Grand Prix Story 2 Beginner’s Guide: 12 Tips, Cheats & Tricks for Winning More Races

It’s been six years since the release of the original Grand Prix Story, and Kairosoft is back with a new grand prix management simulator for iOS and Android, called Grand Prix Story 2. In this game, you can choose any type of car that you wish, and design the “perfect racing machine,” unleashing the full potential of your drivers and mechanics as you train the former to win more races, and the latter to design some record-breaking cars. As the game’s description says, each of the courses have their own nuances and “peculiarities,” and you may need to collect multiple car types, and choose parts that are suited to a certain course. You may also get to use a special type of fuel to get a “super speed boost,” though that special type happens to be that old standby of racing games called nitro.

Despite the 8-bit graphics and minimalist design to this game, this is quite a deep title with a rather steep learning curve. That’s why we’re going to start you out with the very basics of this game, as we now bring you our Grand Prix Story 2 beginner’s guide. Read on if you need some help in making some good progress even in your first few days of playing the game!

1. There’s Very Little Actual Driving Involved Here

One of the first things you should know about Grand Prix Story 2 is that it isn’t a racing game in the sense that you need to precisely time your shifts and your turns in order to make your way around the track. By default, you control only three things — the Nitro (you get complimentary Nitro during the tutorial stage), your brakes (if you’re going too fast around the turns), and your driver’s Aura (only applicable if they have one active). Everything else is handled automatically by the game’s AI, and that should, in most cases, make this a very relaxing racing game. But then again, it’s more of a racing management game, so the main things you need to look out for are your employees (mainly your driver and mechanic), the part of town where your garage is located, and the development of new cars.

2. Make Sure You Train Your Driver And Mechanic

Since there isn’t much driving to do in this game, you can instead focus on making your employees better, and when we say employees, we mean your driver and your mechanic. Each employee has six unique stats, as well as a series of drills they can take part in during the training process. The stats are Strength, Agility, Tech, IQ, Analysis, and Appeal (at least that’s what we think “Appl” stands for), while the drills are Uphill Drill, Car Study, Running, and Part Time Work.

As the game explains (by pressing on Hint at the bottom left while you’re on the training screen), Strength affects a car’s Speed, Agility its Acceleration, and Tech its Handling. It’s these three stats you want your drivers to be training for, so you should be taking your driver out to Uphill Drills (plus points for Agility and Tech), or Running drills (plus points for Strength and Appeal).

IQ improves the EXP (experience points) your drivers get, while Analysis improves your driver’s ability to dismantle cars; these are pretty much low-priority stats you can focus instead on when training your mechanic, in which case, the mechanic’s ability to design cars and perform aerodynamics tests would improve. (Strength, Agility, and Tech improve a mechanic’s Test Run, Repairs, and Development Capacity, and it’s only Agility out of these stats that you should be working on primarily when training your Mechanic.) The best drill for mechanics is, by the name of it alone, Car Study, as it improves both IQ and Analysis stats.

Appeal improves the ability of both driver and mechanic to advertise, or get more fans through the races. You can leave this alone as a secondary, or even tertiary focus when trying to improve the stats of your employees in Grand Prix Story 2.

3. What Does The Part-Time Work Drill Do?

If you’ll notice, we didn’t mention the Part-Time Work drill above, but you could also have your driver or mechanic go through one from time to time; it basically allows each of them to earn some extra cash. But since drills cost them some of their energy, we would recommend making this drill a lesser priority; there are many other ways to make G’s (the game’s main currency) anyway, and part-time work isn’t necessarily the best way to do so.

4. How To Improve Your Car

We made the second tip quite a long one, as it deals with everything you need to know when training your driver and mechanic. But you also need to have a fast, good-handling car out there, and that’s another thing you should pay close attention to.

Your Mechanic’s stats could influence how fast a new car’s base stats are when it’s just been developed, and to wit, the base stats are as following: Speed, Acceleration, and Handling. There are also two other stats — D-Force and Boost — but since this a beginner’s guide, we’d only worry about the first three if we were you. Speed determines, well, your top speed in any given race, Acceleration determines how quickly you are able to reach a certain speed, and Handling determines how well you navigate turns and corners. These stats can be improved through enhancement items, which you could win when a given fan’s meter reaches 100 percent, or buy at the in-game stores, which are located in the right menu with the blinking “SHOP” icon. Tap on a car and click on the second button from the left in the Garage menu, and you’ll be shown a list of items in your inventory which you can use for enhancement purposes. Just choose those items, hit on Enhance, and you are good to go.

There are also parts which you can win in the races, or buy at the store — the Car Shop, to be specific. You’ll see icons corresponding to an engine, tires, a gearbox, and motor oil, and if you have items that fall into these categories, just click on the icon, then click on the part to install or uninstall them.

