The race engineer.

I really battled with this one. The race engineer is such a big part of open-wheel racing, and I just wasn’t sure how I wanted him to come in. In the end I realised there were two reasons to have him.

The first is colour. When I watch Grand Prix racing on TV, they bring in the engineer’s radio, and it adds so much. You get this sense of what’s going on behind the scenes while a driver is trying to win the race. I wanted a bit of that in the game itself.

So he’s there for certain moments in the race. He calls the start with “All cars are ready, watch the lights.” He lets me know when the car ahead is pitting. And when I win, it’s “You did it mate. That is P1. Fantastic drive.”

I didn’t want him to be intrusive, though. It’s not a full-on back-and-forth, where he gives me instructions and I answer him. It’s more just a one-way info loop. He tells me what’s going on, and I just drive.

The second reason is help. When the tires wear, he warns me: “The tires are starting to go.” In practice, once I’m out of the pit lane, he says “Get a feel for the turns. Some only need a lift off, while others maybe need a tap on the brakes or more.” So he also becomes a sort of tutorial, and I thought that was really cool.

The challenge, of course, was what he says. I wanted PocketGP to be something you can just buy once, with no ongoing cost I’d then have to pass on to you. So every line had to be worked out ahead of time. It took a long while to go through everything he might say, find the moments in a race where it makes sense for him to comment, and tie the two together.

But yeah, I’m really happy with the way it turned out, and I hope you guys like him too.

KA