Formula One Rejects Microprose Grand Prix Series



Formula One Rejects Microprose Grand Prix Series, frequently shortened to F1RMGP, is an offline gaming competition created and run on the F1 Rejects Forum by the user dinizintheoven. It is generated using Microprose Formula One Grand Prix running under DOSBox.

Thursday
Thursdays are reserved for free practice, usually held in three sessions: 10:00-11:30, 12:30-2:00 and 3:00-4:30. The first two sessions are a free-for-all including both Main Series and Women's European Cup teams (in European rounds only, obviously), whereas the final session is for Main Series teams only; in this session, from the 2015 season onwards, this is where official pre-qualifying times will be recorded, even though all the Main Series teams are allowed out on the track.

Friday
Women's European Cup qualifying is held from 10:00-11:00. For non-European rounds, this is an extra free practice session for Main Series teams, as these rounds are held at the beginning of the season, when the cars are at their least developed, and at the end, when championships may be at stake.

Main Series qualifying is held at 12:30-1:30.

The Women's European Cup race starts at 3:00, lasting a maximum of two and a half hours. Ending a race after 5:00, in October, in Europe might seem like utter madness but these final races of the European season are in the Mediterranean countries who have a rather slack attitude towards not being two hours ahead of GMT before the clocks are put back for the winter.

Saturday
Saturday is official race day for the Main Series, starting at 2:00 and lasting a maximum of two and a half hours. There are no morning practice sessions.

Sunday
Ordinarily, the teams would pack up and go home on a Sunday - however, in the last race before the mid-season break, Sunday is used for the Grand Reversal, where the drivers swap teams with their opposite numbers at the other end of the grid. Qualifying is from 10:00-11:00, the race starts at 2:00 and is allocated a maximum of two and a half hours.

The points system
This points system is exactly as it is for Formula One from 2010 onwards, and has been implemented from the start of both the Main Series and the Women's European Cup.

Pole positions are recorded, but no points are awarded for it. F1RMGP does not keep a record of fastest laps.

Minor trophies
See the forum thread on F1RMGP's Lost Trophies for the methods used in working out these semi-official awards.

Trophies
The trophies for the Drivers' and Constructors' Championships were officially named before the last race of the 2013 season.

Drivers' Championship: the Carel Godin de Beaufort Cup
The Dutch nobleman, Carel Godin de Beaufort, competed in 31 F1 championship races between 1957 and 1964, started 28 of them, usually in a bright orange Porsche 718, and scored four sixth places – a little bit more than enough to unrejectify himself. For extra rejectfulness, he competed in 22 non-championship races where he picked up his best results – two seconds and a third, along with one pole position. And then there's the added eccentricity that saw him drive in bare feet, or drive in practice wearing a Beatles wig instead of his helmet. Unfortunately, that same race where his wig entertained the crowd would be his last, as he suffered a fatal crash later in practice, his ancient car finally screaming that enough was enough and taking him to Motor Racing Valhalla with it. And though, as has been said, he managed to escape rejectdom, with those results in the same two seasons that he scored his two DNQs: "He properly embodied the true reject spirit: he did not have the talent or equipment necessary to become a great name of the sport, but competed anyway for the sheer love of it." – BlindCaveSalamander

Also highly commended for being in the running for the trophy name is Johnny Dumfries, also a nobleman who was quite fortunately landed with a competitive drive for the 1986 season – alongside Ayrton Senna. Johnny did just enough to unrejectify himself, and hence was one of the original "Lucky Bastards" on the F1 Rejects main site, and let's not forget he managed a DNQ at Monaco in the same car that Senna racked up eight pole positions and two wins with. But, in the end, Johnny did go on to win the prestigious Le Mans 24 Hour race in 1988, and Carel Godin de Beaufort never had that chance.

