I gotta say, I wasn’t expecting this game to be as difficult as it is. I started out my career in the HRT replacing Karthikeyan (The HANS device is painted in the Indian Flag Colors, something I think should have been changed if the driver is of say, Polish nationality. But obviously due to licensing….)
Australia came around and I qualified 24th, 5 tenths of a second off of Glock. This was the first time I said “Finally they got something right!” This was of course on Expert difficulty and with no aids on. The race was ok and I got up to 21st, but then after contact with Trulli I lost a part of the wing. I had no clue how to change the settings so that they didn’t replace my nose, but they did anyway and I lost all the positions again. Then, my engineer informed me that my DRS was “Offline”. Great. So I finished 24th for the first time in any codemasters game haha.
Then Came Malaysia, and finally I managed 21st, ahead of Glock and the two lotuses. My start was amazing as it was raining and Massa spun, slowing down the whole field. This left me in…. 8th! The race was shrotened to 3 laps (I guess it was red flagged cause it was set up for 20% race distance). On the first lap I dropped to 10th, the second, 13th, and finally on the last lap Perez beat me to the line by about .05 of a second. Finally success at 14th, but I instantly felt how difficult it would be driving the HRT. The car is very slow compared to other cars, and I had to go very deffnsive to keep my position against the very aggressive AI (Which btw are finally life like, although they all seem to be big Hamilton fans….).
So in all, I’m 19th in the standings, and I’m very very pleased with the game. The physics feel great (although not full on sim), and although there are a few weird problems (The back breaks away on the fastest turns, you can ride the kerbs as if they weren’t even there, and the breaks lock up oddly, like the outside wheel locked before the inside one a couple of times… weird) the overall product is fantastic, a huge upgrade from F1 2010.