Testing

The Basics

Testing has the following benefits:

- Producing car character points (ccp) which add to your car level (and thus make you faster)
and don’t get lost even if you replace or downgrade parts.
- Increasing stamina, XP, TI and morale of your driver.
- Increasing staff morale, staff experience and staff technical skill (the so-called „untrainables“),
which will in return increase your gains through future testing (a self-reinforcing mechanism).
However testing is costly: 1 M per test and the additional wear on your parts, which is much
costlier and has to be carefully planned in your season wear plan as well as your season financial
plan. The wear differs from track to track, so there are seasons where testing is cheaper or more
expensive.
The more ccps you have the harder it is to increase them. They will decay over time, the higher
your ccps are the faster they will decay.
A minimum of testing should always be done since early gains are really big and the decay is
really low. Achieving 3x13 ccps does only require a limited amount of testing and can be
achieved with moderate testing even in ama and is worth a full car level. Thus no testing at all in
a season should only be considered in emergency situations.

The details
1. Wear is equal for all research priorities (except test car limits which is a useless research
anyway) and not wheather nor setup dependent.
2. Wear is always rounded up, which results in overall less wear for longer stints. For certain
parts there are "sweet spots" for number of laps per stint, with which one can optimise the wear
for certain part(s). These sweet spots are different for different parts lvl and driver dependent so
everyone has to find these sweet spots by himself.
3. For each stint one gains 0.1 staff technical Skill, for each test (regardless of number of stints
and laps) one gains 0.25 staff experience. Staff motivation is increased as well (higher gain for
better standing in the test standings – however if you constantly test your morale will reach 100
anyway).
4. The driver gains stamina (depending on number of total test laps (no difference between long
and short stints) and current stamina), motivation and XP as well as roughly 1 TI per test.
6. The research priority will determine the distibution of test points over the different car
charasteristics (Power, Handling and Acceleration). You can try to modify your car character in
such a way, that it matches the track character, which gives you an additional speed bonus.
Gained testing points will be converted over three races into actual ccps, so you have to plan
that ahead.

What does it all mean?

First thing you should do at the beginning of a new season is to find your wear for your parts
depending on the number of laps per testing stint. For example 4x25 lap can cause less wear for
certain parts than 3x33 laps.
As engine and gear are the most expensive parts you should try to optimize for those.
However there is another factor to consider: If you do 10x10 laps you will gain a full Technical
skill for your staff, whereas if you do only 3 stints you will gain only 0.3 TS. Especially for new
players building up TS should be considered as it plays a major role in the amount of ccps you
can gain through testing. So you should try to do a lot of stints even in ama. There are better
test tracks for that (like Ahvenisto) and worse.

Conclusion: There is a trade-off between optimizing for wear and increase in TS. What is more
important for you is dependent on your plans and current situation.
When planning your season wear there are two ways to go about your testing:

1. Set testing as a given and plan your ct risks and parts replacement around it.
2. Plan your parts and ct strategy and try to fit in as many testing laps you can to fill the gaps.

Or a mixture of both!

Even if you don’t need additional ccps in your current situation, testing will always improve your
staff untrainables, which pays off in the long run. So you should consider to test even if your
wear doesn’t allow for a full 100 laps.

Disclaimer: The above written is what I read on discord and everywhere else. It is meant as a
starting point and please bear with me if I got it wrong on certain parts. Any
corrections/additions and comments are welcome!
Wall of text: how test points are calculated and converted
(advanced!)
Test Points collection

The number of Test Points that you collect is roughly calculated as follows: you start from a base
value of 0.67 points per lap (in total, so P+H+A).

This value is increased by 0.00077 per point of Technical Insight your driver has. For example,
a driver with 100 TI increases the base value from 0.67 to 0.75 points per lap.

This is then multiplied by a factor based on staff skills: Experience, Technical Skill,
Concentration and Efficiency. Tech skill is the most important, closely followed by Experience. If
you have 10 points of both of them, it gives a 2.2% increase to the Test Points. Concentration is
half as important and Efficiency even a lot less.

If you have a Technical Director, the points are multiplied once again by a factor based on
his Experience. This is by far the most important factor: a TD with 200 Experience will give you
a 23% increase in Test Points! This is why it is by far the most important stat when you are
looking for a TD.