Constructors' Championship: the Willi Kauhsen Cup
Willibert "Willi" Kauhsen was a German constructor who tried to enter F1 in the 1979 season by designing his own version of the all-conquering Lotus 79. Not only did this venture fail, but it failed so badly that the Kauhsen cars only entered two races, bombing spectacularly both times and ensuring prime reject status for Gianfranco Brancatelli in the process. Then, in what is quite possibly the most rejectful inter-team deal ever struck in the history of F1, Arturo Merzario decided that buying these awful cars to use for his own team would be the way forward... and to nobody's surprise, it wasn't. With the Lotus connection firmly established in the origins of the Kauhsen team, this is truly F1RMGP's answer to the original Colin Chapman Trophy for the normally-aspirated (and hence instant reject) F1 teams in the 1987 season.

A special commendation goes to Connaught Engineering who came within a whisker of being the name immortalised on the trophy. So their story goes, they could be said to have spanned everything from should-have-been-champions to hopeless rejects. At the top end, Stirling Moss drove a Connaught Type A at two races, and Stuart Lewis-Evans, who might have been champion one day had he not been killed in action, scored a fourth place and unrejectified himself at his first ever Grand Prix, driving a Type B. At the reject end, the Type A was driven by reject hero Johnny Claes in four races in 1953, and the Type B was used for a one-off by amusingly-named profiled reject, Desmond Titterington, in 1956. But perhaps the biggest reject statistic of all for Connaught was how their fortunes lurched violently up and down; the team unrejectified themselves in their first ever race with 4th and 5th at Silverstone in 1952, then failed to score another point for three years. Finally scoring again in 1956 and 1957, when the Constructors' Championship was first started in 1958, the Type B was aging rapidly and the team racked up their first ever DNQs – scoring no points in 1958 with three DNQs out of five entries, then when the Type C was only entered for one race in 1959, that race ended in retirement. The final piece of rejectdom came in 2004, with the foundation of the Connaught Motor Company, who made the bonkers Type D – a 2.0-litre V10 engine enclosed in a body with a grotesquely ugly face.

Spin-offs
The first spin-off series is the Formula One Rejects Microprose Grand Prix Women's European Cup, with its inaugural season taking place in 2014. The championship is held over the European rounds of the F1RMGP season. Teams compete as subsidiaries of the Main Series constructors, or as privateers, running two cars from the previous F1RMGP season - though the top two or three constructors are usually encouraged not to make their cars available for use, in order to give those beneath them a second chance for a shot at glory. However, teams who have withdrawn from the Main Series are required to make their cars available to be used in this series for the first year of their absence.

At the end of the 2014 F1RMGP season, the 24 Hour V8 Bathurst Enduro was created to serve as a Grand Finale for the series' fourth season, to allow drivers and teams from other racing series in the Formula One Rejects universe to compete against F1RMGP's big boys, and to honour Formula One Rejects' Australian roots. It was obvious from the beginning that an endurance race involving V8 Supercars was ideal for this purpose, and the rapid response once the entry list opened for the first race was immensely encouraging - hence the race will be run again in 2015.

Sir Bernard Shekelslike
Sir Bernard Shekelslike (born, if that's the right word, on 20 April 1943) is the ringmaster of the Formula One Rejects Microprose Grand Prix Series. His origins are particularly strange; a New York banker, Shmuigel Jakubowitz, with an obvious interest in helping the Allied war effort, was visiting Britain with the expressed job of improving the financial situation of a number of farms in the West Country. Sir Bernard was the accidental end product of one fateful night involving Jakubowitz, three litres of nuclear-strength scrumpy, and a scarecrow. Throughout his school days, the young Shekelslike displayed an immense aptitude for dodgy business deals and a rapacious appetite for the acquisition of hard cash, usually managing to scam his school friends out of their lunch money, and regularly emptying the wallets of his adoptive parents. After leaving school in 1965 with A-levels in Economics and Business Studies, Shekelslike headed for a kibbutz in the fledgling state of Israel to give something back to his heritage. While on the kibbutz, the Six-Day War broke out, and not only did Bernie survive, he managed to make a ton of money off of both sides, even in that short time, and nobody quite knows how, but he is said to have been incensed that the war did not last longer.

