. Uh Edward Swift is actually I think American Express. Uh so new ATR period has started. Uh, I am going to make some spare parts cuz we don’t have any. One of each. [Music] There we go. That leaves me with a million and it’s uh race day. So, ooh, what? Not a huge amount of money per race available. Best we can do will be less than a median assuming we hit both of our higher targets. I am unsure what the performance of our car is actually going to translate to, especially with the new tires. So, uh, I’m going to go 20th because I expect there will be a retirement or two and maybe we can beat somebody. Let’s go to be back down under for the Australian Grand Prix. Every team and driver comes here with the same goal to win. But that’s for the end of the season. For now, they have to prepare to fight for F1 glory. Alpine are debuting a brand new driver here and that could shake things up. Let’s see then how the weekend unfolds. [Music] And yes, that is a head mod for Franco Colinto. Uh it is uh locked behind payw wall unfortunately that one that is part of the uh the face pack mod on Mr. only’s Patreon. So, uh there are others in there as well. Uh Kimmy Antonelli and Isaac Hajar. Uh who else? Oh yeah, Arvid. Arvid Limblat. He’s one of them as well. There are I think six drivers. One of them is Vettle. Um, if somebody wanted to bring vel back in. [Music] All right, so given that hard tires are potentially going to be very important, kind of loathed to uh do what we normally do, which is to just hammer a set of hard tires and run the entire session on the first day. [Music] I think I kind of need to try and set, you know, settle the car down a bit. This is a This is a tough choice. Do I Do I save the hard tires for race day? [Music] Yeah, I think I have to. So, we’ll run a set of mediums and then we’ll have to just go softs and softs in the next two sessions. Um, we are still going to try and run the entire session without stopping. But whether we’ll make it to the end of the session on these tires or not, I just don’t know. Uh, I’m going to put a lot of fuel in the car. Uh in terms of uh components in the engines, we have uh three engines for the season. We have two ERS and we have four gearbox as well. [Music] All right. So, setups. Let’s start with the same setup on both cars. Uh, let’s go with something along these lines. [Music] [Music] and I need to change those tires. There we go. And we are set. And this will be your introduction to the new liveries. Ready check. All right. So, he’s getting a run out for Ferrari today. Uh, and if you aren’t even sure who these two are, Victor Martan’s getting a run for Mercedes. There’s a Ferrari popping out in the background. That’s uh uh Porsche and Browning getting a run out at Williams. Porsche in Williams Academy, it would seem uh Tim Tramlet’s getting a run out at Audi. [Applause] [Music] [Music] So the other variations of this livery. Uh instead of uh yellow and black, there’s a uh a gold variant and there’s also a blue and white variant. And uh I just wanted to run the yellow in this season. We may well switch it to one of the other ones next season. We may stay with this one next season. Uh, but there’s a lot of blue uh on the grid in general, so I didn’t want to jump straight in with a blue and white livery. Every team is running a brand new livery. Um, some of them are subtle changes, some of them not so subtle, and you will start to see those as we move through this session. Uh, we are getting some ghosting, unfortunately. There’s not a lot I can do about that. And let’s see who is currently on the grid. Let’s have a look at the new Ferrari, shall we? With the new McLaren as well. [Music] There you go, the new Ferrari livery Hamilton helmet on display. Uh, as you can see, we have got Goodyear Eagles. Uh, Pirelli no longer the tire supplier. And we’ll take a closer look at Oscar in the new Mercedes as well. McLaren as well. We can catch him at the right angle. [Applause] [Music] And there we go. Uh, Monster taking more prominence on the car with a massive M on the sides and a big one on the front of the car as well. There you go. There’s another angle. So that’s the updated livery for McLaren. Williams have got something of a throwback livery. [Music] There we go. Kind of hearkening back a little bit to the days when they had BMW engines uh with the nose. There’s another shot of the new 2026 Williams. No Atlassian branding on here it would seem with this particular livery, but I do have other liveries waiting in the wings as well for each team. And try to work on your front tires. There’s Porsche in the second Williams. Uh, anyone else on track? Yes, Liam Lawson in the updated racing bull. I really like this livery. [Music] There you go, the updated racing bull with Ford branding. And I think that blue and white looks beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. That’s uh one of my absolutely favorite mods that I’ve ever seen for liveries. [Music] All [Music] right, Gassley is coming out in the Alpine. And it’s pink. It’s very, very pink. And it will be pink all season again just to help eliminate some of the blue off the grid. So there is the Alpine delivery for this season. [Music] [Music] Again, I will link uh all of these mods in the video description once the stream’s over and I’ve collected the list. So, probably tomorrow. That list will be in the video description. It’ll also be in tomorrow’s video description as well. Some of them you will have to uh have a subscription for if you want to use them on Patreon, but most of the mods that I’m using are available for free. Only a couple that are locked behind the pay wall. Uh let’s speed time up and get some of the other cars out on the grid. [Music] Yuki Cenoda in the new Honda Aston Martin running a generic but updated generic Aston Martin helmet. [Music] [Applause] [Music] And again, this is a really nice mod as well. I love the contrast of the uh the classic white panel with the red writing on for Honda on the rear wing. [Music] There you go. There is the 2026 Honda Aston Martin. Mercedes have had a subtle update. It’s a little bit more silver on the car. Uh slight uh repositioning of the uh would you call it neon. Uh so instead of being a line that runs along the top, it now disappears here and then comes out along the bottom. and some increase in the amount of silver on the car. [Music] [Music] [Applause] So, you can see the extra silver that’s added along the side pods. It’s now all flowing in here in a lot more depth than it was on the 2025 delivery. What race difficulty am I using? I’m using HAR with uh an updated tire model and uh with the most upto-ate realistic racing uh model applied as well. I have no idea how it’s going to work. [Music] All right, we also need to have a look at the new pass. Here is uh the bear Olly Bearman. very subtle changes to this livery. It does look, you know, strikingly similar to the current livery they have this season, but they there are some very subtle changes. Couldn’t tell you what they are off the top of my head. Uh but they are there. Uh let’s take a look at the Red Bull. [Music] [Music] Now with Ford branding, uh Ford very prominently displayed on the rear wing there as you can see and with these nice blue flashes here. Uh we also have Ford branding on the uh back of the powertrain uh cover as well. So the only one left to look at is Audi. And here it is. This is the um theoretical 2026 livery for Audi. It hasn’t been revealed, so we don’t know what it’s going to look like. But as you can see, Revolute branding has been slapped on the side. Uh so we do have uh quite a nice looking Audi livery [Music] which will probably stay unchanged for at least a couple of seasons. So we got a nice mix of color uh across the grid. Not too many cars looking uh very similar. And now we’re going to uh speed through the rest of practice and see how we do with our settings. We can help you with no big struggles. Copy that. [Music] How are these tires? We need to work on the tires. Keep the temperature on the tires. [Music] Update when you can. Yeah, I’m happy. Copy that. [Music] All right, we have some feedback. Let’s have a look. 75% for both drivers. So, they could theoretically be running the same setup. I know we gave them the same starting setup. They’re both exactly the same distance away, but we’ll have to see what the sliders look like at the end of the session. Let’s see how the tires are hanging in. How are we looking? They’re down to just 48% after 30 minutes of running. Uh so yeah, tires are definitely going to be an issue. Uh running them outside their temperature window is not going to help. Uh, the new tire model means that, you know, when the tires overheat, they will wear down faster, but they will also wear down faster if they run too cold. I completely forgot about that. Um, unfortunately, I can’t show a prediction against tire wear in practice. Uh, but this simulates the tires blistering as they would do in reality when they’re too cold. They they blister and start to tear up. Uh, which also reduces grit. So, yeah, I’m going to have to remember that for future sessions. Good evening, Army. [Music] Let me just check the LSS is switched off. Oh no, it’s on. It shouldn’t be. That should I say that ghosting wasn’t anywhere near that prominent with my uh with my tests that I ran. That should improve things a bit. We might still see a little bit here and there, but it’ll be significantly reduced now. [Music] Frame rate’s not quite so good, though. [Music] And that’s okay. Yeah, significantly reduced the ghosting. That’s what we wanted. Tire temp’s coming back up again. Still a little too cold. The uh operating windows are different as well. So, uh soft tires will overheat very quickly. Let’s try increasing the tire wear up a little bit more. Let’s get them into the right window and see if that will stretch these a little bit longer. tire face update when you can. I’m losing a bit. So, that’s quite interesting that they um they don’t go yellow now until they hit 15%. That’s interesting. I was wondering why that hadn’t happened. Now we know. We’ve done 33 laps on these tires. We have literally killed them. Let me take a look at uh lap time history. [Music] So there you can see where we started to increase tire pace and now with the wear tire pace is dropping away again. [Music] [Music] We have a bunch. Oh, copy. Okay. So, punctured. So, we get into that uh really low period and that’s it. That’s puncture territory. So, we better call Valtry in as well. There is a chance that Czecho might not actually make it back to the pits. Wow, look at that front tire overheating quite quickly now. Oh, no. Wait, that’s condition box. So, they have a very short window of uh before they start to completely collapse. They go yellow at 15, orange at 10. We’ve already got one puncture. [Music] [Applause] [Music] our front left is also very susceptible now. Oh, I think Valky’s picked up a puncture. He has. [Applause] Same tire that left rear. Confirming you are boxing this lap. Yep. Got it. I wonder how this is going to affect punctures in reality in uh in in full racing situations. [Music] On. And there we can see stopped in front of the guy limping his way back. At least he made it back. That’s that’s good. I think if he picked him up a second puncture, he might not have. So that’s what the sliders look like for Valtry. [Music] Ah, it’s not quite the same, is it? So good, good, good. [Music] Oh no, it is the same. Ah, so maybe they are going to be running the same setup. Okay, so let’s increase I was going to say let’s increase the rear wing. It’s the rear wing we don’t need to touch. Uh so let’s bring that back to a 73. Uh maybe increase the front wing a little bit. [Music] Let’s take that to 64. [Music] Let’s bring that up that way. And then bring that to the other side. Let’s see how we do with that. So 8 1/2 13 64. Oops. And you can see these tires will only do 18 laps in total. So what did we go? 8 and a half 64 3.25 25. What is it? 0.5. That doesn’t look the same. I’ve already locked in the changes now, so I can’t uh adjust them on the other car, but looks like maybe we are going to be a little bit different on this car. And that’s pretty much our running done for this session. Picked up 25% uh knowledge of the car. A lot more to go. Genuinely curious as to how the AI is going to react to uh these time models as well. Reading the uh the mod notes means that they should be able to push as hard as they like without the tires exploding, but it does mean that they could be making lots of stops if they go aggressive with the tires. So, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we see three and four stop races at, you know, various different circuits this year. [Music] There we go. First practice is in the bag again. We want to save those tires. So, we’re going to go with soft tires. We’ll put 20 laps of fuel