Our Test Points calculator has a margin of error of +/-0.4 points (in total, so P+H+A) so there is
probably still a small error in our knowledge, but it is more than accurate enough for its purpose.

Conversion to R&D Points

Test Points are converted to R&D Points. The base rate of conversion is 0.83, i.e. if you have
zero staff and facilities and you had 30 Test Points, they will turn into 30*0.83=24.9 R&D Points.

Effects from S&F are added to the rate of 0.83. The most important stat here is Technical Skill:
every point of TS increases the conversion rate by 0.0015. This may not seem much, but just
calculate what 100 TS does: it increases the conversion rate from 0.83 to 0.98! Efficiency has
one third of this effect; Stress Handling has half the effect of Efficiency, and finally Experience
also has a small influence.

Your Windtunnel, R&D Workshop and R&D Design Center also add a bit. Their influence is
different for each car characteristic. The effect of facilities is quite small; the effect of 1 level of 1
facility is slightly larger than the effect of 1 point of Stress Handling (and therefore much much
smaller than the effect of Tech Skill).

Finally your Technical Director multiplies the conversion rate. The only TD stats that are in
play here are the R&D skills. Having 100 of each will multiply your conversion rate by 1.1, so it
is significant, but not as important as the effect of TD Experience mentioned above. Two things
are noteworthy:
1. TD effect is a multiplier, so a good TD increases the effects of the staff and facilities (but the
facilities are still insignificant even with a TD).
2. R&D electronics is significantly less important than the other two (it has only about 60% of the
effect). It does take an equal part in TD overall, so keeping this R&D stat low is probably a good
thing.

Our formula for this step of the calculation is highly accurate, you will hardly ever see an error
that cannot be explained by rounding errors.

Conversion to Engineering Points

This step is highly similar to the one above. The base rate is 0.727.

Your staff's Experience, Technical Skill and Efficiency each have a roughly equal effect: they
each add about 0.0006-7 per point. Again having very high Exp and TS here will make a big
difference compared to someone who has them below 20. Concentration has a small effect too,
about one quarter of the effect of the other stats.

The Engineering Workshop and Alloy & Chemical Lab have a small contribution, 1 level here
is worth about two thirds of a point of staff exp. It's still not much, but it is slightly more than
the three facilities that affected the previous step (and since we're adding these effects to a
smaller base rate than in the previous step, the actual effect is further enlarged). So if you ever
need to upgrade some facilities, look at these two first.
Note: just like in the previous step, each facility has a different contribution to each car
characteristic.

The Technical Director contributes a lot once again, this time

through Leadership and Motivation. They each have the same importance. 200 Moti (or 200
Leadership) adds 11-12% to your Engineering Points. So TD motivation is quite an important
stat, but again, it is not as important as Experience.

Our formula for this step of the calculation is highly accurate, you will hardly ever see an error
that cannot be explained by rounding errors.

Conversion to Car Character Points

The final step is completely independent of any facilities or driver, TD or staff skills. The only
things that matter are:

- How many Engineering Points are coming in

- How many CCPs do you already have

The conversion rate is calculated independently for each characteristic. First of all, your CCP is
reduced by 5% (whether you have any Engineering Points coming in or not). Then, Engineering
points are converted and added to the CCP. This rate of conversion decreases the more CCP you
already have.

If you have no CCP at all, the conversion rate is 1/3 (so 15 Engineering Points turns into 5 CCP).
But this very quickly decreases: when you have 10 CCP, it's already down to 1/9 (so your CCP
goes from 10 to 9.5 due to natural decay, and then you add 1/9th of your incoming Engineering
Points).

At 35 CCP there is a sort of symbolic tipping point: the conversion rate here is roughly 1/20. This
means that if you have 35 CCP, you need to supply 35 Engineering Points just to keep your CCP
from dropping! And it just gets worse the higher your CCP is going up.

This is why testing is very worthwhile when your CCP is low, but gets very expensive if you
want to get them really high. Having said that, I still recommend testing as much as you possibly
can, to get that Experience and Technical Skill up, because I hope I have shown in this post why
they are important!