Returning to Britain in 1968, Shekelslike opened his first business - a used car dealership in Brent Cross. Little is known about his business dealings for the next 21 years, as he kept the lowest of low profiles due to his involvement in the Anti-Communist Resistance, but what is known is that within a year he had made enough money to buy himself a Mercedes 600 Grosser, the car of choice for the cruellest dictators the world over, equipped with a horn that played If I Were A Rich Man at ear-shattering volume. It is also alleged that stories of his experiences buying and selling used cars and employing every foul trick in the book would later turn up in Auto Express magazine in the mid-2000s, under the name "Sheepskin Coats". Meanwhile, nobody outside the governments of the period knows exactly what his Resistance activities involved, but in 1989, as the Berlin Wall fell, Shekelslike was knighted for playing an integral role in the downfall of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe. Arise, Sir Bernard.

The creation of the Formula One Rejects Microprose Grand Prix Series in mid-2010 was a masterstroke from Sir Bernard; he knew there was a captive audience for a racing series in which those drivers who had not exactly excelled in F1 were to be given a second chance. He would run the series in partnership with the Formula One Rejects website, but knowing full well that the series would see two cars run by its own co-administrators, Sir Bernard needed to create a credible opposition that only he, with his quite literally magic touch, could provide. Having previously persuaded comic book hero Skid Solo to return to Formula One in 1998 to counter the underhand antics of the devious Manfred von Schuntmaker, his latest coup was to bring back two drivers and a team owner from the dead to challenge the in-house F1 Rejects cars. Thus was the creation of the F1RMGP Scuderia Ferrari, with Il Commendatore Enzo Ferrari running two cars for Gilles Villeneuve and James Hunt. (It would later be revealed that Sir Bernard owns a Hologram Projection Unit, and can recreate one deceased team boss and two deceased drivers for any one season - drivers are shown with the logo.) The defunct F1 team, United States Grand Prix Engineering, were the next to sign up; by the start of the inaugural 2011 season, 34 cars were battling for 26 slots on the grid at the Phoenix Street Circuit in the USA. The cars were all various 1990 and 1991 models, but this did not bother Sir Bernard one bit. The series was finally underway.

The Mercedes 600 Grosser has since been sold to Jeremy Clarkson.

Sir Bernard is known to have been married six times and has five daughters (and who knows, even at his age there may be more to come). The first three are from his marriage to a former Miss Albania who apparently won the competition in 1972.


 * Tallulah Shekelslike (b. 1976) is known for her many fingers in many different business pies, all of which have required bail-outs from her famous father at some point. Despite this, she still has aspirations to appear on Dragons' Den some day. It was always alleged she wanted to run her own racing team, and somehow, it has happened, as she prepares to "lead" Shekel Racing through their first attempt at F1RMGP in the 2015 season.
 * Anastasia Witherington-Shekelslike (b. 1978) decided to further secure the family fortune by marrying into the aristocracy. Most of her time is spent riding horses and whipping servants who won't clean up the mess.
 * Illyria Sheqëlslek (b. 1981) was named after the Roman province that would become modern-day Albania, and has altered the spelling of her surname to reflect her nationality. So seriously does she take that, and her father's work with the Anti-Communist Resistance, that she has carved out a career for herself as a controversial nationalist politician in Albania - conveniently ignoring her party's anti-Semitic overtones. Despite this, Sir Bernard is intensely proud of her, and justifies her behaviour on the grounds that Enver Hoxha might one day rise from the grave.
 * Miami Shekelslike (b. 1985) was named after the place where she was conceived - or, at least, the plane was flying over it at the time on the way to one of Sir Bernard's many Caribbean holidays. Miami is the forgotten daughter - it is said that Sir Bernard will organise lunch with Polly Toynbee just to get away from talking about her. Miami lives in a small flat in Ilford, has a steady boyfriend, is taking an Open University course in psychology, and is said to be the happiest of the five daughters.
 * Princess Darciella Shekelslike (b. 1993) isn't a princess (Anastasia is far closer to being one), but may as well be for all she is spoiled rotten, and is never seen in public without her tiara. She is clearly Sir Bernard's favourite, and he is only too happy to fund her avaricious desire for dresses, shoes and all-night parties.

