Hello, everybody!
My name is Lucas Bleicher and I'm from Brazil. My first contact with modern games happened about five years ago, when a friend brought "San Juan" one weekend and spent hours talking about those "modern games". Even though the game itself wasn't particularly impressive to me, the subject stuck in my mind and I found myself reading a lot about those "german-style board games" in Wikipedia and random sites (I was unaware of the specialized ones such as BGG). Then one I bought Tigris&Euphrates and my life changed completely. I bought many others after that, but T&E is still the one I love most - only that now its place on the top has Imperial as company.
One thing I always liked to do was to use BGGs "advanced search" to see if I could find some "hidden gem" that would please me, combinining mechanics and themes I like. For example, a couple of years ago I was surprised to find that there was virtually no game that combined two of my favorite mechanics - worker placement and tile placement (today it seems there are many cases, and I'm looking forward to testing Keyflower for example).
My other interests involve science (long history short - I studied computer science as an undergrad, then switched to biological physics in grad school and I currently teach Biochemistry/Bioinformatics and do research on protein computational/structural biology), cooking, literature, music (I play a handful of instruments in varying degrees of incompetence, 60/70's rock and jazz being my main interests) and formula 1 racing.
Which leads to how I arrived here. Being a F1 addict (you know, the kind of guy who wakes up 3 in the morning to watch not only races but quali sessions and who can describe how championships from twenty five years ago unfolded), it was just natural that I looked for games on that subject. However, I found out most of them are luck-driven affairs on car positioning, and they very rarely involve the "team managing" aspect. And also, there was no car racing game using the worker placement mechanics in the BGG, which looked like a very nice niche to be occupied - what about having a game where the purpose is not being the race winner, but managing a racing team through a multiple track calendar, choosing which engine to run, which drivers to hire, where to focus between races to get better results and, by the end, have the winner decided by how much money he got after the racing calendar?
So I decided to design a game based on that premise. It would alternate between two phases: the races themselves and the "management" between them. The first part is more or less fine, being a streamlined representation of "race stints" where cars would overtake others based on criteria such as engine, aero efficiency and driver qualities, which would generate a sum (which defines how much a car will advance or be able to overtake others) with different weights in different tracks (for example, in a track like Monaco a car with good aero efficiency but a bad engine may get a very good sum, but a terrible one in a track like Monza).
Between races, however, a worker placement phase would define how much each team would spend in car developing, in driver salaries (hiring the good ones meaning spending more money per race), in mechanics, etc. This is the part I still have a lot of work to do before building a prototype as there's quite a lot of variables to think about and balance. I also have to think about the needs of catchup mechanics, although I expect that this can be at least partially balanced by the fact that, to run a very efficient team one needs to hire two of the "good drivers" at the same time, and I also thought about including "pay drivers" which are terrible in the race phase but instead of requiring an amount of money to be paid every race, actually produce income to the team which can be used to improve the car. Of course, this means balancing things very well so that all possibilities (going for two good drivers, hiring a good one for results and a bad one for income or even two bad ones and focus solely on the car) are all valid strategies a player could choose and have a chance at winning.
I hope to do this by the end of January - the most complicated thing still to do is deciding what will be available as worker placement options, so perhaps I should put everything I thought of as a first try and then remove those that do not work so great.