1st part : Improve your car (design, spying & staff)
It's not a secret for anyone but better cars usually are faster so the first thing to do when you want to improve your team is to get the best possible design at the start of a season. To do it you need the best Chief Designer (CD) and also to have a good knowledge about car attributes, last thing to know is that there is a design cap at the start of a season and no stat can be over 50 at this point (if we except suppliers bonuses). Finally you need to have participated in all races during the previous season to get the best possible design as it improves by a slow amount after each race. With a 4.5 stars CD you can expect to start with 43 for most of the stats with the exception of the CD's strength at 50 (cap) and the CD's weakness at 22, that's why it's more important to have a "good weakness" rather than a good strength.
You already know "The Big 4" with Acceleration, Braking, Downforce and Handling but to be honest they aren't all equals, ACC is a little better than the couple BRA/HAN and DWN is a little behind but still is an important stat, you really want one of those 4 attributes to be your CD's strength. Then come 2 stats (Fuel economy & Tyre economy), FE is more important and I don't advise you to start a season at 22 (weakness) but you can afford it with TE as it has less impacts on your car. Cooling and Reliability have little to no effect so I advise you to get one of them in weakness as it won't affect your performances. A good (but expensive) way to improve your weakness if you cannot find a good CD is to get 2 CDs with different weaknesses and to swap them mid season.
The swapping strategy (2 CDs) also is the best because thanks to the starting cap (50) you can get 2 attributes at 50 if you have two 4.5 stars CDs and your 2 weaknesses will be at 33 which is better than 22 in the case you cannot get a "good weakness". Those + 7 points will help you a little but keep in mind getting a better CD will give you more than 7 points in "the big 4" with more points in the other attributes, also starting with a better design means you'll get less points by spying and by experience I can say that little gap is caught in 3/4 races by other teams. Last thing regarding CDs and staff in general is they are really rare at 5 stars so a 4.5 stars CD will do the job or a 4 stars CD if it has a perfect strength (big 4) and good weakness (cooling, reliability) especially if you cannot afford this strategy as this is expensive (1 more contract to pay each race).
The spying efficiency also known as "research power" is determined by the combination of your CD & TD stars (TD = Technical Director), also lower level teams get a small boost. You can select all, 1 or a couple of attributes. A little trick to know here is that spying is using a "ceil function" which means you can get higher amount of design points if you use it smartly, I won't explain it mathematically so here are 2 simple examples to understand how it works :
Spying on 2 attributes with 20% research power :
- for 2 points difference : 2 x 0.20 = 0.40 => + 1 point
- for 9 points difference : 9 x 0.20 = 1.80 => + 2 points
Spying on 1 attribute with 40% research power :
- for 10 points difference : 10 x 0.40 = 4.00 => + 4 points (and not + 5 points)
- for 11 points difference : 11 x 0.40 = 4.40 => + 5 points
So anything between X.01 and X.99 gives you a higher amount of points, also keep in mind you'll always get at least 1 point even in the situation where you are only 1 point behind the best teams in all attributes and spying on all stats at the same time.
During the first half of the season I highly advise you to put your design points and spy on "the big 4" as this is the best to do if your FE & TE aren't at 22, I'll discuss about FE more in details later because there are a few exceptions even if it is between 22 & 43 for example. Once those 4 attributes will be maxed it will be time to focus on FE & TE and finally if you have enough time on cooling and reliability for the last races but as I said earlier they have little to zero influence.
As for specifically where to put points and spy on ? There is no real rules but your goal will be to maximize your spying rewards while putting design points on the best attributes, you'll have to adapt to what other managers are doing, for example the "2/2" strategy = put points on 2 stats and spy on the 2 other stats or the "4/4" strategy = keep an average difference with 4 stats and spy on those 4 stats were initially my most used strategies and are really easy to understand, but other strategies are potentially better : "3/1", "2/1", "2/4". Here is an example with 2 spying strategies :
"2/2" strat :
"4/4" strat :
Last trick about spying, if you're not sure on which attribute to spy on you have the possibility to reload the page during the race and to change the selected attributes before the end of the final lap. Here is the quick link :
Research
For Doctors only full stars matter and they will improve your training by spending less health during training sessions :
5 star => - 10% health
4 star => - 11% (same for 4.5 star)
3 star => - 12% (same for 3.5 star)
2 star => - 13% (same for 2.5 star)
1 star => - 14% (same for 1.5 star)
0 star => - 14% (same for 0.5 star)
Keep in mind young drivers train faster, also a driver level far from your team level means a better training efficiency, over that level the training will be very slow and you'll only get + 3% if I remember it correctly. Last trick regarding your DR : If your drivers are fully trained there is no need to keep him as there is no driver atrophy (stats loss) for now so don't renew his contract and a very cheap DR (only 50k per race) will take his place and will save you a lot of money !
Finally staff can decide to retire when you offer them a new contract, it starts from 65 yo and at 70 yo all staffs decide to retire.