5. Collect From Your Vending Machine

Need to earn some quick G’s? Well, you’ll want to regularly go back to your Vending Machine, preferably twice or thrice a day. As time passes, this particular “building” will earn more money for you, so if you’ve spent all your money on improvements, you might want to head to the vending machine instead of, as we warned against earlier, tiring out your employees by having them do part-time work.

6. Keep Grinding It Out As Long As You Have Fuel

Basically, the key to ranking up your garage through EXP, earning more medals (the game’s premium currency), and winning more enhancement materials and other items (as gifted by fans) is to keep on racing. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t finish in the podium in your first tries; you’ll still win some G’s, and that’s still going to count toward filling up the meters that correspond to each of your fans. You also seem to get EXP for each time you overtake someone, and as we’ve found out, overtaking other cars, even if you qualify in the back row, is pretty easy with the game doing almost everything by itself.

7. The Best Way To Earn More Medals And Spend Them

As for winning more medals, this is achieved each time your garage ranks up. And you typically get about 10 each time you rank up; that’s much more than the measly one medal you get if you click on the parading characters around your village to watch an ad video. You can earn medals that way as well, but the game only has a limited number of ads to serve up at any given time. Additionally, you could choose the Swanky Shop option and buy medals with real cash, or complete one of the many Tapjoy offers in the bottom-most shop option, which simply says Free Medals. Your mileage may vary with the Tapjoy offers, so with that in mind, we do have another suggested way for you to earn medals in Grand Prix Story 2 — through daily login rewards.

What will you be using those medals for? Chances are you’ll be needing them to buy Nitro, with the cheapest Nitro package costing a good 50 medals. (50 percent nitro costs you 125 medals, while a 100 percent refill, on the other hand, costs 168 medals.) You can also use medals to buy research tokens, or to speed up the construction of buildings. Converting medals to research tokens is sometimes a good idea, but never should you, under any condition, use your medals to speed up construction! Sure, we can get that constructing buildings could take a while to finish, but you’ve just got to be patient, as there are other things you can use that premium currency on.

8. Don’t Start A Race If Your Driver Is Nearly Out Of Energy

There is an obvious danger, of course, to starting a race while your driver is at 20 to 30 percent energy or less. And that danger is them not performing as well as they normally would! That essentially adds up not only to a waste of energy, but also a waste of fuel, so we would suggest that you put the game aside for a bit if your driver’s all tired out from training. The same applies to your mechanic — you don’t want him working on any new cars or repairs if he’s too tired.

9. How To Get Research Tokens

Research tokens aren’t really a form of currency per se, but you will need them if you need to research new technologies for your team in Grand Prix Story 2. As we mentioned above, the game will sometimes ask you if you want to exchange your medals for research tokens, but the best way to get them, in our opinion, is to win a track for the first time. Not only does this unlock a new track for you to compete in, or the ability to enter a Grand Prix season, if you’ve completed the third track; track owners will also gift you with research tokens from time to time.

10. Make Sure You’re Ready To Race When Your Driver Has An Aura

Every now and then, your driver will get an Aura, signifying that he or she is in a particular good mood, and has a better chance of performing well in any given race. You shouldn’t hesitate to join a race if it so happens that your driver has an Aura, and once that happens, you should hit the Aura button at the very moment the light turns green. That will allow your driver to pick up a tremendous amount of speed, and to pass everyone else in the field (or almost everyone else), giving him or her a great advantage as the race goes on. Auras are only active for a few seconds, and there’s always a chance that someone may pass you when the Aura wears off, but you will, in most cases, be able to pass those guys again once you’re further down the track.

11. Stick To One Car Type, Or Work On Multiple Types?

As you go along, you will be able to unlock various car types, and you may be wondering whether you should stick to one car type, or collect as many as possible and add to your stable of vehicles. Our recommendation would be to stick to one for as long as you could, because enhancement materials don’t come around that often; as we mentioned, these are earned mainly through good finishes in the races, and through patient grinding and replaying of races. But since cars are subdivided into classes, with some classes being better than others, you should also make it a point to move on to a better class of car at some point, so as to ensure that you remain competitive in the game.

12. Login To The Game Every Day

Last but certainly not the least, we should also inform you of the importance of logging in to Grand Prix Story 2 every day. Even if you’re not planning to enter any actual race, you might want to log in even for a few minutes, as that will still allow you to win the daily login reward. These rewards may vary, and as we mentioned, they may sometimes include premium currency. But in any case, you can expect to win something, so make sure you’re taking some time each day to simply open the game on your phone!

And this wraps up our detailed guide for Grand Prix Story 2 here on Level Winner. If you know additional tips or tricks, be sure to share them with us below in the comment section!