This guide is largely out of date as it was written several updates ago (before GT). I have not had the time to experiement with the new version to update the guide. The basic premise should still work however, you'll just have to find the new marketable drivers and either make your run earlier or much later.

I have tried the Predator challenge before, and even managed to get Predator to finish in 4th place in my first season. However, without the cash flow, HQ, or car capable of keeping up with the other teams, the second season was a total crapshoot. So, this is why I came up with a slow build strategy.

Mostly I'm just going to chronicle my own playthrough (currently in season 5) with what I thought to be successes and things to watch out for. Please, please, please, feel free to add comments on things that we all can improve on, and I'll try my best to update the guide as best I can.

OK, so you've started the Predator Challenge. This is supposed to be the most difficult team to win with, but it has what I believe to be some excellent advantages that you may not have thought about. Advantages I believe make them the perfect slow build team.

1. They have zero expectations of you. I have literally told them to expect me to come in 10th place every single season and the Chairman has always stayed at 100% happiness with me.
   
   
2. They spend almost nothing on wages. This will be a key component to the slow build.
   
   
3. Their lead designer, Charlotte Williams, and a mechanic, Tom Woodbridge, have good star potential for a great European Series team.

The main objective of the slow build is to take advantage of your low expectations to build up your teams infrastructure, so that you can completely dominate the competition all the way up to the World Motor Championship.

1. You'll want to make your Manager have the Financial Background. That 5% savings adds up to a whole lot when you're talking about Legendary Engines that cost upwards of $3,000,000.
   
   
2. At the start of every season (after your first), the game takes your two parts with the highest performance rating (current, not max) and makes your two starting parts similar in quality. Meaning if you have an engine that is 200/235, and one that is 180/220, your starting engines the next season will be in the neighborhood of 200 and 180. This applies to the AI too, so realize that every season the opposition will also be improving their cars.
   
   
3. If one of those engines has a risk value, (doesn't matter if it's low or high) the risk will be removed on the new starter part, but the performance will stay the same. This is one of the biggest things to remember in the slow build strategy.
   
   
4. Marketability! This is the most important attribute to look for in a driver while slow building.
   
   
5. Pay Drivers, Pay Drivers, Pay Drivers. You want all three drivers to be one if you can manage, but do not sacrifice marketability for it.
   
   
6. Upgrade everything in your HQ before you do anything else! This is the whole idea of the slow build. I was worried that the AI would also be upgrading, and with higher prize pots they would be superior at this as well. However, I'm in season 5, I have a level 4 Factory and will have a level 4 Design Centre by the end of the season. The only teams that have a 4/4 HQ are Kitano and Steinmann, and both are at the top of the WMC. In comparison, in the ERS, the best teams are still at 2/2.
   
   
7. Depending on how long you're willing to let this take, you may want to stockpile a ton of money before you actually start building/upgrading your HQ. This can save you a few million dollars in maintenance fees.
   
   
8. Once your HQ is properly built, turn all of your focus onto your car. You'll have a lot of catching up to do, but with such a superior infrastructure you should have no problems catching up and then far surpassing everyone else.

Alright, it's March 1, the first day of your management career! Here's what you should immediately do.

1. You have some mail, one of which is to give your Chairman a target for the 2016 season.
   Pick 10th place. Yes he will pay you around $3 million less for the season, but we will make up for that on our own.
   
   
2. Go to the Finances tab and adjust your budget for next years car to Low $500,000. We have other things we can do with that cash.
   
   
3. Scout Everyone
   The attributes change very slightly each time you start a career, so the values I show may be slightly different than what you experience, but should overall lead to the same conclusions. However, by scouting everyone you may find a better fit than what I show.
   
   
4. Your team's payroll is already cheap, but we can do better. Go to your Scouting tab, and start scouting these three drivers:
   
   Bjorn Bjelland
   Marieke Meulen
   Konstantin Ivanov
   
   Bjelland pays around $300,000 per race and I signed him for less than $40,000. His marketing is also around 100% so make him your #1
   Ivanov isn't a pay driver but he has around 80-85 marketability which will help get those 5-star sponsors.
   Meulen pays around $200,000 per race so she is in reserve. Signed her for around $30,000. You have to have her do your practice runs every race in order to make half of what she pays.
   
