Motorsport Manager Online Advanced Guide: Tips & Strategies for Improving Your Car, Drivers and Team

After two massively successful PvE auto racing management games, Playsport has taken its iconic Motorsport Manager franchise to the world of massively multiplayer online gaming with the newly released iOS and Android title, Motorsport Manager Online. Instead of dealing with the same AI drivers and managing your team across several seasons, you will now be competing against other human players, hiring a team of two drivers, upgrading your car as you go along, and experiencing the realism of managing an auto racing team not just by yourself, but with thousands of players from all over the world.

There have also been various new modes and features introduced, with existing ones also getting noticeable revamps, just as you’d expect from any new version of a popular, high-end mobile racing game.

As you keep progressing forward in the game, you’ll find that there’s more to just timing your pitstops and choosing the right tires, as well as constantly upgrading your parts. You’ll also need to hire new drivers, upgrade your headquarters and work on new projects, and do a wide range of other things in order to stay competitive while moving up! With that said, this is where our next Motorsport Manager Online guide comes in.

In our second Motorsport Manager Online guide, we shall be tackling various intermediate-level tips, specifically driver negotiations, HQ upgrades, and driver strategies, while tackling some of the game’s other features that we weren’t able to spotlight in the first strategy guide.

1. Negotiating With Drivers – Monitor The Deal Point And Never Overpay

Eventually, you’re going to need more than just the lower-ranked likes of Lucca Allen, Chica Balcazar, Will Hume, and Ines Santa Maria driving for your team. As you move up from tier to tier, the competition will intensify, and upgrading your car’s parts oftentimes won’t be enough to keep up with the proverbial Joneses. Of course, it’s still arguably most important to have a high-performance car with the best available parts that you can afford, but you won’t truly be racing up to full potential if your drivers aren’t up to par compared to the ones that other players have on their teams.

As usual, Motorsport Manager Online allows you to negotiate with free-agent drivers who are interested in a ride with your team, and when it comes to the timing of these negotiations, we would recommend doing so once your current driver has one race remaining, or if their current contract has run out. You can also renegotiate their contracts and keep them on your team for several more races, though typically, you’ll want to go from strength to strength while advancing through classes and tiers.

The basic mechanics behind negotiating with drivers haven’t changed at all in a fundamental sense. Like in previous versions of Motorsport Manager, you will have one to three chances to offer a contract to a driver, depending on their overall level of patience. We would suggest avoiding drivers where contract negotiation is a one-shot-only deal — unless you’re overflowing with cash and staff members and can immediately make a big-time offer, you’ll probably get rejected outright, forcing you to wait several races before you can talk to the driver once again. You will, however, definitely have more leeway when it comes to drivers that give you two or three chances to present an acceptable offer.

When negotiating, do not waste your chances by offering a low-ball salary right off the bat. In almost every instance, the driver will find that offer to be insultingly low. Try advancing both the Contract Cost and Support Staff bars by one notch for your first offer, then take a look at the distance between the yellow hand (your side) and the gray one (the driver’s side) in the Deal Point section on the top of the negotiation screen. You can then use this to determine how much more you need to advance Contract Cost and Support Staff in order to seal the deal. Do not, in any instance, overpay by moving the Contract Cost bar a bit too far to the right! You’ll need that cash for other things in the game, such as buying new parts, to name a very basic example.

As for the Contract Length section, we suggest leaving that at 10 races until you’ve unlocked higher-rated drivers — say, the ones that have an overall rating of 80 or higher. You wouldn’t want to keep them locked in for too long, thus preventing you from getting better talent once you are promoted to a new class or tier.

2. Know Your Drivers And Upgrade Them When Possible

In addition to hiring new drivers from time to time in order to stay competitive in Motorsport Manager Online, you may also need to review their stats and know what each of these attributes represent. You probably may think won’t need much of a backgrounder for this if you’re an experienced MM player, but there have been some changes made to the stats per driver, as we’ll be explaining in the next paragraph.

The first stat you’ll see is Overtaking, which is pretty much self-explanatory — it affects the ability of a driver to overtake other cars, but also their ability to maintain their position and not get re-overtaken, thus the failure of the move to “stick.” Defending generally refers to a driver’s skill in avoiding been overtaken.

