DRIVER

In Rookie your driver is your number one priority. He can very easily be the one factor that single-handedly changes your fortunes to finishing 1st instead of 20th. We have even seen many people dominate their leagues and earn promotion, simply because of their sensational driver without even bothering to upgrade their car. This of course is great, but extremely dangerous – as people who do this will be in for a rude awakening if they attack Amateur with a car 3+ levels lower than everyone else. By all means sign a fantastic driver – but please don’t let him earn promotion for you alone. Still continue to upgrade your car throughout the season (only when parts are worn out of course) and save cash whenever you can.

The main stats you need to be looking for in a sensational Rookie driver are extremely high levels of Concentration or Talent (200+), some Stamina (20+), and low weight (less than 80kg). [For a full list of Driver Stats and what they mean please see the section titled Driver Stats]

It is unlikely you will find a driver that holds all these stats whilst in Rookie, but a happy medium will suffice and provide you with a promotion-worthy driver.



Examples of promotion-worthy drivers: (This should win you promotion easily now, they may even do well in Amateur)

Driver A: Concentration: 225, Talent: 90, Stamina: 10, Weight: 95kg
Driver B: Concentration: 80, Talent: 218, Stamina: 0, Weight:64kg
Driver C: Concentration 130, Talent: 130, Stamina: 30, Weight: 78kg

But how much do you pay these drivers? Well as little as possible really. A lot of the time there may well be huge competition for drivers of this ilk, so you may be forced to pay over the odds to get them – but generally I wouldn’t recommend paying much over $3mil salary (and that’s per race) otherwise you may struggle to continue upgrading your car come season end.

As mentioned in the money section above, at the end of every season Rookie is completely reset. This includes your driver where, if your driver has over 85 O/A (Overall level) you will lose him also. This mean a LOT (and I mean LOADS) of managers are without drivers come season start, meaning it is a mad scramble in the drivers market with the best promotion-capable drivers receiving in excess of 20 offers. Not good – and you want to avoid being involved in this at all costs.

Therefore you want to be scouting for a driver and signing one towards the end of the season in preparation for a serious assault next year.

The advantage you have here is that the market will be quieter – but you can also offer an obscene signing on fee (up to 3 times the salary) as an incentive for the driver to join you. The money you effectively throw away here doesn’t matter, as you will be reset to $30mil next season anyway!

The one thing you need to bear in mind though is that after you sign a great driver - you lose him at the reset because his OA is over the 85 limit. There are three ways to keep his OA down

1. Deliberately do badly in races (20 pitstop strategy anyone?) or even make sure you dont finish (dont replace car parts, set risks to 100 etc)

2. If your driver has a motivation stat it can be dropped to zero very quickly. Every 8 points of motivation is equal to about 1O/A – and if you go more that $15mil in debt (by buying facilities to get you as close to zero as possible, then upgrading your entire car) this will zero your driver’s motivation. Be sure to do this before the last race as you cannot upgrade your car after race 17.

So for example – an 85 O/A driver with 72 motivation will suddenly become (about) 76 O/A. Magic.

3. If you only need a 1 point drop then Fitness training may reduce the OA by 1. For details see the section on Driver Training below.