It's time for some Scrub Era Car-NG. Let us begin with that which doesn't require any RNG at all:
Tyres.
Goodyear Tyres (medium grip, high durability) go to:
- Williams
- Tyrrell
- Leyton House
- Lotus
A drastically smaller set of runners than in previous years as they feel the effects of being undercut by Pirelli.
Pirelli Tyres (high grip, medium durability) go to:
- McLaren
- Benetton
- AGS
- Ligier
- EuroBrun
- Fondmetal
- Footwork Project Four
- Lamborghini
- Coloni
- Zakspeed
- Monteverdi
- Osella
- Scuderia Italia
- Onyx
- Minardi
- Arrows
Pirelli have become the predominant tyre supplier in all of Formula One, thanks to their lower price point.
Avon Tyres (low grip, low durability)
The F3000 tyre manufacturer is stepping up to F1 amid a cost crisis, though nobody knows if they will actually provide an F1-quality tyre.
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Now, onto the engines:
Ferrari have been out
shaking the charity box selling their engines to interested customers
In addition to powering themselves, they have also sold a bunch of customer engines at less than half price. This means we will have:
- Ferrari
- Benetton-Ferrari
- Ligier-Lancia (rebadged Ferraris)
- Zakspeed-Ferrari
These are all deals that have been agreed on both ends so no harm there.
Lamborghini have also been out drumming up customers in what looks like an Italian arms race. They will be supplying:
- Lamborghini
- Monteverdi-Lamborghini
- Scuderia Italia-Lamborghini
Coloni also attempted to approach Lamborghini for a customer deal at half of cost-price, and never so much as heard back about that because of course they didn't.
Honda accept an asking price offer from the Ron Dennisless McLaren.
Renault have only one offer, but Frank Williams is playing semi-hardball. He's offering £830,000 instead of the requested £900,000.
1-50 - Renault accept immediately because they have no other offers
51-100 - Renault do "negotiation" until Sir
Frank Rob Dylan capitulates and promises a conditional £170k on top of that at the end of the season
37 - Renault are cool with the 70k discount, anything to get Frank's frightful French off the phone.
Isuzu have built an F1 engine just to prove they can, and it turns out a bunch of teams are interested in it. They were: AGS, Footwork Project Four, Arrows and Lotus, but AGS withdrew their bid leaving just the three British teams.
1-30 - Isuzu see significant upside in a mutually beneficial engineering relationship :dennis:
31-60 - Arrows are a pretty established name in F1, but not so much in the spotlight if this goes tits up
61-100 - Colin Chapman would be proud
80 - Say hello to West Team Lotus Isuzu.
We now have an intriguing bid for works Fords from Tyrrell:
Ken Tyrrell wrote:Tyrrell would argue (in nice marketing/business-speak) that as Ferrari seem to be providing a sizeable portion of the grid at a near 50% discount for an engine that is, on balance, slightly ahead of the HBA4, Ford must do the same if it wishes to attract customers. As McLaren and Williams will use Honda and Renault and Benetton are using Ferraris, Tyrrell would be the best team to showcase the Ford works engine (On account of its 1989 finish)
That all sounds lovely until they get to the kicker: they want the engines for
325k. This is a 275k discount on the 600k price tag, but there's nobody else
with any money who is interested in the expensive Fords.
1-30 - Ford accept out of desperation
31-100 - Ford accept, but will be collecting the rest of that money at the end of the season come what may
77 - If Tyrrell can't pay that back by the end of the season, there will be
implications.
Yamaha also have an offer: Footwork Project Four are looking to get them for
240k, a steep discount on the marked price.
1-40 - Accepts on the spot
41-70 - Negotiates, and accepts Big Ron's offer of the difference being paid at the end of the season on the condition of a top 10 WCC finish
71-100 - Negotiates further and insists on the difference being made up at the end of the season regardless.
54 - Ron Dennis has now become the Team Principal of Footwork-Yamaha.
The rest of the grid has scrubby engines:
- Arrows-Ford
- Minardi-Ford
- AGS-Judd
- Coloni-Judd
- Fondmetal-Judd
- Leyton House-Judd
- Onyx-Judd
- Osella-Judd
- Rial-Judd
- First-Life
- EuroBrun-Subaru
However, there is some concern coming out of Maranello about the amount of Ferrari customers. Ferrari have never supplied customers like this before, and now they are supplying power to eight of the grid's cars.
1-33 - Fortunately, these guys are experts in their field and it'll be fine
34-66 - The engines are slapped together a bit, and the customers' reliability suffers as a result
67-99 - Ferrari slapped together all engines, including their own and they'll all go *BOOM*
100 - They got help from Renzo Engineering to meet all of the demand
93 - That could be a problem.
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For chassis RNG, I will not be posting every RNGed number into the thread. Instead, I will do a short written summary of each chassis.Our first chassis RNG will be to decide the fate of the
Lola T90. It has interest from two teams at opposite ends of the alphabet: Arrows and Zakspeed. Arrows are by far the most experienced team, but Zakspeed have come in with their Marlboro money so it's not a complete non-contest
1-66 -
A67-100 -
Z42 - Arrows will take the customer Lolas, while Zakspeed will have to continue building their own.