   
   
   All together you'll make an additional $300,000 a race from drivers paying you to lose!
   
   ** SIDE NOTE ** During the 2016-2017 offseason you may want to steal Bao Tāng away from Dragon Race Team China. He pays around $290,000 per race and has only slightly less marketability than Ivanov. ( 78 vs 82 in my career) He also seems to get marketability increasing traits regularly. I had him at 100% for a season because he was racing trucks and volunteering.
   
   Next sign mechanic Ellen McBride to replace Oscar Deveritt. She has good potential and can be gotten cheap.
   
   
   
   
5. Next, go to the Car tab and have your mechanics work on reliability in this order:
   
   Engine - Takes the longest to repair during a pit
   Gearbox - Takes the second longest
   Breaks - Wears out the fastest, but doesn't take very long to repair
   Suspension
   Wings
   
   This wont matter much while we are losing, but it makes the races end a bit faster when you don't have to pit as often, and can help you get 16th place in the first race or two.
   
   *DO NOT FORGET TO INCREASE YOUR PERFORMANCE AS WELL*
   This small difference adds up over your seasons. By season 7 you can have a performance around 100, if you never touch them they will stay around 10.
   
   
6. There isn't much else to do until your first race. (an interview, but your choices don't really have a huge impact so I'll skip it) So, advance to the Travel to Black Sea day, and then click on the Sponsors tab. You can have at most 3 offers for a specific slot, however when a contract ends, you may not get 3 offers right away. This is why I always wait till the travel day before accepting new contracts, so you can choose the very best offer available.
   
   I almost always take the sponsor that has the highest payout per race over the length of the contract. The math to figure it out is pretty simple, so don't worry if numbers aren't your thing. If you have an upfront payment of say $1,000,000, and the deal length is for 10 races, divide 1,000,000 by 10 and you'll see it breaks down to $100,000 a race.
   
   For the first race I didn't have 3 offers for all the slots, so I just took what was available. Slot 2 I was offered Maxwell's Beer: $150,000 for 6 races, or Rogerson Ales: $500,000 upfront for 8 races. Do the math and see that Rogerson Ales breaks down to only $62,500 a race. So clearly Maxwell's is who to take.
   
   On your Race Bonus Sponsors, I almost always take the one with the highest upfront payment. We aren't aiming for anything better than last place, and with our new one star drivers that's likely all we will get anyway. This also means that if you don't have 3 sponsor offers for those slots, its ok to wait a race until you do.
   
   
7. I wont go into how to manage the drivers on race day, or how to set-up your car during practice, as there are already excellent guides on those subjects. Also, who cares right now when we expect to lose.
   
   The starting Rogerson Sponsor pays $200,000 for a 16th place finish, this will be hard with our new drivers, but not impossible to attain, and is worth trying to accomplish. The first few races everyone's reliability is low so you should have a little help from drivers being retired. I was also able to sign a 4-star sponsor for an upfront $4,000,000.
   
   After the first race you can see that we have already come back out the red from releasing our drivers, and are well on out way to domination!
   
   
   

The rest of the seasons are fairly straight forward, make a ton of money and use it to upgrade your HQ.

Again, you may want to wait a season or two and horde your money to save on maintenance fees.

I don't have/remember the order I built everything but the ultimate goal is the Theme Park and Road Car Factory.
The Theme Park costs $100 million and pays $2 million per race.
The Road Car Factory costs $65 million and pays $1.5 million per race.
Those are huge investments, and will take about 5 seasons to have made back what you put into them. But, the slow build strategy plays the long game, so getting them as soon as possible lets you take advantage of them as soon as possible. Also, making back your money isn't your priority, total profit per race is. This allows you to afford the best drivers/staff/parts on a race by race basis.