in, but I don’t know if we’ll actually get 20 laps of running out of them. [Music] And we’ll go with this for our tires, for our running. [Music] So now we have green light. [Music] Get everything as you want it to be for the start of the lap. Copy. Forgot to do that with the uh drivers in the first session. So, let’s um run through these. See how we do. Keep the tire information up this time so we can keep an eye on temperatures. We’re not going up high enough. So, we are going to have to go like that. This might be a side effect of us avoiding curbs. Down to 75% already. Just seven laps. [Music] [Music] Yeah, these tires are falling apart really quickly. [Music] [Music] [Music] Oh yeah. in instantly. Look, how does the car temperature start coming back up? Yeah, all good from my side here. So, let’s we’ll have to make sure we avoid highrisisk avoid going on to avoid high-risisk curbs in practice sessions otherwise we are going to just shred the tires through uh blistering. Uh we have feedback from Valkyrie up to 93% so there’s still some work to do with him. How close are we going to be with Czecho? We’re going to be closer or further away. Say he’s taking his sweetest time, but that’s actually pretty good. Anyway, uh 93% I forgot it’s because Mark Slade has a super feedback uh score of 99. Yeah, tire temps are definitely better. Down to 29% after just 16 laps on these tires. The vast which uh majority which we try to protect them. Can’t do that. It’s not a viable strategy anymore. So that is really going to make practice sessions interesting. Very interesting. So 85 86 is when they go into the window. They start overheating at 95. [Music] tire phase update when you can. Okay, we managed to get about 19 laps out of them, but I’m guessing the pace is not great. So, we’re going to call them in so we don’t puncture like we did last time. What about tires? Let’s take a look at our lap history in terms of pace. So, yeah, dramatic drop off as the tires start to fall away. Yeah, copy. [Music] This here I think is when we actually turn the temperature or turn the push level back up. You can see the pace improved. [Music] Hard to tell. Oh, we did get a puncture. Ah, okay. So we need more. Let’s try that. And let’s put on another set of softs. Change the run plan. Same again. Look. So, let’s increase that. Push that to there. Looks like we are going to actually start the season with both of our drivers running identical setups. [Music] Now, for the second half of this session, we’re going to run the tires normally. So, we can see we get a better understanding of the tire model. I still got them driving in clean air because dirty air will increase the uh temperature of the carcasses which we do not want and then maybe in the third session we’ll turn that off. Coming past you now. So normal tire pace. Okay, normal fuel pace. We’re still going to protect the ERS units because we only have the two for the entire season. [Music] [Music] And immediately you can see we’ve jumped up the rankings because we’re not saving anything. So, we’re getting a slightly clearer indication of our pace. No idea how relative that is to the rest of the field yet. Of course, we there is still more pace to find because of our DRS, sorry, our ERS not being active. That might be worth half a second a lap on uh normal. Tire is struggling to stay in the window again. That might be because we’re driving in clean air. Any comments though? Optimal feedback from uh from Valkyrie. And there we go. We nailed it. So, we should theoretically see 100% out of Czecho here. Entire face update when you can. Well, these tires last long enough to give me that feedback. Understood. [Music] Copy that. Let’s keep an eye on uh exactly when those tires do go pop. Practice your pit. There we go. We’re looking at the wrong car, but they just went pop. We have a boat. Damn it. Have to call him in. I don’t have my feedback yet. I’m just going to have to trust it’s good as we limp back to the pits. Now, these tire changes are definitely going to make practice awkward. Make sure your limiter is on. Stopping on the marks. So, I think potentially our biggest There we go. That’s is about as close as we’re going to get to a confirmation that it’s bang on. Um, I think one of the biggest things we’re going to have to focus on is improving our tire uh tire cooling performance with our suspension and maybe the front wing as well just to improve our tire wear stats in the turning. Nat la. [Music] [Music] All right, let’s dive into the stats a little bit, shall we? So, lap history. Uh, so we started out pretty strong and then the tire pace fell away quite quickly. [Music] And then we called him in before he punctured. Perez again started pretty strong. Tire pace started to fall away quite quickly on the softs and a couple of good laps here and there. So, the tires really don’t last very long, do they? See the AI not running the uh tires for particularly long stints. And then you see us sticking out like a sore thumb. We are seeing people using hard tires, so they will only have one set available. [Music] So, let’s do just 15 lap runs. I think that’s probably the safest way to avoid puncturing. We’re going to keep two sets of mediums and two sets of hards available. Does mean we are going to be severely limited with soft tires. Only two going into qualifying with a third to be unlocked after qualifying or hitting Q3, which I don’t think we’re going to do. Uh so um we’re all about prepping for the race rather than for anything else. We’re just going to send them straight out. Green lights. You got sacked after one season on your second play through. Is that uh your own team or you controlling McLaren? Update when you There we go. That’s the last little bit of feedback we needed from Czecho. We needed less than a lap to give us the feedback and it is spot on. So, they are both running identical setups and it’s kind of cool. Uh let’s again protect the ERS units. Charge button on. Copy. And we’re just trying to get more car part knowledge and uh see if we can max out the track knowledge as well in this session. Energies are good. [Music] Car says, “The Audi livery reminds me of the Vodafone McLaren.” Um, don’t see it myself. The Vodafone McLaren was chrome. You know, uh, the Audi is uh a lot darker. You got little flashes of gray, but it’s essentially a black car with red trim. But I in terms of the contrast between the red and the rest of the car, I can kind of see that in terms of your point. I do actually have um in a folder. Maybe we’ll use it as a one-off um the Vodafone McLaren livery. So, evening cats. Uh, what mods do I have in use? A lot. Uh, they will all be listed in the video description tomorrow. Uh, I need to compile links to where they all are. Um, a couple of them are paywalled, but the vast majority of them are free. Uh, quick rundown. We’ve got new liveries for every single team. Uh we’ve also got Cadillac as the my team uh with some Cadillac sponsors. Even though we don’t apply sponsors to the car because it’s a fixed livery, it it’s just for the uh for the moments at the beginning of each season when we choose our sponsors. Um just for that extra little bit of immersion. They are a Cadillac themed pack. Um, I’ve got face models for uh Arvid Limblat, Colinto, uh, Isaac Hajar added in as well as a couple of other drivers. Ollie Bman is one as well, Hampton. Um, I’ve got a new tire provider. So, we’re running Goodyear Eagles rather than Pirellis. Um, there is uh a sponsor mod which will replace the Pirelli branding with Goodyear that needs to be made compatible. Uh, I’m waiting for an update on that. Uh, we’re running realistic racing. Obviously, this leaderboard here is a mod as well, collapsible, expandable with sector times. Uh, I used uh a database mod to change the color of Audi so that they weren’t showing green, lime green for Salva because there’s a lot of mods. I’ll I’ll have them all linked in tomorrow’s video description, and I’ll add them to this video description as soon as I can. [Music] I’m running a graphics mod as well, just to tighten things up a little bit visually. How did I get it to 2026? Uh, I loaded up the 2025 season mod and then simmed through a season to get to 2026. [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] Okay, there we go. That’s our 15lap run. Let’s take a look at the timings. [Music] So again, you can see the pace just degrading as the tires wear out. Little hard to see exactly how they um have fluctuated because we’re going to hit traffic on some laps, not on others. But it gives us a good kind of window of a benchmark. So again, you can see good pace and the tires start to wear away. She held relatively consistent in terms of the degradation rate, so that’s encouraging. A little bit more knowledge on the tires. We’re at uh 94% track knowledge, 60% car knowledge. So let’s see what that looks like in terms of driver prep. 88%. Let’s slap on the other set of tires that would get sent back anyway. And we’ll run those as well. Have I done some changes to team performances? Yes, I use the uh online database editor to uh tweak driver stats. Uh set everyone’s team performance to um specific sort of levels at the beginning of the season. Obviously since then we’ve had two and a half months worth of car development. Um so that will change a little bit but uh the top teams were um Mercedes, McLaren, Ferrari and I’m not sure beyond that and again there’ll have been some development since then. So, [Music] uh, the drivers have had their stats tweaked in some places. For the most part, I’ve left the drivers relatively untouched. Uh, I think I just tweaked a couple a couple of uh little areas on Oscar just to get him up by like one overall rating point. Uh, I gave Limblad a slight boost um to represent him having had uh a really good year in F in F2 this year. Uh gave Hajar a slight boost. Uh gave Antonelli a slight boost I think and maybe tweaked Bman slightly as well. Colinto got a tiny tiny little tweak to his stats. Porto got a a nice little boost of a couple of rating points overall. Uh, did I touch uh Perez or Botas? No, I didn’t. Uh, but they’ve had a season uh in the car in sim mode to get to 2026. So, a couple of their stats have improved. A couple of them have degraded. [Music] I made some uh tweaks that made sense as well. Uh so uh for example, Hamilton had a really bad uh adaptability rating. Hamilton was one of the best wet weather drivers in Formula 1. So I upped his adaptability rating to a very high level. Uh and then tweaked a couple down so we didn’t get a massive jump in overall performance. [Music] Like I said, it’s just tiny little tweaks here and there that make sense based on how the drivers actually perform. [Music] [Music] There we go. So, uh, we have finished our practice sessions. We’re at 92% prep overall going into the first race, which isn’t bad. Isn’t too bad at all. That is it for practice. Time for the allimportant opening qualifying session of the season. [Music] [Music] Hello and welcome to the much anticipated qualifying session. Drivers need to get into Q3 if they want to make the top half of the grid. With only 10 slots available, it’s a fight nobody wants to lose. Now, there’s been a bit of talk about Sergio Perez of late. How’s he going to be feeling, do you think? It’s obvious that they’re feeling confident today, and that’s sure to be an advantage. I’m keen to see what they’ll manage here. Strap yourselves in. This is Formula 1. [Music] Here we go then. First qualifying. Uh, have I played Bordlands 4? No, I haven’t. Um, I probably won’t. I enjoyed the first Borderlands. Never really got on with any of the subsequent Bordslands games for some reason. I just I don’t know. Didn’t grab my the uh the sequels didn’t grab my attention as much as the first one did. Um, is 7:00 p.m. my new start time? No, it’s just a one-off for today because it’s uh the beginning of a brand new series. A lot of stuff to discuss and talk through before we actually got into the race itself. uh normal time of 8:00 PM uh will be applied for the rest of the season. So, normally I would go out early just to try and get a time on the board. Not going to do that in this race. gonna let others clean the track up for me a little bit because we are extremely limited on tires. So, uh you’ll see just a slight gain in grip and uh and rubber at the end, but it’s negligible, but we don’t want to be the first ones out. We want to try and get out a little bit somewhere around about here, I think. So now we have green light. So Yuki Cenoda is the first one to break cover [Music] and is received on track to a smattering of applause from the Australian fans. [Music] You’re waiting for Red Bull to confirm their drivers for 2026. I think it’s going to be the the driver lineups that I’ve got for Stappen and Hajar and Limblat and Lawson. [Music] [Music] How much money did I start? Um, I uh