Smoothness affects the wear and tear of a car’s tires — low Smoothness means a lot of tire wear, while high Smoothness allows a driver to last longer before having to go to the pits for a tire change. Race is a stat that determines general speed, Qualifying impacts a driver’s speed during the qualifying laps, and finally, Race Starts determines how quickly a driver can accelerate from the starting grid.

In addition, each driver accumulates more experience points as they complete more races for you, and once they’ve earned enough XP, you can then level them up and manually improve their stats — you will be allocated six new statistical points upon leveling up, and it’ll be up to you to choose which stat you wish to improve and which ones you wish to leave as is.

Since we did suggest keeping drivers on 10-race contracts until you have access to someone with really great base stats and are in the higher tiers, we would suggest focusing on their most obvious strengths first, and basically leaving their weakest stats unchanged. Again, they’ll usually be good for just nine to 10 races, so you don’t want to start any long-term improvement projects here.

Due to the online PvP setup of Motorsport Manager Online, ages are no longer included in driver stats. Time was, you had to be mindful about a driver’s age, due to how their skills would decline once they reach a certain age (usually their early 30s) and how they would eventually retire, typically at some point between their mid-30s and early 40s. That means you need not worry about deteriorating stats — their stats have nowhere to go but up, especially if you’ve decided that your current drivers are keepers!

3. About Driver Strategies – What Are They And Which Ones Should You Choose?

New to the world of Motorsport Manager is the concept of Driver Strategies, which can be best described as “powerful bonuses during races” (Playsport’s description), or, in general gaming parlance, buffs that improve a certain aspect of a car or driver’s stats or performance that are in place for as long as you’re implementing the strategy. Take note that you can only choose one strategy per car, which means hiring new drivers for your Driver 1 or Driver 2 slot will not change the strategy!

All in all, there are 32 Strategies to choose from in the game, although you’ll only have a handful to choose from early on. Getting promoted will unlock new Strategies, so that should give you yet another reason to keep racing and keep pushing forward by earning more points! Below are some examples of some of the Strategies you can employ and assign to your No. 1 or No. 2 car.

Perfect Race Start: Allows for extra-fast performance on the first lap
Micro Repairs: Additional 15 percent reliability/25 percent speed per pitstop
Qualifying Boost: Improves a car’s Qualifying Power by 20
Aggressive Strategy: Shaves 0.5 seconds per lap with tires wearing out 15 percent slower, Overtaking getting a 25-point boost, and Starting Energy reduced by 2 laps

These are just four Strategies, but as we mentioned, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Feel free to mix and match Strategies as you complete more races until you find the one that fits your play style the best!

4. Work On Your HQ

If you’ve been playing Motorsport Manager for a while, you probably are aware that building your headquarters is important when it comes to a lot of things — may it be improving your drivers, building parts and upgrading them, or saving on costs, among others. You can access your team’s HQ by tapping on the section on the bottom left of your screen (before scrolling down, that is) and make upgrades or start new projects, which would be as necessary as ever for the betterment of your team’s prospects in Motorsport Manager Online.

The first thing you can do in the HQ menu is upgrade your headquarters, which would cost you at least a few hundred thousand worth of cash. However, this would be a necessary expense if you want to hire more staff members, speed up completion times, and have more people dedicated toward drivers who would need it in the negotiation process.

On the right side of the HQ menu, you’ll see a familiar feature that’s been redesigned quite a bit despite the similarity in mechanics. This is where you can start new HQ Projects — these are the new items you can research in order to improve things in the various areas we mentioned above, namely drivers, parts, budgeting, and more. For example, one of the first two projects you can undertake is Great Engineers, which allows you to hire just that — Engineers with Great overall ratings — in the talent pool.

The other one is Personal Trainers, which allows you to earn ten times the XP you normally would earn per race for drivers — this is great for intermediate players, because it’s at this point where you will be able to hire some truly talented drivers and not the scrubs you may have had access to in the first few classes. Starting a new project costs cash, requires staff members, and takes some time, so you may need to be patient when working on one!