Here is a little list of what order seemed best to me:

1. Factory level 2 - Factory is your most important building
   
2. Design Center level 2 - Not very useful but necessary to unlock other buildings
   
3. Helipad - Allows 5-Star Sponsors. You'll need 90% Marketability though, so grab Ivanov to get up there.
   
4. Staff Center - If you don't have this your staff will never improve, so get it early to take advantage of your staffs good/high star potential.
   
5. Tour Center - Makes around $80,000 per race if I remember correctly. It currently makes only $73,000 a race for me though, so I don't know what hidden factors influence it.
   
6. Factory level 3
   
7. Design Center level 3
   
8. Factory level 4
   
9. Design Center level 4
   
10. Road Car Factory
    
11. Theme Park

You should now be making enough from your HQ to pay for most or all of the rest of your HQ. From here on out you want to build the rest of your HQ focusing on developing your car.

Here is my HQ at the end of the first season:


Here is my HQ at the start of the 2021 season:


All Drivers are still cheap and happy:


My marketability is high and I have several 5-star sponsors:


The Test Track / Telemetry Center / Brakes R&D / Handling Development are next on your list. The order doesn't matter you just want them all maxed out.

The Scouting Facility / Forecasting Center / Simulator / Wind Tunnel are not important until you advance to the Asia-Pacific Super Cup, so don't bother with them till then.

The only exception is the Scouting Facility. Depending on how long it takes you to get your HQ up and running, some of your Pay Drivers may start retiring. Use the Scouting Facility to find more pay drivers, or really crappy one stars that you can get on the cheap. For example : Felipe Nunes, and Katie Linares. (These two don't require the facility to be built though)

In my play-through I went ahead and built the Simulator and Wind Tunnel before I made my move up the rankings. Once you move up to Asia-Pacific Super Cup, you'll want to start improving your Wings. Once I reached the APSC I took another season to improve the car further, then went for the crown.

So, you've got yourself a mammoth HQ, now you're just a few seasons away from total dominance!

This should be a fairly short section with mostly how to develop your car as quickly as possible.

1. Each season you have to start upgrading your parts all over again, starting with Average and working up to Legendary.
   
2. Your lead developers Known Components don't cost extra when building a part. So, take advantage of Charlette Williams having one for Average/Good/Great by building parts as cheaply as possible until you can make them legendary.
   
3. You can start working on reliability during the preseason by going to the Home tab, clicking on the bar graph for Car and then Improve Car
   
4. If you're improving the cars reliability in the preseason, go to the same bar graph, only now you can design parts. They will still be from the last seasons attribute threshold but you can get them up to Epic quickly; once the season actually starts the legendaries you build will have the new season attributes.
   
5. What you're looking for is whatever component makes the maximum performance the highest. Then have your mechanics improve it to that maximum. Remember that all Risk levels will be removed the next season, but will still apply the performance increase.
   
   *Disclaimer, your legendary parts will likely have very high Risk Levels, so DO NOT FIT THEM ONTO A CAR! You will be caught, and you will lose that part, the money it took to build it, and receive an additional fine. Not to mention your time.*
   
   The whole idea is that you'll eventually have a car whose base parts are vastly superior to all your opponents, and winning every race should be a cakewalk.
   
   Heres my car at the start of the 2027 season:
   
   You cant ask for better times than these!
   
   
6. When building a new car, always pick the cheapest chassis components, the extra cost isn't worth the relatively small bonuses to improvability. Also refuse all Dilemma offers during the building process.
   
7. Continue until all of your parts are best in your league.

Now that your parts are the best, you'll want the best chassis. So, when you build a new car choose all the most expensive Chassis Components. You'll also want to now accept all Dilemmas to improve the car. Each +1 means one additional star, making the dilemmas much more cost effective at improving your car than the Chassis Components.

Now that your HQ and Car are the best, you'll want the best drivers to take advantage.

Your driver seems to have a slightly higher impact on winning than the car. Having a 5-star driver means all the attributes will be close to 20. I haven't found anything online that can show if perks actually make them go above 20 or not though.

However, we are still in the ERS and a 5-star driver isn't even going to talk to us, so we need to find drivers who have a high potential, young enough that we can train them to reach that potential, and are currently only average enough that we can at least make it to the negotiating table.