made some tweaks. So, once the uh first day of 2026 had arrived, that’s when I went into the database editor and uh tweaked everything. So uh once the engine payments had gone through uh I then set every team to a starting budget of 10 million apart from H who are historically very stingy when it comes to investment in a team set them at 5 million and I set Cadillac at 7.5 million. So, engine payments that went out and then every team had a starting balance of between five and 10 million. But we have on on balance the worst facilities or we did. We’ve upped a couple of them. [Music] [Music] It’s around 270 is the opening purple sector for Yuki Cenodo. We’ve got Antonelli and Lawson starting their laps in just a moment. Norris now leaving the pit lane as well. It’s 266 Rantinelli. So 410 quicker. Aston using Honda engines. This is a custom engine added in through the online database. Ferrari pass and Cadillac are running Ferrari engines. Mercedes, McLaren, Williams, Alpine are running Mercedes engines. Honda the only team uh you know Aston the only team running Honda engines. Red Bull are running Red Bull power trains which are um tweaked from their baseline to represent them being the Red Bull Ford engines. Uh nobody’s running the Renault engine. I’ve kept that reserved. That will become the Cadillac engine going forward. And Audi are running their own custom engine as well. [Music] So Antonelli is quickest by uh 1.2 two seconds over Senola Lawson is 5 and a half t off. You can see he’s wearing a Limblat’s helmet there. Uh unfortunately, we’ll see the AL there. Um unfortunately, Limblat’s helmet is overwriting Law’s helmet. Uh and if I remove Limblad’s helmet, then he will also be running with either Lawson or Hajar’s helmet. So, yeah, it’s messy. Uh Hajar doesn’t have his own helmet at the moment. He is running um a custom Red Bull default helmet. [Music] Everyone else is running their own helmets. So Antonelli, uh Cenoda is running a default helmet for Aston Martin and Hamilton both have their own. Uh Norris and Gastri have their own. Max has his own. Uh, Haj say running a default but a custom default. Uh, George running his own. Aar Gazzley and Calapin Calapinto Colinto Alvant and Offon they all have their own helmets. Limblat has his own helmet as do Hulk Baltto although they are this season’s helmets. So a couple of the sponsors are a little wrong. Alonso has his own as well and both Botas and Perez are running custom helmets but they are identical custom helmets. I can’t do anything about that. [Music] And here is a chance to see Isaac Hajar’s custom default Red Bull helmet. There you go. Let’s get plenty of brake temperature if you can, please. Pretty generic, but has the Red Bull and Tagire branding on it. So, it’s better than the uh in-game default helmet. [Music] All right. So, who is currently on a lap? Let’s have a look. Max. Bman’s come very close to Antonelli’s time. Max is uh purple in the first but not in the middle. So, you’re in a good position. I’m running on hard difficulty for both race and uh uh car development. [Music] There we go. We are about to start our flying laps. Let’s uh move on over to Valkyrie. Go. [Music] And track is clear. Track and Max is topped by 17,000 of a second. Off for last corner, [Music] [Music] but don’t forget as well as running um the hard difficulty for racing, I’m also running realistic racing and I’m also running a brand new tireware model as well. And I have no idea how well all three of those things are going to gel together. So there may be some tweaks going forward, but all right, we’re down 3/10 to Isaac Hajar’s just gone purple in the first sector. Uh down 510 with Perez. Pretty good middle sector. That’s actually a tenth quicker than Max did. Perez struggling a little bit. Let’s not forget Perez is affected by sponsors um which is having an impact on his mentality for the first three races of the season. So expect Valtry to slightly outperform him at least in qualifying. Russell goes top with a 116992. We pop up into seventh with Valkyrie. You are currently P7. Hajar crosses the line and goes P4. Hamilton on a quick lap in the Ferrari. Perez slots in in 12th. Slowest time recorded so far. That’s not encouraging. He’s down 1.1 seconds on his teammate. Yeah, copy. And Hamilton goes second. 64,000 slower than George Russell. Here [Applause] is Arvid Limblat starting his debut qualifying lap in the racing bull. Let’s see how he gets on. [Music] Gazzley crosses the line, pops up into 10th place. Science just behind Limblat on track. He’s on a lap as well. That’s Hamilton. Let’s see if he gets in the way. Pulls out the way as quick as you can. Limiter should be on now. Stopen the marks past uh Albon and I didn’t see the other car. And one of the al pins that’ll be collar pins. So, and we need speed limit on speed limit on and stop on the marks. [Music] And it is 15th place, second slowest so far. Purple in the first science pops up to P8. [Applause] [Music] Hulkenberg P9 in the Audi. Yashri is about to cross the line as well. [Applause] [Music] [Applause] Goes second. And Oscar goes third. Look how tight it is so far. Less than a tenth of a second separating the top four. [Applause] There is Franco Colapinto. He goes up to P12. That drops Bas down to 14. Perez 21st at the moment. Okon the last driver to set a time. [Music] It’s got an Audi in front. I think that’s uh Well, it could be either of them actually. [Music] He was off into the pit lane. So, I don’t think there was any delay for Estan there. [Music] And across the line, that’s 15th place for Aron. So, Valkyrie tentatively through at the moment. Perez in trouble. Let’s get them prepped for another run. We’re down to 83% after just one run. Kind of have to use the same tires just in case we do get through. Hopefully, the second lap will be better. Uh, now it’s a question of when do I go to try and avoid traffic. I think any moment. Out goes Ollie Bman and George Russell. [Music] Send out Czecho now as we have an Alpine coming back into the pits. [Music] There goes an Audi. That’s Portalto. We also have Oh, as we get in the way of Fernando Alonso. Sorry, Nando. [Music] That’s a Williams in front of us. That’s Carlos Science. Both of us pulling over to let Albon through. [Music] [Music] [Music] Watch out for Perez. [Music] [Applause] All right, we’ve ended up right behind George Russell. [Music] This could uh this could be good. This could also absolutely destroy our tires through overheating. Oh wow, they are not up to temperature at all. Only have pulled over a lot on this lap. So that has not helped. [Music] How are batteries tires doing? [Music] They’re also underheating. I wonder if this um [Applause] [Music] Wonder if this is a result of the A. There we go. The Paris is out. [Music] Wonder if this is a result of the tire wear mod changing how tire warms happen. [Applause] [Music] Oh, Valky’s lap is scuffed as well. May as well call them both in. Glad I didn’t put brand new tires on now. Would have wasted them. So Perez is going to qualify last. Uh that’s not an ideal start. See if Valkyrie can somehow squeeze through. I don’t think he can. Please stop on the marks. Yeah, Alonzo was unable to improve cuz we blocked him, but we got blocked ourselves. Forto does not improve enough or at all. So, stop on the marks. Gazzley is out. Oh, Limblad starting his lap. And that’s that’s Limbad scoffed. [Music] Cenod’s in the garage. Gazzley’s returning to the pits. So, I think we’re through with Valkyrie. I think we’ve managed to sneak our way through. [Music] [Music] Traffic is annoying. Yeah, it is. Uh, not a lot we can do about that. So Gazzley’s in the pits as are both of the Aston. Bortalto is not going to be able to improve after an abysmally bad first sector. Limblad’s just gone purple in the middle sector, but he lost so much time in the first sector. I don’t think he’s going to do it. Valiant effort though. Getting a monster slipstream here off the back of that Alpine which I think is Colinto. It is. Can he improve at all or is that first sector killed him? First sector killed him. So there we go. Perez out in 22nd. Limblad out in 21st. Borletto in 20th. Then it’s the two Aston Cenoda and Alonso in 19th and 18th respectively. Gazzley is in 17th. They are the six cars eliminated. Valkyrie has snuck through into Q2 only just as AON crosses the line and improves up to P1. But that is the end of Q1. [Music] Okay, into Q2 then. Uh, let’s run those scrub tires. We only have these two sets of tires available unless by some miracle we make it into Q3. Uh this set will unlock once uh uh we’re either out of Q2 or into Q3 and then we’ll have two sets of mediums and two sets of hards for the Grand Prix. Uh we saw in practice how quickly tires can wear out and we’re seeing how quickly they wear out in qualifying. Uh very quickly indeed. So, uh, yeah, qualifying could be very interesting this year. Let’s get out early just to get our time on the board. These tires are not going to give us any kind of competitive lap time, but they will give us that confidence boost. If I can get two runs out of these tires and still have time for a run on brand new tires. I might do that. I might just go early uh for the second run on the brand new tires just to get a a good lap in and try and avoid as much traffic as possible. There’s less cars running in this session. There is Kimmy [Music] [Applause] [Music] Interestingly enough, Hadar did have pretty strong pace. Qualified or finished seventh in that first session. Uh only a couple of places behind Max. That’s encouraging for Repple. second driver that can actually uh put in the performances where needed. Although one session is uh not much of a sample size. So you’re in a good position. You should have no traffic issues. Good to go. We should have no traffic issues yet. We do have a car on track in front of us. It is a Ferrari and Shalllair. Will he be an issue? That all depends on where we uh come across him. [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] So, we’re 410 down on that early in the first sector. No real surprise there. These tires not Great. But theoretically, they should hold performance a little bit better until they drop really, really bad. 188 again. Not great. There islair. Looks like we’ll just about avoid being held up. We might even get a little toe across the line. You never know. Antony 3/10 faster in the middle sector as well. So, we’re down nearly a full second now. Oh, lap is going to get off to a really bad start. He pulls over to let us through. [Music] So, uh it’s going to be a slow first sector forlair. And he’s got uh well, that’s us. That’s his teammate Hamilton. He’s got another car just in front as well. That’s one of the McLaren. It’s Norris. [Music] [Applause] [Applause] Henber crosses the line. He goes E2 Norris fields out of the way. So 272 forlair. He was down uh 3/10en of a second to Nico Hulenberg. So that definitely shows how much time he lost. only his first run. Oh, one other thing you’ll notice, no tire feedback. Uh there’s another mod I’ve got which does not let us know the condition of the uh of the other team’s tires, just what tire they’re on and how many pit stops we’ve made. We don’t even know how many laps they’ve been on those tires. That’s another thing I wanted to add in to make things even harder is just have no real clear picture of uh of the tires. The only way we can check that is this the tire history to see how many laps they’ve done on the set by looking at this graph. That’s it. It’s the only way we’ll actually find out if we go into uh car condition. Tires blocked out. We cannot see the condition of their uh of their tires at any point. Is that you disappearing, Marcel? All right. Well, thanks for stopping in and thank you again uh for the super chat. Very, very kind of you. Uh much much appreciated. Uh hopefully we’ll see you again soon. [Music] [Applause] Norris has gone top by a tenth of a second. Here comes Hamilton. He’s [Music] down a fair bit. He will slot in fourth. Half a second behind and behind Isaac Hajar. Good first lap for Isaac. Here comes Colinto. [Music] Max leaving the garage and it’s still a little early. Don’t really want to go quite so soon. Track is definitely going to ramp up. I’m probably going to go out somewhere around about here, I think, in a couple of minutes time. [Music] [Music] Colinto and Max nearly having a coming together there. Just let’s I didn’t even think to look. Let’s see. Is the number one visible on the car? Yeah, there it is. Very small, but it’s there. Number one for Lando Norris, reigning world champion. Russell is on a lap. Lawson also on a lap. [Music] Okon crosses the line. He’s actually slower than us. I don’t know if that means he just had bad tires or bad traffic. [Music] Oh, Albon has to abort the start of his lap to let Science come through. And that’s ruined the start of Albon’s first run. Here comes George. And he slots up behind his teammate. Just a hundth of a second slower than his teammate. Lawson went P6. Sites in 11th. He’s only just quicker than Very. Max now starting his flying run. And there’s a fair few cars on track in front. At least three of them are on cool down laps. [Applause] [Applause] taking a gamble by going now. It’s a little early, but at the same time, I’m hoping we’ll avoid some of the traffic issues that plagued everyone else’s laps. [Applause] And we’ve actually got a few cars coming out behind us. So that’s encouraging that they’re coming out now and not in a lap’s time. This isn’t a stellar lap from Versappen. [Music] [Applause] It’s good enough for P5 though. It’s slower than Hadger. [Music] [Applause] [Music] Speaking of which, here is Haja. He will potentially be in our way. Don’t want anyone else to come out the pits until we go through. I want this to be as clean a run as possible for Valerie is our one and only shot of getting a decent qualifying position after this. Our tires will not be good. Push good to go. Oh, let’s pull them in. [Music] So, I think we are going to come across There we go. There’s a car coming out right behind us out of the pits. I think we are possibly going to come across Kajar at the very end of the lap. Might be good, might be bad. [Applause] [Music] We have got a boosted confidence level from that first run, which is nice. I think we might be all right. I think we’re going to get a clear a clear track the entire run here. [Music] It’s an improvement in the first sector. 