With the Fomet locked in at Fondmetal and the Dallara locked in at Scuderia Italia, we now know what everyone's chassis will be called. We do not yet know how they will all perform. For that, we will start at the bottom of the entry list and work our way up.
We start with #48 and #49:
Footwork Yamaha. They have bought McLaren MP4/5 cars that were the class of the field in 1989. But how has the aging process treated them?
The new FP4/5B retains most of its grip and reliability, but does so at the cost of some new parts adding to the drag and weight.Monteverdi is updating an old Brabham BT58.
They had an unremarkable RNG, losing a little bit of performance and reliability, but with Mike Groff and Enrico Bertaggia behind the wheel does it really matter?
First-Life updated the F189. In order to pass the crash tests this time,
they lost a lot of whatever pace was even available in the first place and ended up with an overweight car.EuroBrun were the first team building an entirely new car: the ER190.
It came out fairly grippy, but with horribly unpredictable handling and enormous drag.AGS designed a C-Tier chassis, the JH25.
It will be moderately grippy with excellent handling. However, in order to pay their FIA entry fees, they will not be
building it until after they have paid. It will be a massive rush job for a team that doesn't have the staff to bathplug around like this.
1-20 - They get away with it just fine despite the rush
21-40 - Some aerodynamic parts aren't fitted in time (lower grip, lower drag)
41-60 - The engine doesn't get mounted quite right, causing a vibration (lower handling, lower reliability)
61-90 - Spare parts are used from the 1989 car to get it done in time (two random attributes moved to E-Tier)
91-100 - They get the fine folks at Renzo Engineering in to help them out
40 - Straight-line speed is better than expected, but cornering speed is not.
Rial have bought an old Arrows A11, paid for with money that the team only
just has.
Their car retained most of its raw pace, but gained a Schmid-esque knack for throwing its drivers into the wall (bad handling).
The next car is the
Onyx ORE-2. Despite it being a C-Tier, the
grip looks to be shocking, as does the handling, although the drag is low enough for it to hold its own in a straight line.Zakspeed used their Marlboro money to also build a C-Tier chassis. The 901
is a good, predictable chassis that lacks only in terms of outright grip.Coloni have purchased an old Lotus 101, but had some real trouble converting it into the Coloni C4.
Their new car has significant grip and handling problems compared to its past life as a Lotus.Now for the one we've all been waiting for:
Ferrari. Their conversion of the 1989 Ferrari 640
went pretty well all things considered, with no glaring new weaknesses, and some reinforcements added to the suspension in anticipation of the 50p-shaped Avons.Ligier bought a second-hand Benetton rather than building their own car from scratch, no doubt traumatised by the JS33 (more on that later). The oddly-named JS35L
looked like a really faithful adaptation of the old Benetton, until someone looked inside the car to find an emergency 10-kilo stash of Brie, for French emergencies.Minardi also built a C-Tier chassis. The M190
isn't bad, but it does drag worse than a Pablo Larrain film. It does however have Nice. reliability.
Scuderia Italia bought the
Dallara F190, details of which can be found on the spreadsheet.
Benetton managed to scrounge up enough money to build an
A-Tier chassis.
It scored excellently in all departments except reliability, which should see lots of lovely retirements from pole position. More like Eric van de Pole, amirite?
Now earlier I mentioned the Ligier JS33. It was purchased on the cheap by
Osella, who are converting it for use in 1990.
They didn't roll horribly, but the car they were converting was already a dog. Looks like lots of DNPQs for the team from Verolengo.
Leyton House could afford to build a B-Tier chassis.
It proved to be an excellent chassis in all ways except for outright grip.West Team Lotus Isuzu also decided to build a B-Tier chassis to give to the double-barrelled duo of Heinz-Harald [Frentzen] and [Luis] Perez-Sala.
In true Lotus fashion, it was grippy and fast but with unpredictable handling and imperfect reliability.
Arrows' Lola can already be found on the Spreadsheet.
Now for the new pride of Italy,
Lamborghini. Their B-Tier turned out to be
quite grippy and to handle well, but with lots of drag and excess ballast. Not noticeably different to the Dallara in the end.
Having spent all their money on 90MANSELL,
Williams chose to convert their previous year's chassis.
This looked like a good decision, as it will be a good chassis if slightly unpredictable in terms of handling.
The
Tyrrell car looked like an excellent B-Tier chassis,
with bulletproof reliability putting them in prime position to capitalise if and when any faster cars retire from higher up in the points.Finally, the
McLaren car: one of only two A-Tier chassis on the grid, they
produced the lightest and least draggy car on the grid, even if it's outright grip and reliability are both slightly down on last year.
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Based on an entirely arbitrary formula that likely has no bearing on the actual season that's coming up, those chassis (excluding engines and tyres) are rated as follows:
- McLaren
- Benetton
- Footwork Project Four
- Tyrrell
- Ferrari
- Williams
- Leyton House
- Arrows (Lola)
- Lotus
- Zakspeed
- Ligier
- Scuderia Italia (Dallara)
- Lamborghini
- AGS
Reynard - Rial
- Minardi
- Coloni
- Onyx
- Monteverdi
- Fondmetal (Fomet)
Simtek - Osella
- EuroBrun
- First-Life
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An update to the teams' budgets, and
payment of FIA fees to follow shortly.