Well obviously like I said I've been looking into doing this myself so I'll give you my ideas that I was thinking of how to implement into my version.
* As this is based on 2001 you have the advantage of knowning who is coming up in the future, but obviously depending on how far into the future you go does determine how the driver database is done. May I suggest making a database that can be edited by people in future?
* Drivers are set to only become available from the age of 18 to drive for you and retire randomly between the ages of 36 and 46.
* I have seen a GP2 Career excel program which adds up the positions gained over the race weekend to form a "score". Now according to that score and where the team is placed in the constructors championship rankings determines if a team is interested in you or not. I was going to manipulate that a little and have a chart on the main home screen which showed like the top 10 drivers who were interested in your team for the following season, basically been determined by the difference between your teams current season score and the driver's individual score and the closest 10 show on the chart. Obviously quicker drivers would want better team performances before they are interested.
* More available tyre and engine manufacturers and customer engines / works engines.
* General engine development over a season although research shows that manfacturers tended to only gain about 15bhp in a year and in stages, usually related to their home races.
* A good engineer could gain you more than a poor one, but the gain is randomly calculated, i.e. you may have Adrian Newey and the best wind tunnel but he might not have a very good gain for a while but he has more chance of doing so than a bad engineer.
* Top 10 constructors from previous season get prize money split between them per race based on position of previous season, but then also prize money per race based on top 10 results in qualifying and race. The total prize money increased by 5-10% every year.
* Testing would obviously have to be done in the program rather than GP4, maybe working on the ability of the test driver etc.
* Pay drivers.
When I think of more I'll let you know. By the way a great site to look up data is [
www.statsf1.com] if you haven't seen it already.