270. It’s not bad. 187 again. Not bad. I don’t think it’s going to be top 10 worthy. We can start close to uh the cutff point. I’ll be happy with that. [Music] [Applause] [Music] And we get up to P8. But there are other cars improving. Here comes Nico Hulenberg up to the line. He’s already up at a couple of tents. He goes up to P5. What about Charlotte Clair? Very quick in the middle sector. Get a little bit of a toe from the back of Oscar. [Applause] He’s only good enough for P10. He’s had a bad final sector. Might go out here. [Music] So, who is on a on a lap? Alban’s just leaving the pits now as is Hamilton. Bman’s started a lap as has Science. Now these two are both going to come across Pestri and uhlair. So chance to be held up. There’s Norris pulling out of the way of uh Lawson. Bearman goes purple in the first sector. Are we about to see a a blistering lap from the bear? Gets through without any issues there. Two more slow cars in front though. It’s his teammate Okon and Lando Norris. Speed in the pit lane. Okay, stop on the marks. They both get out of the way and Science has been really, really badly held up. He’s nowhere. Science is not going to improve. Bman’s going to get through. He’s going to knock outlair here. Lawson improves up to P7. [Music] And Ollie Bman jumps all the way up to fourth place. What a great lap for him. Sites unable to improve because of that really bad hold up in the middle sector. He’s going to be in 14th, maybe worse off. Uh we do have a couple of other cars still to set laps. Got Antonyelli on a lap right now. George Russell in front on track here on a warm-up lap. Hamilton’s out there on a warm-up as well. He’s about to start his flying lap. [Music] Aon a good first sector for him. Llair is definitely out. Are we able to hang on in there? Aron and Colapinto are the two cars most likely to knock us out. Although we can’t discount Alex Albon. He’s on track just here ahead of Lewis Hamilton. He’s had a good first set as well. [Music] [Music] Where is Colinto? I don’t see him. Oh, there he is. That’s Colinto. I’m looking for a pink dot. Okon gets up to sixth place. That knocks us out. Lewis Hamilton is now on the bubble. Ferrari going to have both of their cars knocked out. Or can he squeeze through? He is looking quick enough. Colipinto finishes 13th. Max moves up to P5. [Music] Hamilton is out and he’s back in again. Lawson is eliminated. Albon went up to P4 which briefly knocked out Lewis. And there we go. It’s Lawson Valtry Botas, Charlotte Clair in 13th, then Colinto in 14th, Oscar Pastri in P15, and Carlo Science in P16. The top 10 will be Norris in the McLaren. The two Mercedes of Antony Russell, the Williams of Albon, Bman and Okon in both of the house cars as Russell goes top. The two Red Bulls of Vstappen and Hajar, one of the Audi’s has made it through. Nico Hulenberg and one of the Ferraris in Lewis Hamilton. [Music] [Music] So, let’s see who sticks it on pole. It’s Max. Max sticks it on pole with a 116. What a lap. Uh George second, two tents slower. Then it’s Albon in third in the Williams. Alton takes fourth ahead of Kimmy Antonelli in fifth. Hajar in sixth. Then it’s Norris in seventh. Eighth Mano Hulenberg in the Audi and then Har lock out the fifth row with Bman just ahead of AON. Well, the fans here are all set. Every one of them eagerly awaiting the 58 laps of today’s race. Albert Park often seems to set teammate against teammate. From Hill and Walner dueling for the 1996 win to Botas beating fellow Mercedes driver and Pitter Hamilton to the win in 2019. The Albert Park circuit is bursting with rapid corners and a long straight where drivers can push their speed to the limits. Good attention to medium speed downforce will likely make beating this beast of a track just a little bit easier. The teams are making their final preparations down in the pit lane ahead of today’s race. [Music] Okay. The all important strategy decision is required. Uh okay. So, we’re looking at 16, 17, 18 maybe laps out of the mediums before they become pretty bad. Uh, we could go with that. Let’s see what it looks like if we go with the extra set of hards that we saved. [Music] Looks like we can save a couple of seconds. I think that might be what we go with just to uh protect ourselves from uh potential thermal deck. This is why I saved the opening uh the extra set of uh hard tires for the opening Grand Prix cuz I didn’t know how the tire model would affect us. [Music] We’ll go with that. We’ll have an extra set of mediums in reserve. And if we get a very late safety car, we’ll have a brand new set of softs or two, depending on the driver in reserve as well. Uh what do I want to do with fuel? Take uh two laps of fuel out, I think. It is 1.8 kilos for a lap. I am expecting us to get lapsed at least with Paris, probably with Valkyrie as well. Uh let’s go hard off the line. See if we can maybe gain a place into the first couple of corners, either turn one or turn three, and then we’ll calm things down again. There we go. We are prepped and ready. The 2026 season starts now. Well, then it’s not long until we get started here and we should be in for a tightly contested race. Our attention shifts to Lewis Hamilton and what he can produce in this race. It’s a second row start there in P4. The trick will be not to slip backwards because there are plenty looking to capitalize. [Music] This should certainly be a good one, folks. Brace yourselves for the Australian Grand Prix. And it’s lights out. And away we go. Right. Not a great getaway there for Very. Max holds position. Russell and Alban fighting over second. There’s the aggressive drive that I was hoping to see into turn three. Perez has made a place. A lot of guys starting on soft tires. Expect them to box very early. Now we’re going to calm our tires down before they melt. And we need you to take care of the tires. Copy and charge on. Charge on. Copy. So P12 withlair breathing down our next speed increased by 10%. Perez chucked up right behind Boralto who’s all over the back of Alonso and Vstappen has bolted opened up a 1.3 1.4 4 second gap to George and DRS enabled. You see our tires already overheating. We are definitely going to have to factor overheating into our tire strategies for this season. say it’s really nice to see Goodyear on the uh on the wheel rims [Applause] and starting to slip. Let’s turn the batteries back on. Let’s take a quick look. Yeah, just kind of in mid space there. We havelair all over us trying to find a way through. And they’re all queuing up behind Valkyrie. I think we’re going to go backwards quite quickly. Nearly contact there aslair tries to force his way around the outside and he hasn’t been able to do it yet. We managed to hold him off, but it’s surely just a ticking clock now as he gets through. [Applause] Perez having a look at Fernando Alonzo. Alonzo gets pushed wide and that is Perez up to 20th into peak confidence which would be worth very little. What is that actually worth? That’s actually worth quite a lot. We’re going to have to I thought I had something that affected this. I might have to make sure that gets reapplied. [Applause] [Applause] Yeah, quite high numbers for Valtry as well. So again, we’ll have to look at getting that reduced [Music] as Limblat tries to push his way through on those softer tires. So we’ll have more grip at least for a little while. [Music] Tires down to 88 and 87% already. First off, all right, let’s concentrate. Next car behind is Alonso. having another look at Harvard. Copy, mate. Have to tuck in behind him. We’ll have another bite of DRS, though. Oh, we got a crash. [Music] It’s science. We got a full-on safety car for dead. [Applause] Who did science hit? Oh, did Oscar plow into science? We heard the screech of brakes. Yeah, there we go. That’ll be at least Science out. I think that’ll be Pastry out as well. And not much that the team can do about that one. Horrible start to the season for Oscar Pastry. Way out of position through qualifying. Now looks to be out of the Grand Prix as well. Safety car. Safety car. Charge on. [Music] Tight lipped on the radio. [Applause] So, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we see some of the soft tire runners boxing already. A crash in the main straight. Take advantage of this safety car, which means we would gain quite a few places. Okay, at the moment they Okay, debris off lane. Let’s see what does Max decide to do. Max is in. So, yeah, let’s see if the rest of them follow suits. Russell’s in. Hamilton’s in. Hamilton’s on mediums. [Applause] They’re all piling in. This is going to promote Valtry and Perez. That’s Max. You’re currently 85. You’ve got Russ. There’s George. So that’s fourth place and sixth place. [Music] Valtry’s tires have dropped out of the window, but they will drop back in to the window once he hit the uh the back of the queue. Well, they should do [Music] running in the dirty air. [Applause] Have to keep an eye on this. I want to protect the tire wear a little bit, but I also want to make sure that we don’t blister the crap out of them. [Music] I think we might have to up the wear rate slightly to try and keep them in the window. [Music] [Applause] So, everyone diving onto the hard tires, [Applause] everyone who boxed. That’s worked out really nicely for us for now. It does mean in terms of just performance in the tires, we are going to be at a disadvantage against almost everybody on the grid after just a couple of laps. [Music] Then we see Perez’s tire attempts nice at the moment. Valtry is starting to climb back up. [Applause] Tire temps look good. [Music] [Music] [Music] Heat. Heat. [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] We need to do the full management on this set. Very happy with tire management. Yeah. And safety car is ending. Very short safety car there. And we may restart next lap. Okay. Didn’t even manage to fully uh fully refill the batteries. Got pretty close. Saved a lot of fuel. No lift off needed. You are doing a good job. Copy. Okay, G. If there’s anything left in the tank, let’s go for it. Suggest. There we go. Green flag running. Albon will lead us across the line. Antonelli and Vstappen behind. Max has stopped so he has a massive advantage. [Music] Tan. Okay, charge on. That being said, it’s a long way to go until the end of the Grand Prix. How long can we even think about hanging with the front runners before we start going backwards? [Music] Don’t want to sp the battery immediately. I cannot afford to lose the DRS if I want any chance of at least hanging on to these places for a couple of laps. I think I’m going to have to turn them on now. push. Perez is coming under immense pressure from Hamilton. Russell’s putting all sorts of pressure on Valkyrie and we are drifting away. [Music] There won’t be any DRS active until we get round to this part of the track again. If he can survive until the Hamilton’s got through already. [Applause] [Music] Diving up the inside there at turn 10. Tried to fight him off, but he had the inside line. [Applause] [Music] And looks a little whoop from Lewis. [Applause] DRS is enabled. Can we keep George at bay? Can we stay with Max? Here comes George. Keep him covered. What about tires? Hulenberg in eighth place is behind Hulenberg is behind Perez who has been dropped by by Hamilton already. This could turn out to be a really strong