This can be harder than it sounds, the AI will try to nab the best drivers while you're off building.

After a bit of testing, it looks like a 3-star driver is the highest you can get to talk to you. Maybe 3-stars and a hair more if they are unemployed.

Here's the attributes in order of importance:

1. Braking / Cornering / Smoothness
   I always prefer the top three attributes over all the rest, as they are the ones that directly influence how the driver handles the car in all situations. I prefer Smoothness over the others if I can. Tire wear will increase your lap times considerably. I've seen Super Softs add 2 seconds when at 75% before.
   
2. Focus
   The higher this is the less likely your driver will make a mistake. This should have the greatest impact when driving with maximum aggressiveness, and since every race starts with everyone going Red/Red for the first 4-5 laps, this can have a big impact on making your way to the front (unless a vote has added qualifying)
   
3. Overtaking
   Typically in ERS there is no qualifying so the drivers with the highest points start in the back, so overtaking coupled with good focus are going to get you back to the front.
   
4. Feedback
   A high feedback will get you some very nice bonuses come race day. Especially if you can take advantage of the AI's poor practice strategies.
   
   For example, if you see that during practice it will be hot and sunny, but on race day it will be a downpour, do all of your practicing on Wets or Intermediates. All of the AI will use softs because the practice is hot, leaving you with the only tire bonus on race day. I've seen this help numerous times on careers I wasn't slow building. I'd fight my way to the middle with a middle car and middle drivers, then the last 5 laps of a race was a monsoon and my +10% on wets that no one else had got both my drivers to 1st/2nd right at the end!
   
   
5. Fitness
   No need to have it at max, but you probably don't want it really low. It makes your driver slow down the longer the race takes. Usually I'd put more importance on this, but with our super car we should be lapping half the grid so tapering off at the end shouldn't make much difference.
   
6. Consistency
   Again, with an OP car and a great driver, having a poor lap here and there shouldn't have much impact. It can also swing the other way and give you an outstanding lap and equalize your total race time anyway.
   
7. Adaptability
   The least important attribute from what I can tell. Whatever impact it has is situational and small. Your drivers talent and your car should make up for whatever negatives a low attribute might cause.

Here are some drivers to look for:
George Patterson
Shota Takimura
Jasmine Megic
Inmaculada Erostarbe

And the three I chose:

You may want to improve your staff as well, but then again maybe not.

From what I've read online, the attributes don't actually do anything when building parts. Therefore, you'll either want the cheapest you can find, or one that has great Known Components.

I haven't taken the time to look through every one of them, but Isai Nolde isn't a bad pick up. You can get an extra Good and extra Great component with him

You only really need one attribute here, Pit Stops.

Concentration should be your next priority, it helps prevent errors during pit stops, and since you'll always be attempting Fast pit stops, this can help. However, with a 30% chance for an error, and my pit stops having an error around 70% of the time, I'm led to believe that the dice rolls for every aspect of the pit stop. Meaning that the fuel, and each tire have a 30% chance of error, rather than a single roll to see if the entire stop has an error. I'd love if someone has more info here though.

Part Fixes: If you're improving your reliability while the car is being built, or waiting till a part is at 100% before using, you should never have a part fail on you, making this attribute useless. And, if your driver has high concentration like I suggested, crashes should be rare.

Chemistry: Some mechanics have some interesting perks you can take advantage of, but I haven't come across any that I thought were vastly superior to a Race Trim +10%, let alone a +15% or more.

Reliability: Just decreases the time it takes to make parts reliable. Its nice to have but ultimately has no effect on race day if you've done everything else correctly.

Performance: Same as reliability. This can be nice during the car improving seasons if you have that one last part you want to max before the season ends.

I've won the Drivers and Team Championship, I'll take one more season to do nothing but build the car, then it's off to the APSC!


Once you've advanced to the Asia-Pacific Super Cup, you can again ride out some time at the near bottom to further build up your car.

