August 2018 Review
Spring is here and the mid-season break in the F1 is over. I took a little break too and spent some time on other things. That being said, there is still a heap of changes to the game.
To get started, of course, we need a montage song to set the mood.
Early Access
Ryan Boucher’s Formula Racing is in early access and you can play today. Go to ryboracing.com and put your email and preferred platform in and I’ll send you an invite.
Discord
We have a discord server now. Discord is a popular chat platform for gamers. There are channels to talk racing strategy, report bugs, find an opponent or chat about the how the F1 is going. All players are welcome. When you first join the server there is a little waiting room where you can read the code-of-conduct and introduce yourself before you can see the rest of the server.
It’s pretty small at the moment but I think you’ll help make it a bit bigger.
You can go here: https://discord.gg/tRDrF69 and join.
Qualifying Outcome Distribution
Qualifying is a bidding system with a dash of chance. Each player chooses their preferred starting tire and how much fuel to add. This determines the order of qualifying. The quicker your tires and the less fuel you carry will give you a higher priority.
Next, each player indicates how many hot-laps they want to do. Each hot-lap is discarding a lap card from your hand before the race has started; the best cards on your chosen set of tires. The cards you bid here, you are bid blind. You won’t see the cards before the race has started and you won’t see them after the race has commenced.
The question you are asking your self is how important is pole position? Enough to start from a weaker position than the car behind?
It’s a blind bidding system so you also don’t know what others are doing or how it plays into their overall race strategy.
The underlying problem with this mechanism is it’s hard to know where you will place. This is where the new feature comes in. It shows you a probability distribution based on your qualifying setup.
Below is a short video showing how it works.
It isn’t perfect. It’s based on all tire types being available on the course. For some circuits, there are limited tire options available. When that happens the graph is slightly off in terms of place, but not in terms of distribution.
Race Strategy
The second feature is to help you plan your race. You can add each of the stops you think you’ll need and choose the fuel and tires you want. It then graphs the predicted lap times.
Below is a video showing how it works.
This view hasn’t made it into the race screens or pit screen yet. At the moment it’ll help you prepare for your race. After that, you’re on your own. In time, the race strategy will be updated with your race performance. Later again, as a pro-mode feature, you’ll be able to compare your performance against your plan to help you improve your strategy execution.
What it does do however is make your race strategy available to the autopilot. Previously, if the autopilot pitted for you, it would take the longest tires and enough fuel in the hope it could see out the race. That has ruined a few races. Now, the autopilot looks for the next stop and puts those tires and fuel on.
It’ll work fine if you stick to the plan, it’ll be less effective the more you make it up as you go along.
I wrote a bit about how race strategy options played out in a twitter thread.
Card Outcome Icons
Each lap card that you have can’t be read in isolation. Its power is relative to the players around you. A semi-powerful card that isn’t good enough to get past the card ahead is wasted.
You could always work this out but it required a bit of maths by comparing the difference between your card and the lap times of the player ahead. That’s not fun and gave the advantage to people good at arithmetic. It also hid some strategies from players.
Now, each of your cards has a lap outcome icon. The outcome changes based on what the car ahead is doing and tells you one of the following:
- You can probably pass the car with a battle
- You can’t get passed but you will increase your battle metre
- You will get closer to the car ahead but not enough to increase your battle metre.
- You will maintain the distance
- You will fall further behind the car ahead.
- Don’t know (on the first lap and when the car ahead comes out of the pit and their prior lap data is not useful)

New Tracks
Belgium was the only track added in August. It’s the shortest, fastest track in the game. 44 Laps and two types of tyres: Quick+ and Quick.
Most of the circuits I have designed so far have had three or more tyre options and are carefully constructed to play them off against each other. That doesn’t really happen that often in the F1 where there is usually one clear strategy.
I thought we could have one race like that. Put on your fastest tires and drive as fast as you can.
Now it is a little bit more complicated with the option of splitting tires and using the slightly slower Quick tires to give you more attacking options. Something that is fairly easy to do on this track.

Balance
Each track has a world record fastest lap and best ever race time. You can only get onto this list if you take the record from someone else. Now, every day the cards in the game get a little bit quicker.
Think of it like incremental technology improvements.
It also means that those world records are up for grabs.
Other Changes
- UX — change so that autopilot doesn’t stop the player from taking a turn after the timer runs out. Your turn won’t apply if the autopilot gets in first. But you should still be given a chance.
- UX — Fix text colour of autopilot now that we are in dark mode
- UX — Drivers using autopilot are shown with an orange ring on them.
- UX — Show laps remaining more clearly
- UX— Replaced dirty air dial with held-up dial
- UX— Current race record is now more obvious in display
- PN — Only receive a push notification when the autopilot plays for you on the 1st, 5th, 10th and 20th turn in a row. Rather than every single turn.
- PN — Don’t receive a push notification when you take the world record at a track from yourself. You’re probably aware of your greatness.
- PERF — The turns now take less time to process
- FIX — Fix wording of push notification when you lost the record at a track
- FIX— Fix push notifications going out for lost world records
- FIX — Fix app crash when a connection gets prematurely terminated
- FIX — Fix issue where autopilot was not taking a turn for the player
- FIX — Pit window again moves according to your position on track
- FIX — Tire age calculation
- FIX — App no longer crashes when you select hotlaps before tires
- FIX — App no longer crashes for new users.
- FIX — Completed races now disappear from device after 3 days
Thanks for reading.
Ryan Boucher’s Formula Racing is in early access and can play it now! Get early access here. I’ll post updates on the project here and on the game twitter account.