debut performance for Audi. Uh Valkyrie has been dropped by Max. We couldn’t stay in DRS range. And now the uh inevitable drop down the for the uh running order is about to happen in earnest. I think [Music] the one saving grace Valkyrie has is that George is going to bring a massive pressure from Lewis. But Perez is about to be swallowed up. Tire phase update when you can. Yeah, tires are good. [Music] [Applause] Here comes Hulenberg having a look into turn one. Get side by side. He’ll have the DRS. That’ll be moved on. We slough him behind him. As long behind now we just have to stay with him. if we can. Valkyrie has actually caught back up just about to Vnappen. He’s right on the edge of being uh cut from DRS. I think he’s just dropped out again. That’s a shame. We need to reduce K1 usage. And there we go. We’ve just about managed to hang him to the DRS, but we’re out of battery now for both drivers. So Perez has a chance that of staying where he is for a couple more laps. Valkyrie, it’s just a question of when. I think tires overheating again with a double DRS coming up. I think if not both of them and certainly George is going to get us by turn three. I don’t think we’ve got the DRS to Hulenberg. No, we haven’t. So, we are vulnerable to Orlando. The last remaining McLaren Norris gets us and gets us comfortably. We’ve got nothing to fight with. Correct. Russell gets past Hamilton behind you. Right. We’re taking the second corner. He’s going to give it to turn one, isn’t he? [Music] Faints to the inside, switches back to the outside, just swoops on through. Closer and closer to that podium now in fourth place. [Applause] If I can keep at least one of my cars running somewhere in the top 10 until we get to our pit stops, I’ll be happy with that. That will give us an opportunity. [Music] Hamilton has DRS. Oh man, look at this. They are lining up to take a shot at the back of Botas here. Hajar is side by side with Perez. Has to back out. They’ll have another bite of it here. up the inside and just again no no no answer to that but it does mean we’ll have DRS for the next two straight Hamilton gets draw here we are then at the 11th corner they decide to give it a go and that’s a straightforward move down the inside again that means Baltry will have RS and fifth place after that. So that will hopefully protect us for another lap. [Music] See the tires [Music] really kind of fluctuating. This is where we went into protection into the safety car. And immediately as the tires start to overheat, the lines start to get a bit squiffy again. Pit window is opened up for Valkyrie. Well, will open up next lap. [Applause] [Music] I don’t really want to push the tires just yet, but I might have to. Both of them are uh struggling to stay with the hard tires down to 60% wear, which means we’re probably about to see another little drop in pace. [Applause] [Music] They are queuing up behind Jacko the back way. [Applause] [Applause] They seelair putting the moves or trying to put the moves to Liam Morrison. [Applause] [Music] is just going to swoop on through here. Or is he? No. Good defending from Jacko there. Lacing up on the brakes to make Eston think twice. [Applause] [Music] [Applause] Keeps him covered again. Valkyrie is keeping Hulenberg at bay. [Music] I am going to start to go a little bit more aggressive with the tires now. This is going to absolutely shred them over the next couple of laps. But we are very close to stopping anyway. [Music] Oh, and a really bad line through that corner for Nikico Hulenberg. Norris gets through. Hajar tries to get through. Has to hit the gravel. Backs out of it slightly. [Music] Okcon’s got through on Perez. And here comes Lando. There’s no blocking this move. Look at them all swarming in the background. Players are ready. Yeah, copy. [Music] Ah, Hulenberg gets us as well. Can we at least keep Hajar behind? We can. Way to go. That’s two places to rock for Valkyrie. Now we’re approaching turn two. The opportunity is there. You hear the lift as he goes over the curb and onto the grass. That’s what allowed Hulenberg to swoop on through. [Music] Perez on borrow time at the moment. Colipinto all over the back of him. Everyone’s just leaving us for dead as soon as they get past us. This really does worry me about where we’re actually going to finish up. But we’ve had those two retirements I was expecting. So with both of our cars aiming for 20th. As long as we finish, we will hit the sponsor targets for both of our cars. So we’ll get about 800 grand out of this race if both cars finish. as Colinto gets through. [Music] Hadar is through as well. There’s progress to be made and Albon is into the pit is. [Applause] So, first racing pit stop there for Alex Albon. [Music] Antonelli, the only other driver who didn’t stop along with us under that safety car. He is currently second. There he is. Expect to see him in the pits in any moment. Uh I’m actually going to box Valkyrie this lap. Let’s get after these cars in front. You can see how quickly the tire wear is just disappearing when we start to push these tires with the new tire wear model. Boxing this lap box. Perez’s tires aren’t doing that much better. We’ll box him on the next lap. And try to cool down the tires as much as possible. Got him. [Music] In fact, they’re far enough apart. Let’s just box them both. Copy. This is why we uh built in redundancy into the strategy with how much brick we would have or rubber we would have left on the tires. [Music] Let’s just hope we don’t have a bad stop. Did we? We are going to come out at the back of the field. There’s no question of that. Well, hopefully the free air will give us a chance to get some good lap times in. [Applause] Beautiful double stop. 2.6 seconds for Valtry. 2.4 for Czecho. Tra will be clear. No delay for either driver there. Beautiful stuff. Let’s see what sort of times we can do. Ahead is Alba with clear air. Car behind Perez. Perez 2 and 1/2 seconds behind. car in front is Botas. [Applause] So if we come to the end of lap 15, it is Max Vstappen leading from Lando Norris. Antonelli in third but has yet to stop. Then it’s George Russell from Lewis Hamilton. Nikico Hulenberg in the Audi in sixth. Isaac Hajar in second. Red Bull seventh. Aon in eighth place. Ninth place is uh Colipinto Gassley’s into the pits. Wow. He started on he’s already changed tires once. So that is uh some pretty excessive tire wear for Gazzley. He will come out behind Vtory Bas and hopefully behind Perez as well. Perez goes through. So 18th and 19th so far. Uh it’s Lawson in 10th. Then the Clair Cenoda Lindlat on his debut. Currently 13th in the second racing ball. Bilelettto 14th has picked up either some damage to his tires or damage to his car. [Music] [Applause] And nothing is showing as uh hazard against the tires. Even though we can’t see their status, I don’t know if that means we won’t see any hazards to the tires as well. So that might be underfloor damage for Bortalto. Let’s see if he dies into the pits. [Music] Alvin’s already caught the back of the pack. So, Porto stays out. So, I’m guessing it’s not tires. I’m guessing that’s under floor damage then to Porto’s car. Sets the fastest lap. [Music] Antony in fourth. Pace is definitely falling away. Those tires are going to be starting to struggle. [Music] [Music] And there we see confirmation that is the second pit stop for Pierre Gazzley. So yeah, he went through those hard tires very quickly as Hamilton gets past Antelli. Hajar is having a look as well. Surely he’s going to be into the pits soon and stays out for another lap. [Music] But uh he’s going to be a sitting duck now I think for most teams. 1253 last lap. Really slow lap. [Music] Perez and Gazzley are side by side. I don’t know who’s going to have DRS out of the final turn. Possibly probably Gazzley. It is Gazzley. Copy. But 1224 for Valkyrie. 1241. Very defensive driving from Perez who has just about been able to keep keep going. Gazzley behind him. Although with the DRS open a second time, I don’t think that’s going to uh Yeah, there we go. Slots in. But that might be a good thing for Perez. That might if he can stay with Gazzley, that might pull him a bit further forward. Let’s use some battery just to make sure he stays in DRS. You can use all the boost bar. [Music] So, I have a feeling Gazzley will try and pull away quickly. There we go. We’re in DRS range and charge button on. Do a little bit of micromanaging here on Czecho. We are lapping faster than the cars in front as Norris sets the new fastest lap. Antelli still not boxing. [Music] Yep. And charge button on. Okay. A reminder, running a brand new tire wear model. I have not run it for more than just a few laps. So, I have no idea how our tires are actually going to perform or behave throughout this Grand Prix or for the rest of the season as we go to different tracks and different climates. We could be in for some uh very interesting results and more energy available. Yeah, copy. [Music] just unable to stay with Gazzley. Perez is definitely struggling at the moment because of his uh sponsor commitments. It’s uh affecting his pace. As you can see, he’s down nearly what 8/10 of a second of. And that’s with him using bits of battery and getting DRS. So, not expecting a lot as Antelli is finally into the pits. In comes Yuki Cenoda as well for his second stop. And it’s a set of soft tires for Antonelli. Did not expect that. Both of the Aspens are in. Soft tires go on for Cenoda. Medium tires for Fernando Alonso. [Music] Antonady gets out in front of Perez and Gazzley. The Aston get out just behind. We are back in DRS range again, but we’re out of battery now. And Taton on, please. Yep. Botas still rebuilding his battery and slowly chipping away at the cars in front. Albon is being limited to uh the pace of the cars in front. pressure tires [Music] [Applause] that stuck it at the back of a DRS train. [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] And now Senova gets pasted on Czecho. Soft tires. Absolutely no surprise there. Marries his tires slightly hot because he is uh in dirty air. Bot’s tires much more comfortable. Down to 85% as well. We haven’t been running that many laps. We already lost 15% of the life. But it is behaving according to prediction there and so far just about the gecko as well. Alban gets past Bman and let’s see how quickly he goes after Porto Limblatlair and Colinto. Really good job. Think he’s already in DRS range. Next guy in front will be another he is. But he’s just left Bman for dead. [Music] We are just two seconds behind. There is Bman [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] Haring from the gas leak. How long he’ll stay there is 81 to guesslair is into the pits. Currently P15. [Music] So some of these tires not lasting long at all. [Music] Antonelli sets a new fast slap on his soft tires. Valkyrie has got into DRS range. [Music] And that is a hell of a train, isn’t it? [Music] Load push. Yep. [Applause] [Music] [Applause] Let’s get him looking for those opportunities now. Okay. [Music] [Applause] Thought he would jump to the inside there, but he thought better of it. [Music] Antonelli steaming up to the back of us as well. High speed management is very good. Let’s give him a little bit more tire push just to help facilitate one of these overtakes if we can. Harder if you can. Colipinto’s in for a stop. Just no way through at the moment. It’s such a tightly packed train here. Can we get the drop into turn three? No, we can’t. So, I’m going to protect the tires. Oh. Oh. Oh, come on. Limblad goes wide. That’s going to be under floor damage for Lindlat. Charge on target. [Music] Who’s out of DRS range? So, uh, we should hopefully be able to get the move done into, uh, turn 10. Try and squeeze some, uh, extra life into the battery. Gassley’s tires really dropping away by the look of it. He’s dropped not just behind us, but behind Alonzo, and he does have a decent amount as well. You are good to go. Mode push. All right, we should get the DRS here. And that’s into the pits for Lindlat. Borletto’s in as well. We didn’t get DRS. Oh, that’s annoying. So, the detection point, we’d already got through by that point. We got through just after No, we got through just before the detection point. Never mind. [Music] Closing on to worry about management on these tires. Just pushing. So, this is where our tires should be coming good against everybody else now cuz we did stop out of sequence. We did not box during that early safety car. Charge on coming [Applause] in the clean air. Paris’s temperatures back under control. [Music] [Applause] Need to get a little bit more battery back in the car. Nico Hawkenberg is in for Audi. [Music] Medium tires for him. So he still has a little stuff to go. We get through on Bareman. charge on. And it was a really bad exit for Antelli. Cenoda has jumped. Antelli. Antelli going very wide over the grass there. Bman’s