*Make sure you don't rank dead last or else you may be relegated back to the ERS*

I didn't find this difficult though, it was pretty easy for me to stay around 4th place for two seasons while I developed the car. This also gave a bit of time for my drivers to get closer to their max potential. Then moving up was again a breeze.

By this time you should have a handle on how to proceed. If you have access and the funds to get even better drivers do so as needed, but if you picked the young guys with high potential they should be capable of clinching you many trophies to come.

The Politics each season can help make you development easier. Here are some ideas I've had that seem to be working in my favor.
Step one: Abstain from EVERY vote unless you absolutely want a yes/no outcome. Many votes wont have any impact on you as you're slow building. i.e. tire manufacturers or number of tires allowed.

1. Add a race to the schedule? YES
   The addition of another race is the addition of more money per season. This will reduce total number of seasons you have to grind through in your slow build.
   
2. Change a part to Spec? YES
   In my career I was able to get spec parts for the Engine and Gearbox. This means the only advantage the AI cars have over me is the Suspsension and the Brakes. This puts a greater emphasis on the drivers abilities, and will reduce the number of parts you have to improve to catch up.

A lot of people leave comments asking how to raise marketability and keep morale high. Interviews are one of the main ways to do so. After most races you're offered an interview with the first queation asking if you're disappointed in your driver. Choose the TOP answer that you are very disappointed. This is cost you -10 morale but will give you a 1-3 increase in marketability. Do this for every interview and in a season you can gain an extra 10-20 Team Marketability each season. Don't worry about the morale loss, after the next race you usually get a +10-15 to morale.

Most of these are minor, but a few can have a major impact

1. Will you be paid for a choice? TAKE THE MONEY. Whatever negative morale impact you suffer from taking the money is usually regained after a single race.
   
2. Will you have to spend money? DONT DO IT. Just dont.

*EXCEPTION* Occassionally you will be offered to buy the plans for an AI teams part. This usually costs around $400k-1.5 million. This is the only time I've spent money on a Dilemma that I can remember and is absolutely awesome.

Here you can see the benefit of buying those plans, my brakes and suspension are much improved. $400,000 for the brakes and $1,500,000 for the suspension. Saved me a great deal of time and money:


Now I have one of the best cars on the grid and I have not developed a single part!


This tip is very situational but I have been able to take advantage of it the last two seasons.

1. There was a vote passed to only award points to positions 1-5
   
2. Votes were passed to make Gearboxes and Engines Spec
   
3. Football Manager Sponsorship to place 7th or above for $600,000, with a 3.4x bonus in Britain.
   
4. Aim to place 6th or 7th so that you can get $2,040,000 without getting any points. Allowing your team score to stay in last place.

Despite previous tips in the guide people are still messaging me about marketability, so I've added this section.

• The higher your Marketability score the better sponsor offers you will recieve.
  
• Your total Marketability score is the average of your two main drivers and the team. This means that you add all three together and divide by 3.
  
• Drivers Marketability score can go up and down during their careers. Most of the time they are temporary, but a few can become permanent.

• You need to build the Helipad
  
• You need 90% total Marketability. This means that when you add up the three contributing marketbility scores you need their sum to be a minimum of 270.
  
• Accept all post-race interviews. Answer the top answer on the first question and the last answer on the second question. This adds 2-3% to Team Marketability for every interview.
  
• Achieve your season goals. This should be the easiest as youre only aiming for last.
  
• After signing Bjelland (100% Marketability) and a team score now at 100%, this means your second main driver can have no less that 70% marketability. 100 + 100 + 70 = 270, our goal. This means that ANY driver with less than 70% marketability should not be considered, unless you are already so far ahead in HQ and car development that maximizing income is no longer your priority.

Here is a list of all the drivers I've found with 70+ Marketability. Im making the list at the start of season 6 with a level 3 scouting facility. So, all ages listed are how old they are during season 1. Likewise all star ratings may be more/less that what is listed here, though potential star ratings should remain the same. Marketability seems to vary slighty with each new career, so give an allowance of +/- 2-3% from whats listed. Pay drivers also vary how much they pay with each new career, so I will only list whether or not they have the trait.