Golden Lap (PC) - Preview | Phenixx Gaming

When I opened my emails last week, seeing a fake Monaco GP layout and that game being described as a simplistic racing strategy game, I downloaded Golden Lap faster than Lewis’ 2020 Italian pole lap. Set in the “Golden Age” of Faux-mula racing, you take control of a team with a legally distinct name and totally original car designs. Developed by Art of Rally and Absolute Drift developer Funselektor Labs and Hell is Others developer Strelka Games, Golden Lap places you on the pit wall to effectively be the Bernie Collins or Hannah Schmitz, playing Chief Strategist. Or as the Ferrari strategy engineer is known in Italian: €50K, dead or alive.

On the surface, the simplicity of Golden Lap’s visuals undersells just how difficult and strategic it can be to call the right pit strategy, both during a race and during the qualifying sessions. In the full release, according to the press emails, you’ll fight through the pack and chase championship glory in a 14-race calendar. Managing the simplified budget off the track and managing both fuel and tires on the track, you’ll have to be at the top of your game, with the best possible drivers and support crew to achieve glory and become the legends in open-wheel motorsport.

The demo, however, runs a little short, as you’d expect. With only four races in the career and a quick race option on the main menu, you can select only one team to lead to success. It might take a moment for you to understand how to succeed even with the best possible drivers your budget could manage. As there is no real tutorial in sight, some of Golden Lap’s more detailed aspects are missing explanation; “tuning” in particular took some time to work out.

Starting a new career, you’ll pick your team and design philosophy before moving on to selecting drivers, all of which have special traits. Some are cocky, some are aggressive, some are reckless, and in the case of some drivers like Lance Stroll, their negative trait is being Lance Stroll. With both of your drivers selected you’ll move on to an engineer and a “crew chief,” a term that is (to be derogatory) very American. Now with your team selected and your budget practically spent already, it is time to head to the first race.

There are only four in the demo: Jarama (Spain), Monaco, Silverstone, and Monza, or their legally distinct relatives. Each car has a range of performance specs, which can be upgraded throughout the season by spending your budget. In the demo, these are magic numbers that go up with upgrades and down with wear. Starting the weekend in the Quali session, you have to set the car up as you attempt to set your position for the race, doing single hot laps.

Sending out your drivers to do their install laps, you have the option of only three sets of tires: Softs, inters, and full wets. Establishing a feel for the track you’ll gain a sort of resource with the pit crew who will fine-tune the car on three more perimeters, engine, chassis, and handling, though you have 20 points to spend with each driver each time they pit during quali, each tuning option uses up more or less points. Rated on a bar that’s about 85% white, 5% yellow, and 10% red, you want to use your resource points to hit the yellow or golden sweet spot.

For tuning you are given two options per section you want to tune up, sometimes you might be given the option to spend 5 points to get your engine tuned by 3-15 whatever the resource is for that, performance points maybe? This goes unexplained, so I’m trying to give a rundown without knowing the terminology used by the dev teams. The ultimate goal is to hit the yellow sweet spot and not hit the red or you’ll incur a portion of damage. Hit the sweet spot and you’ll be near the top of the grid, or at least that’s the idea. This could depend on your development package and drivers overall.

Races are all about watching your resources tick down: Fuel, tires, watching the weather, checking the delta between drivers, and most importantly, telling them when and where to push. Alongside being Chief Strategist for Faux-rrari, you’ll be both driver’s performance and race engineer. You can tell your drivers to push the engines or push the tires, which of course uses up more fuel and more tire wear. Alternatively, you can tell them to hold station and eke out another lap or two in order to preserve the tires a while longer.

Unlike F1 24 or other racing titles, you’ll not set out a race strategy beforehand, you have to decide that on the fly. Though you do get to select the starting tires and have a weather forecast, giving you an idea of how your race will pan out and let you try to figure out the best strategy. From here you leave it up to driver’s abilities, the pit crew’s competency, and the whims of the tire gods, sometimes begging for a yellow flag/safety car after leaving a driver on high fuel usage for too long.

If you’ve ever seen a race map, here you are watching that as the dots go round in circles. The truth is, that isn’t what you are supposed to be watching, or at least not the only thing. On the bottom left, much like qualifying, you have your two driver’s current and previous stints shown as well as their progress through the race thus far. Here you can select the three options for driver performance, low, medium, and high fuel and tire wear. Though this is where you’ll interact most, this still isn’t what you might want to focus on too much.

Above the rather small driver strategy options is the typical timing tower you’ll see in Indy Car, NASCAR, GT Racing, IMSA, Stadium Trucks, F1 Academy to F3-F1, and basically every motorsport. The difference within Golden Lap is that you control the info you see. Hovering the mouse over the top of this timing tower gives you an extended view, showing you the last lap time, fastest lap time, as well as strategy, adding to the info already there of which tire everyone’s on, how worn it is, and the gap (delta).

If you know how to read these pieces of “technical” information, you can easily enough (with a top team) dominate a championship like Fangio or Clark. That’s where I think there is maybe a lack of challenge to Golden Lap. Sure there are the events of driver’s mistakes causing you to have a Gunther Steiner moment, though there is no saying reliability will always be in your favor or against you. That’s what this demo seemed to lack in the nearly three hours I’ve played it, the lack of anything could happen all the time. Of course, that risk is there, but it never feels as impending as it could be.

Ultimately, if I wasn’t excited for Golden Lap already from a press release prior to faux-E3, I’m beyond excited now to see what not only a full season feels like, but multiple seasons. I want to see how that evolution over seasons works, how reliability works especially around the Faü(x)rburgring. Golden Lap is a simple and fun, sometimes rarely tense racing management title that hits just the right spots for Formula 1 nerds such as myself who enjoy the technical but happen to be too stupid to join an F1 team. Golden Lap releases sometime later this year.