kept Cenod behind him. So that gives us a little bit of a chance to try and stretch our legs a little bit. Open up a small gap. [Music] [Music] here. How much snow is happening to lift as George Russell is in [Music] [Applause] soft tires for Russell. So, he’s definitely making another stop. [Music] There’s Aron boxing as well. [Music] and Bman and Cenoda. So Cenoda is off those soft tires already. He’s going for a set of mediums. I don’t know if he’ll be able to take those to the end. So I’m expecting another stop. Ali Yuki Cenoda. That’s not a good stop. [Music] He’s behind Bman. Ah, that’s going to be frustrating. Bareman running soft. Chance for Bman to try and sprint away a little bit. Let’s cut back to Valkyrie. [Music] There’s Czecho. [Music] 2 and 1/2 seconds behind Antinelli. But a slow lap for Antinelli. Well, he went wide and dropped the place last lap, didn’t he? So, that’ll be why. Let’s check his sectors, though. The first sector. I think he had DRS. I think we’re closing the gap to Antinelli. I think Antonelli might be in soon. Another couple of laps. See what the final sectors look like. But I think our tires are in better shape here. [Music] Yeah, we are closing on Antonelli. [Music] Ah, thank you Wayne. Very kind of you. [Music] [Music] [Music] All right, Hamilton boxes from third place and a long way behind Max and Lando. Oh, it’s not a good start. That first front right did not want to come off. soft tires. So that’s going to be yet another pit stop needed for Lewis. There’s no way he’s going to take those tires to the end. Fastest lap for George. Lawson is in. [Music] He’s going soft. So he’s definitely stopping again after this. That’s a much better stop. Good smooth stop there for Racing Bulls. He will drop out just in front of his teammate. [Music] Let’s take a look at pit stop time so far. So, quickest stop has been max. We’ve got the third quickest stop here, 2.411. There’s Racing Bulls with both of their stops. Very consistent for Racing Bulls today. [Music] Slowest stop so far has been 2.8 Eight for Williams, Colipinto, Russell. Hamilton’s best stop so far is 2.5. And you can see Perez is closing in. Let’s give him some battery because we have gotlair having a look. Alban has got past Hamilton. Actually, no. Hamilton’s come out behind Albon because of his pit stop, hasn’t he? There is Antinelli into the pits. I said it would be a couple of laps. I thought there might be another couple of laps to go yet, but my plan was to try and get up onto the back of him. That’s not going to happen now. Medium tires for Kimmy. Could possibly go to the end. Alonso is in if the leaderboards will hold still. Medium tires going on for Colapinto. Soft tires for Alonso. So it looks like he’s stopping again. And next car behind. Still 29 laps to go after this one. So I think anyone who’s on softs or mediums is stopping again. We still have one more stop to go for another set of hard tires. Question is what are these guys running at the front here? Hajar currently in third place although needs to stop soon I would imagine. Oh there we go. He’s in [Music] and it’s soft. So there’ll be another stop for Isaac. Where is he going to drop out behind Hamilton? Just ahead of Valkyrie. See if Valtry can put a little bit of pressure on him. Yep. for AON and Hulenberg right behind Czecho. [Music] [Music] So the leadboard flatters to deceive a little bit at the moment. We are definitely out of sequence with the rest of the grid or pretty much the entire grid. There’s a couple of cars he stopped around the same time as us. Uh seventh and ninth right now. We will almost certainly not be finishing. Oh well, Perez certainly won’t be finishing there. He’s out. That’s a safety car. I’m running out of battery. It’s virtual. Huge huge crash there on our side. We can continue. Both rear tires are gone. Terminal chassis, rear wing, and suspension damage. That is definitely a retirement. I don’t know if this will go full safety car. It might well do. It’s early, but we could [Music] could potentially stop Very. It does mean these tires will be hanging on. [Music] What about how many uh softs do I have? I think I’ve only got the one sort of soft set of softs available. Yeah, look at that. We’re looking at what 12 laps at best on the soft tires, but we could go soft to mediums like that. Let’s create that as an alternative strategy. We’ll see if it goes full safety car or not. That is a massive shunt. It is a full safety car. Where are the leaders? The leaders are there. So, we don’t have to box immediately. That’s good. We can get another lap out of this. Let’s uh do I want a fuel save? Yeah, let’s do some fuel saving. And here we’ve got a yellow flag. This was a huge, huge crash. Watch these cars as they head into turn 10. Oh, and there wasn’t a lot that could be done to avoid crashing into the barrier. I imagine their confidence will have taken a knock. [Applause] Not the best of starts to the season for Czecho. [Music] And now I think we have to uh we have to change the strategy. It’s just a little bit too long for the hard tires. Copy that. Box this way. [Music] That was a crazy crash. It was but luckily you’re here safety Clark so uh press you into service again solair is out on soft tires as is Borletto Bman’s going out on mediums Gazzley on softs yeah softs is definitely going to be the way to protect us I think see what Max Norris, remember they stopped during the first safety car and went onto the hard tires. It’s going to be mediums. Oh, not a good stop. Chance for Norris to take the lead here. And he has. Clean stop for Lando. They’ve both gone on some medium tires. And down in the pits. Oh, that’s a slow one. And based based on our own tire prediction models, they’re both going to have to stop again as well. Still a fair bit of this race to go. We’re only what just about the halfway point. Maybe just past Yeah, just past the halfway point. And we are currently running P5. We’ll get a a a bit of a cheeky quicker stop than prediction thanks to the safety car, but we are going to come out behind this queue of traffic. Whether we’ll get out in front of or not, I don’t know. I was tempted to just stay out, but that’s a decent stop. 2.6. I think we are going to clear. You know, we’ll come out just behind Lawson. Yeah, there we go. Nobody’s been lapped yet. So, uh, we just got to wait for the cars to basically Constantina back up again. And while they’re doing that, I’m going to pop an ad break and go get back in a sec. [Music] No management required. Copy. [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] There he is. [Music] [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Oh my. [Music] So, just waiting on Limblad to uh bring the whole field back together again. There we go. Down to 19 runners. Unfortunately, we will not get any money for Perez at the end of this Grand Prix. Uh we will get a hefty bill. Although, actually chassis we’re okay with. Suspension, that’s a problem. We do have a spare in the works. Whether we’ll get it in time for the next round or not, I I think we will. I hope we will. But that’s one of our upgraded parts gone already. [Music] And the real question is what’s that done to the powertrain? Nothing good. I’m pretty sure of that. Heat. Heat. [Music] So, is the safety car going to come in at the end of this lap? [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Small request. If you are enjoying the stream, then uh hit that like button and uh be sure to uh share this video with your friends. Hopefully this uh series will gain a bit of traction. Uh we’re showing off a lot of variation on some of the stuff that we’ve done in the past with liveries and a lot of extra mods that we’re throwing in there as well. So, uh it would be good for uh the creators of the mods to have their work displayed to a larger audience as well. So, spread the word. If you’re not yet subscribed, a subscription to the channel would be awesome as well. Safety car is going to come in at the end of this lap. Safety car is in this lap. Got a lot of fuel to burn off now. [Music] From tire point of view, we don’t think lifting co is necessary. Yep. Might need to pick up the pace a little bit. Mode push. Copy. [Music] Can we get a points finish? We have a chance of getting a point or two. Sarah has left the leader. They’re about to get back underway. Lando will lead them across the line. [Music] Russell looks like he was caught napping just a touch there. So car behind still. He’s 0.5 behind. Okay, let’s get on it. Still everything to play for. And we’re coming under immediate pressure from Charlotte as expected. Let’s get these tires back in the window quickly. Remember, long way to go in this race. [Music] Charge on. Slow down now. Copy. Hulenberg has dropped away and that’s creating a little bit of a a queue. [Music] Tights are good. I expect he’ll push on this lap to try and close the gap back down. [Music] DRS is enabled. Fastest lap for Lando. Max has stayed with them. Russell’s caught back up a little bit. And it’s Hadar who’s now going to come under a bit of pressure from Hamilton. [Applause] [Music] This focus says I’m not racing. [Music] Let’s have no push. Drop it. Let’s see if we can maybe do something. He has DRS. [Music] [Applause] We’re happy with time management. Tires up to 100°. That’s already 5° over their uh comfortable threshold. They’re going to start to melt if we’re not careful. [Music] We have a little bit of uh tolerance built into these tires now because of the safety car, but that’ll disappear very quickly. Just do your best. [Music] [Applause] He can’t get past Lawson because he’s tires behind Hulenberg. Hulenberg is trying to close in on Aon. Aon dropping away from Albon. Albon barely hanging on to Hamilton. Everyone starting to space out a little bit. Morrison might not have got the DRS. Let’s see. Ah, he did. But we’ve got a nice little run on him here. Let’s go full attack and see if we can maybe capitalize out of the chain [Applause] and breaking. [Music] [Applause] [Music] Come on. Valkyrie gets the move done. Did we get the DRS to Hulenberg? I don’t know. Aon’s in the pits. Wow. That is a surprise. You are currently ninth. Got bigger. We did not get DRS, so we are vulnerable. Our pit window opens up in five laps, four laps to our predicted pit stop. But the tires won’t last that long. Look how quickly that curve has gone down. [Music] You need to keep pushing though just to get back into DRS. Oh, it’s a problem in the pits. Rock on as well. He’s going soft tires. They will not go to the end. So, it’s going to be another stop for Rock. Is he going for another set of softs after that? [Music] Stay in range. Stay in range. Stay in range. Car behind it is Lawson. Yes, we’re in range. [Music] those tires down quickly. Just cool down the tires as much as you can. [Music] Hamilton’s pace has dropped away. He’s either had a bad lap somewhere or his tires are are dying. [Music] or both. Evening Daniel Hajars into the pits. Mediums. If he’s careful with them, they could go, but I don’t think he’s going to be careful with them. [Music] Still desperately trying to get the tire temperatures down here for Valkyrie and it’s not happening behind you. Look how much tire wear we’ve lost in just a lap or two laps. It’s crazy. If you are able to increase pace, it would be a good time to do it. I have to up the tire push again just to make sure that we don’t lose the DRS. Cool your tires. What do I think of Rosco passing? I think it’s a shame. You know, it’s always, you know, upsetting when uh when a family pet passes away. What about tires? Heart goes out to Lewis. I know what it’s like. I’ve been in that situation myself and it’s horrible and you know, he had Rosco for so long. Charge on. Yeah, copy. Car in front is Niko. No worries, mate. [Music] [Applause] [Music] Tires are slowly starting to cool down, although the the life on them is falling away dramatically. [Music] very happy with your tire use. Yeah, I’d like to think that uh the journalist won’t be that insensitive, but he’s definitely going to get asked about it at, you know, at least once. [Music] There we go. Hamilton into the pits. [Music] Car behind is lost. Soft tires for Lewis. Ah, they should go the distance. Pick the pace back up. I’m going to go one more lap, I think, without [Music] actually I’m going to go uh this lap and see if I can undercut Lewis. Let’s box then. I lost the DRS to Hulenberg which has not helped. Okay, for mode push. Copy that. [Music] Currently P6 car ahead is Niko. [Applause] All right, in we come. Lost behind you. [Music] Waterto boxing behind us. 2.6 again. Decent stop. Could be close with soft tires for for Gabby there. Hamilton did get out in front of us, but not by a lot. [Music] URP16. So, we got to be careful with these tires. Need something that’s going to give us some pace. He is 2.3 seconds behind. They are going to be a little bit more