5. Sign Sponsorship Deals For More Premium And Common Currency

One thing that many players may have neglected on Motorsport Manager Online is the option to sign sponsorship deals. In previous versions of the game, it was easy to pay attention to this, as you would constantly be reminded about expiring deals and always have an attractive incentive waiting for you if you’re able to satisfy their expectations and place above a certain position.

In Motorsport Manager Online, the sponsorship concept has changed a bit, in the sense that you no longer have to make sure your cars are placing above a certain position — this, as you may have gleaned from our beginner’s guide, now comes into play in the form of bonus cash per race, sponsor or no sponsor. Instead, you will simply be given the choice of claiming a Paddock Token or cash reward after waiting for a certain period of time — make sure to set your notifications so you can claim your reward and accept a new sponsorship deal! (Depending on where you are in the game, you will also have the option to choose from Small, Medium, or Large sponsorships when using this feature.)

At the end of the day, the choice of cash or tokens will all depend on you. However, we would normally go with cash in the early goings, considering that you will usually be using those tokens (or tempted to) to speed up certain tasks and the fact that you’ll need a ton of cash to keep up with all those expenses — paying drivers, building parts, hiring new engineers or staff, the whole nine yards.

Additionally, be sure to watch an ad video before claiming your sponsorship reward, as that would allow you to double your earnings!

6. Connect Your Game To Facebook

Like many other games, Motorsport Manager Online offers the option for players to connect their game to Facebook. What benefits does this have to you, the player, if you decide to take your game to social media? (By the way, you can access this by scrolling down on the main menu and tapping on the Play with Friends section.)

Most likely, you would have noticed the sweet premium currency bonus you can get after you connect your game to Facebook — that’s 50 free Paddock Tokens which get automatically credited to your account! Aside from using them to speed up progress when building a part or working on a new HQ Project, among other tasks, you can also use them to buy XP for your drivers or buy new building materials for your cars in the in-game store.

However, beyond that, connecting your game allows you to compete against other Facebook friends who may also play Motorsport Manager Online. And more importantly, this lets you save your progress, so you don’t need to worry about starting from scratch if you previously decided to uninstall the game but want to reinstall it again, or if you’re switching from one device to the next.

7. Race More Often To Move Up The Leaderboards And Earn More Bonus Cash

As Motorsport Manager Online is a multiplayer game, that also means competing against other players to earn as much cash as possible across the span of a one-week season. You can access the game’s Leaderboard by scrolling down and tapping on the section on the lower right corner. Here, you will see the league that you are currently in, as well as the season leaders based on your current league, global ranks, and among your friends on social media. The latter is only for players who have connected their game to Facebook, as we explained above.

Obviously, racing as often as possible is the best and only way to earn more cash and improve your ranking on the leaderboards. Depending on your league (Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum), you could earn up to 350,000 bonus cash for coming out on top; otherwise, you may only earn a few thousands as a bonus if you rank in the bottom 25 percent. You would, however, want to go for something more ambitious than just that, so keep on playing Motorsport Manager Online, keep on racing, whether you win or lose, and keep getting promoted so that you can make some moves up that leaderboard!

8. What Does Completing Achievements Do For You?

On the upper left corner of the main menu, you’ll see a tab that includes your team name and team motto — tapping on this would pull up a list of Achievements, which may include picking up a certain number of wins, pole positions, or podium finishes, scoring a certain number of points, and so on. (As a bonus tip, you will also see the option to connect your game to Facebook, so that’s one alternate way of getting the 50-token bonus we told you about earlier.)

Depending on the achievement you completed, you will either be able to unlock a new Logo, Motto, Background, or Logo Background for your team. Now this wouldn’t have any bearing on your actual performance, but if you’re trying to collect stuff in Motorsport Manager Online, this is exactly where you’ll want to go. Most of the Achievements can be completed organically, but it’s always a good idea to tap on your team name as we said above and see what you need to do in order to complete the current set of Achievements.

Basically, these are collectibles to help spiff up your overall identity as an Motorsport Manager Online player. However, be aware as well that you can also use this section to change your team name — albeit at a rather hefty price! It will cost you a whopping 100 Paddock Tokens to choose the new team name of your choice (as long as you aren’t using any dirty words, of course), so you probably would want to avoid this unless you happened to choose something really embarrassing when you first started playing the game.