Other personalities

 * Professor Sim Dawkins is Chief Medical Officer. Possessing the medical knowledge of the entire print run of The Lancet, the extreme antipathy for all things pseudo- and anti-scientific of Professor Richard Dawkins and the skills with a welding torch and a spanner that saw Sim Oakley star in Scrapheap Challenge and James May's Man Lab, it is said that there is no job in medicine too difficult for him to achieve. Legend has it that he could have restored Niki Lauda's face to being not just un-burnt, but having a few years wiped off his appearance to the point where he'd still be getting IDed in pubs to this day, and also that he could have rebuilt Didier Pironi's legs so that he would have been ready to race in Austria a week later. However, he does concede that had he been given the job of repairing Alex Zanardi, that might have caused him to miss one race, maybe two.
 * Doctor Francesca Rimmer is Chief Technology Officer. Said to have an IQ that would break eight-bit binary, she is fluent in seventeen computer languages, reads physics journals for fun, and can beat I Wanna Be The Guy on its most insane difficulty setting. Her main job in F1RMGP is to keep the Hologram Projection Unit running, which for anyone else would be a painfully difficult job, but for her is a trivial task which can be done to perfection between filing her nails and solving wasabi-strength su doku puzzles. She is also in charge of developing the "equivalency formula" by which turbocharged, normally aspirated and supercharged engines, running on petrol, diesel or ethanol, can all end up in roughly the same performance bracket. On the downside, the isolating nature of her work has taken its toll on her personality, to the point where she can communicate only in withering put-downs, has not smiled once in her time in the F1RMGP paddock (or at any other time in the last 30 years), and is known to chase intruders out of her computer lab with a cricket bat with nine inch nails hammered into it. The last victim who was brave enough to visit her in person reported that she looks a bit like eccentric artist Gemma Correll, huge hipster glasses and all, plus about fifteen years and minus the pets.
 * Murray Hunt and James Walker are the official television commentators on the practice sessions, qualifying sessions and the race for all officially sanctioned F1RMGP events. Hunt is said to be excitable and can generate drama out of almost anything, even a snail intruding on the track, though he is said to have been utterly defeated the one time he tried to commentate on a Formula One race at Valencia (averted in 2012, however). He is also known to take his work home with him, commentating on events he has visited as a spectator, such as F1RMGP pre-season testing sessions, the Rejectful Eastern European Car Computerised Series, some local banger racing, and two women taking their toddlers for a walk in the park in pushchairs. Walker, on the other hand, is far more restrained in the commentary box, usually because he is in the middle of guzzling champage, beer, brake fluid or anything else alcoholic. Most likely seen outside the commentary box with a blonde model under one arm, it is said that he has been married seventeen times, sometimes for as little as five minutes, before another blonde model takes over. His commentary is usually in the form of invidious barbs on the rare occasions when his colleague shuts up, and most of it is directed at a small handful of drivers; it is said that he reserves the worst of his comments for Jacques Villeneuve and Olivier Grouillard (both of whom left the series after the 2014 season). Highly esteemed reserve commentator Ed Benjamins, currently reduced to "alternative commentary" on the internet, is hoping to make the step up to the main commentary box once Hunt retires or Walker ends up in the Priory or in jail.
 * Jimmy Allinson is rarely seen around the F1RMGP paddock, as his job is to be the radio counterpart of Murray Hunt and James Walker. Almost as excitable as Hunt but with a fraction of the charisma, his penchant for talking too much was ideal for radio, where there are no pictures and his "commentary wi' nowt taken out" is considered highly informative by adenoidal motorsport geeks, and by everyone else as more irritating than a yeast infection armed with a decade's supply of itching powder. The reason nobody has seen him is, because of budgetary restraints, he is forced to commentate by watching the TV pictures from a broom cupboard in West Bromwich.
 * Marktin Brundell is the roving reporter for F1RMGP, in charge of updating us all on matters technical, such as Super Aguri's latest new innovation that never quite propels them to the top of the grid, what possessed Fondmetal Team Malaysia to run a W9 engine, how Sir Bernard Shekelslike's hair never moves even in the harshest of weather conditions, and the rejectful attempt of an unnamed backmarker team to make a blown diffuser out of two hairdryers rigged to the alternator. His job away from race weekends is to comb through the newspapers and magazines for F1RMGP news, and sort out which stories are wild, unsubstantiated rumours (i.e. most of them) and which have a bit of truth in them. His job is at least made easier by having a direct line to the Series Management, though he is no closer to solving the mystery of Sir Bernie's hair.

