Hi Norrie and welcome back.
In the new version of the game, next season's car is developed this season. Starting in Australia, every race this season assigns 1/17th of the total DP for the beginning of next season.
The size of that 1/17th is dependant upon three things, your CD star rating, strength attribute and weakness attribute.
Star rating is a measure of the difference between your manager level and the staff level. For example, if you are L14 and your CD is also L14 he/she will have either 4.5 or 5 stars (there seems to be some sort of rounding which means they're not always 5 star). Because staff are not trainable, as you level up the CD star rating will begin to get lower and the amount of DP points that are generated per race also falls.
Assuming you are in an Elite tier with a single 5 star CD who has been active for an entire season (17 races) your new cars will roll out of the garage for the first race of the following season with 43 DP in six attributes, 50 DP in CD strength attribute and 22 DP in CD weakness.
That's the easy bit LOL. If you level up during the season but don't replace your CD you will probably have lower DP because of the reducing star count mentioned above. The earlier in the season you level up the lower will be your total DP the following season.
You can also play tunes with multiple CDs. This has been discussed before, here is a link...
https://igpmanager.com/forum-thread/17046
I'm not very good at explaining things so I hope this makes sense.
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