Beginner course on Grand Prix Mode (40 miles), 1st place finish, normal car, manual transmission
FULL COURSE CAUTION at 6:45
Expand the description for a big tutorial on Grand Prix strategy!
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Grand Prix Mode makes the game considerably harder, not just because the race is longer and you have to put down good laps for a much longer period of time. Grand Prix also adds a level of strategy to the game in the form of fuel and tires. New HUD indicators appear: the fuel and tire gauge on the bottom left which is shaped vaguely like a race car, and the blue flag indicator box near the speedometer which shows the race state.
The fuel and tire gauge shows how your car is doing. As you drive, you will burn fuel, making the fuel gauge decrease. Obviously, do not run out! The four other rectangles show the state of your tires, ranging from lime green for fresh tires to flashing red for damaged tires that need replacement immediately. The tire indicators will also flicker when the tires are about to degrade to their next state. Hard crashes and contact with the walls and other cars can also prematurely damage one or all of your tires, so try and avoid contact of any kind. As the tires wear down, your top speed will start to decrease and the car will have less grip, making the car much harder to drive. Less grip means drifting will happen sooner than normal or even by accident. Note that spent tires will also make your drifts take wider lines, so you will have to slow down more for each corner. Combined with the reduced top speed of spent tires, your lap times will start to suffer as your tires enter the yellow state and will be hurt dramatically as they enter the orange and red states.
If you crash and damage a wheel, if your tires are getting too worn down to drive on, or if you are about to run out of fuel, drive into the pit lane to have your pit crew repair any damage to the car body, replace the tires, and top off the fuel. Note that a pit stop takes nearly 30 seconds to complete! You can't just drive in every ten laps to get fresh tires to keep your car easy to drive and your lap times fast. Instead, you must budget how many laps you can complete on your set of tires and try to find an optimal time to pit before the tires wear down completely. Do not try to pit too late in the race however, or else you will find yourself with a lot of positions to try and recover before the race ends as you will be thirty seconds behind the lead car when you leave the pits. Try and pit with about 15-20 laps remaining so that you have fresh tires that you can finish the race aggressively with; if you pit then, you should not have to worry about your tires degrading past the yellow state and you will have plenty of time to catch up to the driver in first.
Keep in mind that the computer drivers never have to pit and never have to deal with tire wear. They will always put down very fast times. The computer drivers also "rubberband," so if you take first place and try and get a large lead, they will drive faster than their normal speed to close the gap and constantly threaten you; this pressure is even more overwhelming when you are driving on worn out tires. The computer cars can crash however, which can be a blessing for you especially if your tires are badly worn.
Full course cautions can occur only on the beginner course at random when the computer drivers crash in the third corner of the track. When this happens, the blue indicator box at the top displays a yellow flag and a pace car pulls out onto the track. The pace car drives slowly around the track and the other drivers are forbidden from passing, must line up behind the pace car, and must follow it around until the accident has been cleaned up. You are no exception; you will lose control of the car and the 'AUTO DRIVE' warning will flash on the screen in addition to the words 'FULL COURSE CAUTION' as your car lines up with the others behind the pace car.
However, this is the perfect time to take a pit stop since all of the other cars are slowed down behind the pace car! Press the start button to select if you would like to take a pit stop. The yellow flag will only last a few laps, so make your choice quickly. When getting ready to restart the race from a yellow flag, the screen will flash 'RESTART.' Select third gear and press down the accelerator for the restart as you do not regain control of the car at a speed high enough for fourth gear unlike the rolling start.
Also, keep in mind that full course cautions are entirely random events. They can happen as soon as the race begins, they can happen within a few laps of each other, they could not happen for several hundred laps, or they could happen at the very end of the race resulting in the winner of the race being whoever was in first when the caution flag occurred. Do not rely on the cautions to give you a chance to pit, but take advantage of them when they do happen!