The Media

 * Autosport is a highly respected, English motorsport magazine, known for its sensible and unbiased journalism and a dedication to the facts. However, there is an unrelated Japanese magazine of the same name, whose grip of the truth is rather less firm. One journalist, said to be related in some way to F1RWRS driver Barii Mori, has a reputation for publishing extremely wild and speculative rumours (the so-called wild mass guesses) about who and what may be shifting in the F1RMGP camp, particularly during the 2013 season - and was also the one who initially stirred the gravy in the infamous "Meat-Pie-Gate" where various baked meat products were said to be found lurking in various parts of the engine and bodywork of Super Aguri's cars. On the other hand, it is said that Japanese Autosport's fervent support for the Suzuki hillclimb engine is what ultimately scored the manufacturer their place in the 2014 season, when Leyton House agreed to join the series specifically to be the Suzuki Works Team. The reputation of the Japanese publication has also been questioned in F1RWRS; notably, in late 2014, they ran news articles that suspected that Melrose Racing Team ran illegal car in 2014 F1RWRS Japanese Grand Prix and Foxdale Auto Racing Team allegedy running underweight in the same race, as well as allegations of Mecha Grand Prix using old DGNgineering cars in the non-championship Luxembourg race. An another publication of same name also exists in Portugal, unrelated to either the English or the Japanese versions.
 * Some Publication is an English motorsport publication with a non-committal title, which has also been known to report on the F1RMGP scene, occasionally offering a different angle to Japanese Autosport, and which set the two sets of journalists into conflict, especially as the 2013 season drew to a close and progressed towards the Silly Season. Sensationalist B. Journalist, Jr., Not Joe Saward and Ida Preferredadifferentname are all known to have written for Some Publication.
 * J.O.U.R.N.A.L. (the Journal Of Underdogs' Rejectful Named Autoracing Leagues) has recently become the publication of choice for F1RMGP news, rumours and speculation since the mysterious disappearance of Japanese Autosport and Some Publication. (Maybe their journalists annihilated each other?) While this publication still has more misses than hits, its journalists are rather more accurate in their predictions than those that have gone before. They used to use the term Jossed when a rumour or predicition turned out wrong. They also reported in RWRS.
 * Tuttosport, Corriere dello Sport and La Gazzetta Dello Sport are all Italian newspapers, who suddenly became interested in reporting on F1RMGP after Italian manufacturer Lancia and their official works team partner Il Barone Rampante burst into the sport. All three can be hit-and-miss with their reporting. All three have different relationships with the Italian teams on the grid; Turin-based Tuttosport dabbles in wild speculation which can often turn out to be completely wrong, Corriere dello Sport also likes to speculate but often bases their reports on some evidence they can find, and finally La Gazzetta Dello Sport appears to have a close relationship with Scuderia Alitalia Andrea Coloni, only publishing positive news stories about the Lancia A-Team.