fragile than we used to to go at the end of this one. Need to get them up to temperature quickly and then really monitor them like a hawk. We’ve got the chance of an undercut on a few different teams here. Few different drivers, especially those who are on the mediums. Max is in. He’s going for a set of softs. It’s a little early than I was expecting for Max. Llair is in as well as is Cenoda. [Music] Okay. For mode push. Oh, terrible stop for Charlotte. So, we’re in 13th place. More still to stop in front of us. Tire temps look good. Copy. Charge on. And now we need to uh have enough pace hopefully to undercut some of these guys and not too much pace that we burn out our tires and just try and hold on. We are looking at a point finish here. [Music] [Music] There’s no point trying to squeeze an extra point for the fastest lap. That is not a thing. It’s Albon boxes [Music] and it’s another set of socks. And my guess is they’re going to be scrubed stops as well. So Alban’s going to have to be careful that he doesn’t destroy his tires before the end of the race. Soft for Lawson. I think pretty much anyone who stops now is going to be putting on a set of soft tires. [Music] Just concentrate getting your tire temps down. He will drop out just in front of his teammate. We’ve closed a gap to Hamilton who is stuck behind Okon. You see we’re doing 120.6 on that last lap which is definitely quicker than all of these guys in front of us who are going to be stopping soon. Quicker even than Norris by over a second. Though I think we were using a little bit of battery on part of that lap and we’re on a higher tire pace as well. won’t be quite so emphatic this time round. [Music] Going to be putting some strain on our engine at these temperatures for a sustained period as well, but needs must. Engine will still be in better shape than PowerS’s engine. Remember, a long way to go in this race. [Music] We’ve gained over half a second on Okon on this lap so far. 1215 for Estan. Hamilton just behind him. 1.2 seconds in the end we gained that lap. We’re almost in DRS range. [Music] And for those who stop late and put on the socks, I don’t know if this is going to work for them. I mean, theoretically, they should have a lot of pace, but they’re going to be having to fight through traffic. Their tires are going to take a huge amount of punishment. They might not actually have anything to fight with by the time they get close to us. Charge on. Perfect. [Music] Russell is in. Okay, let’s get on it. Hulenberg coming in as well. And we have a chance to undercut Hulenberg. I don’t know about Russell. [Music] That would be a feather in a cap if we could beat Audi today. [Music] Soft tires. [Music] We are through. [Music] He will come out of this set just behind Yuki Cenod. That was close. [Music] Meanwhile, we are keeping our temperatures under control. We’re rebuilding the battery. Hamilton’s still not past Oon. Copy. And this is going to allow everyone else to close up to us now. So, we need something to happen in front of us. [Music] Hamilton. Need Lewis to get through quickly. We don’t have the pace to in an outright straight fight to beat Hamilton. Norris comes in. Charge on. Soft tires. Decent stop. Max is going to take the lead. Will Anteneelli get the jump on him? No, it is going to be a straight fight it looks like between Max and Lando. Aons into the pits. That’s release Lewis. And I said we wouldn’t have a chance in a straight fight, but I’m going to have a I’m going to have a crack at it because the others are really close behind us. Let’s see if we can get past Lewis here. [Music] We get around the outside of him and we’re going to push. Excellent work. Currently P9. Glad we were able to get our battery pretty much full. That means I got a a lap and a half to really really try and close in on Colinto. Hamilton has DRS. [Music] We are actually gapping Lewis. He’s going to have to go defensive. Very happy with tire management. Antonelli’s in and we can undercut Antelli here. Bman’s in as well. We can undercut him. We could be on for a really good finish here. Colinto’s in. I don’t know if we got DRS. I don’t think we did. We didn’t. Hamilton’s in. Wow. I didn’t think Hamilton was going to box again, but it makes sense. We’re in P6. [Applause] And we’ve got enough grip to be able to uh go to the end. Have we got enough of a gap to stay in P6 though? Hadar’s going to the end. I think Albon is probably going to have to stop again. So, we might even get past Albon here. [Music] [Music] There’s Botas in the background. [Music] Max is flying. So is Lando. 118 for Lando. [Music] 1197 for George, 121s for Hajar and Albon, a 120 for us. We are closing the gap. Bortalto half a second slower, but we did start the lap with battery. So, let’s see how we do this lap. These two are fighting side by side. That’s going to slow the pair of them down. [Music] The gap is 2 and 1/2 seconds. [Music] We’re less than 5 seconds away from a podium. Although we don’t have the pace of George, but if if by some chance George decides to stop again. Who knows? [Music] We don’t know the status of anyone’s tires either. A long way to go. Don’t know how much grip any of these guys have got left. Whether they can go to the end or not. Whether they’re going to risk a puncture. [Music] And that is by design. It’s adds that extra element of unpredictability into things. 1.8 seconds is the gap and it’s still coming down. We took uh 1.6 seconds out of Isaac on that last lap. [Music] [Applause] [Music] Portalto is not closing the gap. We think he has underfloor damage. Let’s not forget which will certainly be hurting. [Applause] [Music] [Applause] Do your best. [Music] Just going to be outside of DRS range. [Applause] Maybe we snuck in. I don’t think we did, but we’ll definitely be in range at the end of the lap or even halfway round the lap, I think. Still, we are opening up the gap to Porto. Hulenberg can’t get through. They are queuing up. We’re starting to queue up behind Portalto. This is giving us an opportunity to at least cement six, if not move up further. [Music] Seven laps to go, including this one. There’s progress to be made. No. Seven laps to go at the end of this lap. [Applause] DRS is wide open now. Let’s start to protect the tires again. Try and rebuild the battery. We have more pace in the pair of them, but is that because they’re fighting. [Applause] [Music] Alvin is through. [Music] [Applause] Hel’s not giving it up. And Hel will have the DRS, but does he have enough grip? [Applause] How much life is left in the tires of Alex Albon on those softs as we go side by side and we are through against Isaac. No worries, mate. [Music] Good job, mate. Fantastic stuff. Let’s take a closer look. Now this was Valkyrie Botas. The opportunity begging to be taken and fifth place after that. Beautiful stuff from Valtry. What a debut uh race this is going to be for one half of the garage. Not quite so good for the other half. Billetto has boxed. That will free up Hulenberg. [Applause] He has Diorus. So do I. [Applause] [Music] Mode push. Let’s see just how quick Albon is. [Music] Mercedes is the most powerful engine. [Applause] We’re using a Ferrari engine. He does have DRS on you. Y I think he’s the third fastest. I think it’s Mercedes, then Honda, then Ferrari. [Applause] But the engine spread is much more even than it was in the base game where it was 100% power for or 100 for Red Bull power trains and 80 for Renault. The weakest engine is not sure whether it’s Ford or Audi, but the weakest value is 90. So the whole field is spread by just 10 points as opposed to 20. We’ve left Hadar behind [Music] now. Just flashing into the background was Hulenberg. He’s definitely closing on Isaac [Applause] and Haban’s got pace. We are barely hanging on to him despite using battery as well as DRS. There is the Audi. There are five laps closely followed by Snow and Llair. [Music] We can keep our tires at this pace, I think. Charge on. We just don’t have the straight line speed, though. I’m having to use the battery just to stay with Alex. [Music] [Applause] Okay, charge on. I have to see if I can just recharge or, you know, stop burning battery while we’re in these long double DRS zones. Hopefully, Albon Albon’s been burning his battery as well, which will leave us in a stronger position. tires. Started to slide a bit. Attempted going back up. No management required. [Applause] How’s actually closing in on George? Okay. only just but the gas center 3 and a half seconds. It’s not inconceivable that you know with a little bit of luck we could even get past Albon and potentially Hassel and Harry George for the podium which would be insane. [Music] Mode push please. Mode push dropped. Got it. Can we get back in? No management on the tires required. [Applause] [Music] I don’t think we can. Remember, long way to go in this race. Not really. Three laps to go. Welcome back, Johnny. Yeah, we’re still out of DRS range. That Williams is quick [Applause] and you can see the gap to Russell’s down to 2 seconds. We could yet have a podium fight on our, you know, on our hands here. Even if we’re not directly involved in it, there could definitely be a fight between Russell and Alban here. [Applause] I don’t want to turn the tires up just yet. I want to try and if I can wait, but need to make sure that we get that DRS back. Okay, let’s get on it. Still everything to play for. Hopefully I can get in range by the end of this lap. [Music] Just need to pick up the slipstream before Albon picks up George’s. [Applause] Tires are starting to screen. [Music] High speed management is very good. And we’ve done it. Now, can we stay there? Oh, rustles into the pits. Charge on with two laps to go. George is boxing. And now it’s straight fight with Alex Albon for the podium. Two laps to go. This is insane. Charge on. Got me. And Russell’s not even going to finish in the points. down in 13th place with a bit of a gap and traffic to fight through. I don’t think he’s going to have the pace. [Music] This Focus has a long race. We’re just outside of range. It’s going to come down, I think. Load push. Copy. to the last couple of corners on the final lap. [Applause] [Music] [Applause] And now I can’t really up the tires cuz they won’t last the lap if I if I increase the pace. So we have to just see if we can do it like this. Charge on. Norris overtakes V stappen. Is Lando going to steal the opening Grand Prix away from Max who has led pretty much the entire Grand Prix? Yeah, copy. Mode push, please. Mode push. I’ve got to just give it everything. There’s There’s a podium on offer here. We have to go for it. Push a bit harder through turn six and turn 12. [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] We’re not going to get the DRS. We’re not close enough unless Alban makes a horrific mistake. Oh, it’s a puncture for Lindl. Alban’s got the legs on us. He is going to get the podium. Just do your best. We gave it everything we had. It just wasn’t quite enough for the podium, but what an amazing start to the season. We really rolled the dice with tire strategy. The safety cars really kind of threw everything out the window. So, I don’t know if this is something that is definitely going to be a recurring feature or not. As we get another puncture, Liam Lawson. That’s both RBs puncturing. That’s the check in flag. We finish in fourth place though. That is 12 huge points. Norris has taken the win. Max in second. Albon is on the podium. What an amazing start to the season for Williams. Good race for Haja, his debut in the Red Bull alongside Max. He finishes in P5. It’s P6 for Audi on their full Audi debut ahead of in the Ferrari. Cenoda’s debut at Aston Honda met P8 with four points. Angeli ninth. Gazzley gets 10th for Alpine and George Russell ended up in 12th place, stopping with two laps to go and it’s turned into a bit of a shocker for RB. They were looking good for some points at some point with Lawson. Limblad’s not really been on the pace today and that puncture at the end. Well, yeah. Ended any lingering hope. He will just about avoid being lapped, but only just [Music] as Norris peels into the pit lane to head to Park Fair. Oh, his garage as does Max. That is it. That is the end of the opening Grand Prix of the season. What a pretty awful day that was for Czecho Perez. That was a bitterly disappointing retirement. The team certainly wouldn’t have wanted their race to end this way. Lando Norris certainly loves the podium. Heading up there now to celebrate again. And that’s win number one of the season. and it’s sure to provide them with a real confidence boost. [Music] Well, it wasn’t exactly a walk in the park, but it was a thrilling weekend here for us all at the Australian Grand Prix. [Music] Well, Karu, how do you think they’ll be feeling in the team garage at the end of that? It was a strangely mixed weekend for them. We saw one driver put in a