Any tips for a rookie promoted to pro after 1 season?

First thing, make sure your expectations are low. Come to terms you will be one of the worst performing teams.

There are some upsides to this. You can spend this season conserving resources such as replacing parts every other race and money by holding back on upgrading staff until the end of the season. As the start of the next season arrives, you can move towards being a viable mid-field contender with any parts you have managed to save up.

I estimate it will take three total seasons before you are competing at the top of the Pro tier.

Difficult. Usually I'd suggest something on the lines of Yunus post with the possible exception that it might be worth to put some resources into the CD to have a better car next season. But I do see a certain problem there. To have a second season in Pro as mid-field contender you first have to stay in Pro in the first place and as long as no teams are leaving late into the season that means beating at least 2 teams of which at least one has a 2-3 level advantage and most teams should start with a better car into the season as well.

So to me it looks like a choice to make:
-Saving up on resources like parts and money.
-Investing those for better results in this and a better car in the next season (CD) but at the risk to have that effort put to waste because you either would've made it anyway or it turns out you had no chance in the first place. Plus, this route can be a tight rope walk because if you're not carefull you overspend your resources and that quickly can lead into a situation in which you have to go on spending just to keep going but strangling your ability to improve in the process, up to the point of complete stagnation. Especially if not using parts for ads and/or bought token.

Ouch, that's quite a loss. Sounds like you went for the most expensive engines and tyres as well, going for the cheapest options would be a quarter of a million less expenses for a mere 2 points less acceleration. I'm not in favour of short term replacing staff and drivers, you loose quite some money in fees usually so the total savings are somewhat diminished. I'd rather refrain from hiring more, get rid of any surplus reserve staff and wait what the next round of sponsors offers. I hope it's not the full 10 days still, though. iGP is rather easy in things managing because you can deal with that on a race by race base instead of having everything fixed for a whole season, so no need for haste.

As a short term strategy for this season to avoid relegation you could also consider not assigning your design points after each race. This will maximise the yield on research. Then towards the end of the season apply all of the DP you have banked which should make your cars competitive in the last four or five races.

What Yunus means is not trying to take the design points into next season but to maximise the quality of the car for the last few races in this season. If you don't spend design points you make your car worse in comparison to the best cars and thus you get more design points through research/spying. By doing this the right way for half a season, or even longer, you improve your car by quite a lot through spying alone and once you spend that half a season worth of design points you saved up it enables you to participate in those last races with a competitive car, maybe even a slightly superior car at the first race of your attack.

With your 5th place all of this sounds a bit academic though. I don't think that not finishing a race costs money but I didn't put that to a test.

It's exactly as Frank Thomas says (except for calling me Yunus LOL). But surely you can't be talking about your WS6 team, they're in no danger of relegation.

Sorry Kevin, seems I had more things on my mind as I posted and it was around 6 o'clock in the morning after doing a night shift. :-) Given the information I think it's this team: Trans Am Racing by Drennan Rutherford

@J Dre: Any profit is doing very well in this game, a black zero is doing well and even a slight loss is absolutely OK later into the game because you should earn 3 token every race as well and those are also some kind of money and one way exchangeable into it.

The loss just shouldn't get out of hand especially early into the game because building up the HQ costs quite some money and takes already long enough without having to pause it to wait to collect some more funds. At the same time building up a base stock of token would be a good idea as well because hiring good staff and especially finding a good YA driver can cost quite some token and once you need to exchange token for money the bigger bags are the better deal but without a nice balance of token you can't get them and people end up taking the smaller, worse deal packages more often.

You're welcome, and that's about the best combination you can get for a CD, nice.

It can take a while but sometimes the first victory, or at least podiums, can come faster than expected, especially with weather involved. Technology can to be quite the handicap for a lower level team, more than 3 levels behind and DRS trains forming in the race are quite bad news if your car(s) is/are in it.
That's why I actually hope for races with rain because I often do pretty well there (but also failed horribly in developing a fitting strategy) and with the rain taking DRS out of the equation, and with it that technology gap, it's suddenly all pace and strategy that matters and the latter, and/or some luck, can fix the problem that the former isn't completely on par with the best cars in the field.

Weird, because even the CD change matches, maybe the link isn't working properly for everyone? Anyway, the easiest way to link to an own team would be posting with the account because the name is a direct link to the team. Else, if you use a browser: To post a link click on your team in the league table, with the now open manager window copy the web address and put it between [url] and [/url], or [url=address] link description [/url] for a text link. If you're on the App only then I don't know how to get the manager ID needed except for posting league, manager name and team name for someone else to find it.

Trans Am Racing

Yes, that's the team I meant and get if I open my own link. I just noticed that this info box comes up with 3 different IDs which slightly differ in their number depending from where you open it. User-ID if you click on the name here in the forums, manager-ID if you click a team in the league list and the team-ID if I click on a team I searched.

OK, that's weird. Both Kevins and my link do both show the team in "US Grand Prix" league for me and yes, the level is 10. The account you're posting with is linked to the team in "Purpose" league for me.