Hologram projection
Sir Bernard Shekelslike's Hologram Projection Unit is able to recreate hard-light hologrammatic versions of deceased racing drivers and team bosses, with a limited capacity of two drivers and one boss at any one time. Holograms are created from vast amounts of data gathered over the course of their lives, from TV footage, racing results and statistics, telemetry, testaments of others, Forix, Wikipedia, dandruff or nail clippings found in preserved racing cars - generally anything that can possibly be employed to create as accurate an approximation to the real thing as possible. The more data that can be harvested, the more accurate the recreation will be, hence the more recent the driver's career, the more data is available (usually via the internet), and the more accurate the resultant hologram will be, irrespective of the date of death. (As an example: a hologrammatic Dan Wheldon would be considerably closer to the real thing than a hologrammatic André Simon, as Simon's racing career was in the 1950s, even though he died nine months after Wheldon.) Due to a quirk of the Projection Unit's software, it is easiest and causes the lowest amount of strain on the processor to create a hologram aged in complete years, hence the Projection Unit acts as a kind of "save point" for a living driver who can be recalled from the jaws of death at their last birthday, losing no more than a year of their lives (and as little as a day). Drivers who have died during their racing career (e.g. Ayrton Senna, Dan Wheldon) are recreated as they were on their last birthday, and thus have no recollection of their fatal crash, or even of some of their final races. Those who survived their racing career and lived on into older age (e.g. Juan Manuel Fangio, Paul Frère) are usually recreated from their first birthday after their retirement from racing, and will be able to recall their entire career. (Note: the curious case of Masten Gregory, born on 29 February 1932, has yet to be resolved; his racing career finished in 1972, a leap year, and there is ongoing debate about whether his date of recreation should be 29 February 1972 or 28 February 1973, should the need ever arise.)

Testaments

 * "This is epic" - Bananaphone, 2011 season
 * "The teams' profiles are just hilarious" - Phoenix, 2011 season
 * "I love this..." - Jeroen Krautmeir, 2011 season
 * "I was pissing all over my room by the time it got to the part with Berger in Hans Heyer's clothing. Not really, cause, you know, that would be absolutely disgusting." - tommykl, 2011 season (we all know what you really meant, Tommy!)
 * "This could quite possibly be the single most epic thread in history" - Wizzie, 2012 season
 * "As if the 2011 season wasn't already the single most epic thread of the past, present, AND FUTCHUHRE!!" - tommykl, 2012 season
 * "The 2011 season thread was the FORMER single most epic thread on the forum. The 2012 season has all the hallmarks of being more epic than a battle between Chuck Norris and Andrea De Cesaris." - Wizzie, 2012 season
 * "No, right now, it's the second most epic. It'll become first at mid-season and unbeatable at the season closer. The only thread who could ever dethrone it then should only be the 2013 season." - tommykl, 2012 season
 * "That... is... simply... BRILLIANT!!" - Wizzie, 2012 season, on Chris Dagnall's first victory (and the accompanying race report)
 * "I am still drunk with all the celebrations relating Chaves' podium! Hopefully the first of many!" - DanielPT, 2012 season
 * "Great Work, I love what you've done." - advent, 2012 season
 * "What an exciting start to the season, if only there was live streamed footage of the race and of Luca Badoer jumping up and down on the podium..." - SuperAguri, 2013 season
 * "What on Earth did I just read?" - Shadaza, 2013 season, on the unfolding story of Günther Schmidt's resurrection to run the ATS Rial team
 * "Those were quite possibly the greatest posts ever!" - The Masked Lapwing, 2013 season, on the same story
 * "We should make a movie out of this. Poor people, going to a movie thinking it will be about F1 - which it actually is - and than seeing a complicated science fiction story. I actually hope people over 1000 years will consider F1 Rejects' alternative championships as a reliable source for what actually hapenned 1000 years ago." - This, 2013 season
 * "I love this championship BTW, the best one that's ever been hosted in this forum IMO." - Phoenix, 2013 season
 * "This is epic, well done on running it" - kobayashiftw, a.k.a. eurobrun, 2013 season
 * "New to the forum, massive rejects fan: this is dynamite guys, dinizintheoven is a genius of Adrian Newey proportions." - joeyTKM, 2015 season