Blindly to start with if truth be told
Starting point of 16384 for the fastest driver in qualifying over the season, and then calculating the average real qualy performance as a percentage and fitting this into the percentages shown in GP3 Edit.
So, in reality Prost was the best qualifier a total over the season of 2 seconds faster than Piquet. This equates to a difference of 0.12% (Prost combined times were 22m 17.402s against Piquet's 22m 19.382)... and just working from there. I took the data from the Autocourse annual Supergrid and then used intuition to estimate for the drivers that didn't compete in all 16 rounds.
The race performances were even more blind, so basically I just copied the qualy and made a few adjustments (Lauda and Keke better etc).Also increased greatly the failure rates to bring them into line with what really happened, with Williams, Brabham, Renault and Alfa Romeo all up around 50% chance of retirement. Of course I only considered mechanical failure here and not driver error.
Ummm, what else did I do? Made all Beemer engines have the same power, increased the Hart power so it could at least manage to reach fifth gear (!) and a few other tweaks along the way.
I always prefer to use default physics to be honest so I just try and keep things basic and adjust performance files and magic data rather than fannying around with GP3APE. With the greatest respect to those that produce g3p files I have yet to find one that I like.
It seems that most tracks are available in the 1984 configuration, or at least very close (is there a Brands Hatch without the Dingle Dell chicane?) so my next trick is going to be to try and get a full set of md files perfected. Might be a bit tricky as the Jacarepagua track I have is about 8 seconds faster than the cars went in 1984. I think there is a Jac95 track which may be better...
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The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. -- F.Scott Fitzgerald