strong performance, but it was a different story for the other. Definitely positives there, though. And that’s about that for this weekend’s here in Melbourne. Join us for the next round as we head to Shanghai for all the excitement of the Chinese Grand Prix. [Music] What a crazy start to the season. Uh it is a win for the defending champion Lando Norris who robbed Max there. Max as I said led pretty much the entire Grand Prix and then Lando pipped him on the final lap. We take a look here at Vstappen. [Music] Boxed under the safety car at the very beginning, quickly got back up into the lead and then just led and led and led. dipped to second when he boxed for the second safety car. Boxed again to drop down into uh P6. Got back up to P5, then second, then back into first, and led and led and led and then Lando snuck it at turn one on the start of the final lap. Look how far those two were separated by throughout the entire stint, though. Very, very small margins. [Music] So it is uh as I say an opening win for Lando Norris. Max second and can rightly feel a little agrieved about that. Alex Albon takes third place. His first ever podium uh for Williams. We just missed out. We finished less than a second behind but just didn’t quite have enough left in the car. But that is still a massive uh result. way ahead of what I was expecting, especially considering where our car was sitting. The safety cars definitely threw strategies, plan strategies out of the window. Uh I’m very curious as to how things would have shaken out without that first safety car with the almost the entire field immediately diving in for hard tires. Could have been very interesting indeed. Haja on his Red Bull debut gets P5 ahead of Hulenberg, Cenoda, Anelli, and Gazzley. Little bit further down the field, uh, it is Bman who takes 11th ahead of Russell. Hamilton in 13th, 14th for Colinto, 15th for Alonso, 16th for Borthalto, 17th for Lawson with that late puncture, 18th for Rockon, 19th for Lindblad also with a puncture towards the end there. Uh, but he hasn’t really been on the pace this weekend. Uh, let’s take a look then at the driver standings. Max is uh, having to settle for second. Lando leads the field. Voucher in fourth place. The constructor standings, it’s Red Bull who are top though, 28 points ahead of McLaren on 25. Williams in third with 15. Then it’s Cadillac from Audi, Ferrari, Aston, and Mercedes. Alpine have a point uh in 10th. H and Racing Balls 11th yet to score. Let’s take a look at the pit stops. Uh quickest stop was Max 2.3. Uh quite a few 2.3 second stops. Uh we did just about hang on with Perez’s 2.4 second stop to get two points out of the competition. Uh but a good day for Red Bull. Good day for Ferrari with two in the top four. Alpine getting two in the top 10 as well. Mercedes get a car home in in fifth place. Sixth for Aston. Uh Racing Balls getting two through in the top 10. Uh not a huge amount of points on offer though. Let’s take a look at the standings. It’s Ferrari top with 30 points ahead of Red Bull with 25. Alpine with 19, 10 points for Mercedes, eight points for Aston, seventh for Racing Balls. We have two and then it’s Har, McLaren, Audi, and Williams bringing up the back. There are the stops consistently in the 2.6 range for Bounty. Need a little bit more pace out of his pit crew. Just the one stop for Perez and then he had that massive off which brought out the second safety car. We got our uh driver payout uh of just 350 grand for Valtry. It would have been the same for Czecho had he finished, but of course he didn’t finish. Uh kind of worried about how much damage has been done to his engine. Let’s head back to HQ and uh survey the damage, shall we? [Music] [Music] [Music] Okay, we are just 4 days away from China. How bad is this going to be? Got to replace the chassis. That’s fine. We hadn’t upgraded that yet, so that’s that’s okay. Same with the rear wing. We hadn’t designed a second one yet, so that’s okay. Not so good. Losing a suspension. Do I have a spare? No, I do not. It’s not ready yet. Will it be ready in time for China? It won’t let me install it. Ah, damn it. There we go. I’m gonna have that issue again, it would seem. Ah, the powertrain’s already red. No, it’s bad. It’s very, very bad. The engine already down to just 40%. The ERS 35% with a fault. The gearbox is dead. So, that is very much engine penalties for Perez at some point this season. Oh, that’s horrible. That is horrible to lose a powertrain effectively [Music] that early in the season. That’s really, really not good. Post race data. We just checked in on that. An update on Williams, who one of our arrivals. Our car has been a medium speed. Um, so that gives us a chance to maybe beat them in China. I doubt it. That’s about the only thing we’re better at them than I think. Let’s take a full look if we can at the rest of the grid. See who is where. So, we’ll start with the McLaren who won the Grand Prix just. So, uh that’s a pretty pretty strong car across the board. Ours very much not strong across the board at all. Uh let’s take a look at uh Red Bull. Wow, Red Bull’s car not as strong as I was expecting in terms of ranking numbers, but again, we’re talking um quite a close field because it is the beginning of a season, the beginning of a new regulation period. So, the gaps aren’t necessarily all that big. Max has definitely made the difference there, but Hajar had a good run as well. So, the Rebels are pretty good balanced all rounder, it would seem. Uh, Ferrari have got some really good downforce. Look at that. Uh, really strong in the dirty air as well. Not so good in terms of speed though. They’ve got a fair bit of drag on their car by the look of it. They’ve got the best uh best tire wear as well. How far behind are we in terms of speed? About a kilometer. That’s encouraging. We’ve got the worst engine Ferrari. We’re only a kilometer ahead of us. Um downforce though, we’re a full um tenth of a G in down in downforce there. That’s a lot. Medium is pretty pretty decent in comparison. It’s not quite as good as I would have liked, but uh again, down a lot in the high speed. Uh down nearly 7% in dirty air tolerance. Down a lot in tires as well. Look at that. We’re down uh 13 12% in tires. Their car is actually lighter than ours as well. That is uh is interesting. Uh let me have a look. See if I can figure out who is the best. Oh well, there we go. I think best best car is the Mercedes. Um yeah, very very quick. Very strong DRS. Very good downforce. Not quite so good in the dirty air. Tieware, not great. Actually, slightly worse than us, which is their biggest Achilles at the moment. But that’s a pretty good car. In terms of pace, again, not as bad as I was expecting. It’s less than 2 km. It’s almost 2 km an hour, but it’s it’s not monstrously big, but we’ll never ever come close to it. It’s something we can aspire to work towards. Acceleration’s definitely uh a fair bit better. And that’s going to be harder to close. DRS, we’re down 8%. Down a bit again in the downforce. A big gap in the medium speed and in the high speed. A little bit closer in the low speed. But there’s definitely work for us to do to improve our car. We’ve got 1 and a half million. Let’s see. We’re five days away. There’s a sprint in China. So, we won’t be able to put the new suspension on again on Czecho until qualifying for the Grand Prix. Um otherwise, we’ll break park fair May for the sprint. But we can put it on for the actual race itself and then we’ll have a spare um on uh on the Saturday for the under floor and the side pods. Do I want to spend some money working on a new chassis but without putting in a big update on it? you know, uh, you know, an intense design. I’ve got hours to spend, but I don’t really want to do that. So, I think maybe let’s have a look. We could definitely find some performance by stripping all of the weight out of the chassis. That’ll give us a little bit of extra speed if we were to tweak that slightly that way. have to tweak the DRS as well. Do that. That might be worth doing just as a a cheap and cheerful update. just make a couple of them, stick them on the car, and then do a proper upgrade on the next one. I would have preferred to do an intense build, but uh we’ve got a month to go until we get our first uh 6 million from our sponsors, so I think we’ll have to do that. We’ve smashed up one of our three chassis. what our three remaining chassis left. We smashed one of them up already. So, by the time that’s designed and then built, we’ll be potentially needing to make spares anyway. It gives me 500,000. I suppose I should add an extra suspension. So, we’re down to 200 grand. It’s not a lot of money. It’s really not a lot of money. And I still don’t really know where we sit performance-wise. Again, the topsyturvy nature of that opening race there means that we massively outperformed the car, but by how much and how much of that was down to weird tire strategies because of those safety cars. China will hopefully paint a little bit of a clearer picture, but it’s still going to be uh a while yet until we know exactly how things are going to, you know, shake out with this new tire wear mod combined with the realistic racing combined with where our car sits in terms of performance. [Music] Let’s advance those four days. [Music] Let’s get a weather report for China. It’s going to be uh hot on the Friday, hot but cloudy on the Saturday, and then hotter and cloudier on the Sunday. [Music] Our car isn’t well suited due to its low medium speed performance. Yeah, we’re uh we’re p predicting the best strategy for this circuit will be a one stop. Under the old tire wear model, maybe not under this one. This will be at least a two stop, probably a three stop for most teams, I would imagine. Again, we may even see four stops. Uh I think safety cars will determine whether or not that happens or not or whether people get stuck in DRS trains and overheat their tires. But uh yeah, very interesting start to the season. Uh we sit very very nicely. Let’s see what the board thought of that. They were delighted as you would expect with a huge points finish on our opening return. Uh we were supposed to be a points contender by 2027. Uh we scored points already. Ninth is the objective. We currently sit fourth. I do not expect us to stay there at all, but uh it’s very nice to see us sitting there in fourth place for however long it lasts. Hopefully, it’ll be a little while, but uh I’m not I’m not uh not holding my breath on that one. So, that’s it for tonight. I hope you’ve enjoyed the opening race to our uh brand new uh series. I’ll be back tomorrow at the usual time of 8:00 p.m. here in the UK. Uh so, uh hopefully I’ll see you there for round two. China with a sprint Grand Prix as well. Uh still lots to figure out as far as these tires go, but uh should be a a good Grand Prix, I think. Hopefully, I will see you there. If you have enjoyed tonight’s race, uh a thumbs up would be much appreciated. If you’re not yet subscribed, then why not consider subscribing as well. and uh hit that notification bell so you don’t miss when these live streams start and uh spread the word. Share this around if you can. Uh let’s uh try and get some more eyeballs on this series. Uh until tomorrow, that’s it from me. Thanks for watching. I am Jim Bob and I’ll be back very soon.

It’s the dawn of a brand new era in Formula One – Cadillac & Audi have arrived, along with new engine suppliers, new tyre suppliers, new drivers and much more…

Mods used:

Tyre Suppliers – https://www.overtake.gg/downloads/tyre-suppliers-pack-f1-manager-2024-w1echuz-little0nion.72316
Tyre Performance – https://www.overtake.gg/downloads/tyre-performance-overhaul.78513
Maximal Graphics – https://www.overtake.gg/downloads/maximal-graphic-preset.70886
Realistic Racing 3.1.1 – https://www.overtake.gg/downloads/realistic-racing.76578
New Race Leaderboard 1.3.2 – https://www.overtake.gg/downloads/new-race-leaderboard.77771
Cadillac Sponsors – https://www.overtake.gg/downloads/cadillac-sponsor-mod.79832
2025 DLC 1.3 – https://www.overtake.gg/downloads/2025-season-dlc.75803
Database Editor – https://www.f1dbeditor.com/
Reduced Mentality/Extras 1.0.3 – https://www.overtake.gg/downloads/reduce-mentality-impact-other-add-ons.78464
Colapinto helmet – https://www.overtake.gg/downloads/franco-colapinto-2025-helmet.77169
Lawson Helmet – https://www.overtake.gg/downloads/liam-lawson-2025-helmet.75345
Lindblad Helmet – https://www.overtake.gg/downloads/arvid-lindblad-vcarb-helmet.79978
Alpine livery – https://www.overtake.gg/downloads/alpine-alpink-las-vegas-livery-special-w1echuz.73380
Red Bull livery – https://www.overtake.gg/downloads/red-bull-ford-team-helmet-2-versions.71552
Williams livery – https://www.overtake.gg/downloads/williams-racing.71793

Patreon – Mr Only – https://www.patreon.com/cw/MrOnly
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