Player's Guide

Welcome to the Clutch Racing Dynasty Player's Guide. Clutch is your chance to take control of a racing team and bring it to glory, rising through the ranks from a low level regional racing team to a national powerhouse while competing against other team owners like yourself. Reporting to an investor, you'll be responsible for signing your drivers and crew chief, landing sponsors, maintaining your garage, preparing for races and, when it's all said and done, making some money. If you enjoy the strategy aspect of racing, this is the game for you!

So without wasting any more time, here is the Player's Guide to Clutch Racing Dynasty. Welcome to the addiction.

Clutch uses a dropdown menu system along the top of each page. Each section contains different subpages which we will touch on later in the guide. Also along the top is a dropdown of your list of teams so you can easily toggle between worlds. You'll also notice a Help icon at the top right corner of each page that, when clicked, will display the help specific to the page you are viewing. There are many popup profile windows within Clutch. Any time you see the name of a driver, crew chief, sponsor, track, race, part, upgrade or user, you can click on it for the profile. These are often represented with a consistent colored text. Clutch uses tables to display data throughout the game. For the majority of these tables, you can click the column header to quickly sort the information.

The Clutch community is typically very helpful when it's not trash talking. You can get help in several ways within Clutch. There's the page specific help by clicking on the Help icon at the top right of each page. You can participate in the Track Talk feature within each world of Clutch (available on the Office drop down menu). There's also our Knowledge Base of searchable questions and answers available from the Community drop down menu. Also on the Community menu are links to Developer Chats which are held sporadically to answer users' questions. Finally, there are the forums that cover all our games including Clutch Racing Dynasty. You can access the forums via the Community drop down. If you're looking for an answer to a specific question or advice from a veteran user, each of these sources can provide you with the help you need.

You'll need to learn Recruiting first.

You need to hire a crew and sign sponsors during recruiting. Recruiting is four days long over five days, beginning at noon eastern time on the first day and ending at noon eastern on the last day. You can begin to prepare for recruiting prior to the recruiting timeframe by adding crew and sponsors to your hiring and sponsor centers. You do that by visiting the Crew Search and Sponsor Search pages. Both will tell you when the recruiting period will begin and end as well as when the signing period begins. You can search and add suitable candidates to your hiring center and sponsor center anytime. You do this by clicking on the ‘search’ button upper right on the screen. But you can only offer contracts once the recruiting period has begun. Once the period has begun you need to wait until the second day of recruiting to receive your first reply. While the signing period begins at noon eastern on the second day the first responses do not come until 2 pm eastern. They then come every three hours at 2, 5, 8, & 11 am and pm eastern time until the end of the recruiting period.

Hints about Sponsors

• You need to sign one primary and one associate sponsor.
• If you cannot sign sponsor(s) they will be issued to you by the sim.
• Your two sponsors cannot be from the same industry.
• Sponsors have requirements you must fulfill to get bonuses.
• If you don’t earn bonuses from your sponsors they will get less and less ‘happy’.
• Unhappy sponsors don’t re-sign or increase payouts the next year.

Hints about Crew Chiefs

• Make sure you change the "level" in search criteria to your current level (Elite for first-time users).
• You can only sign one crew chief.
• If you cannot sign a crew chief one will be issued by the sim.
• Some crew chief skills directly impact the quality of your parts, others his performance.
• Engine rating determines HP and engine durability.
• Aero rating determines draft rating and durability of body.
• Traction rating determines handling rating and durability of frame.
• Experience effects how well he executes his ratings.
• Leadership determines the odds that your crew members will mess up on a pit stop.
• Pit speed determine speed of pit stops and is a factor in overhaul and repair rates.
• Pit skill determines how often you get a pit penalty & determines how well the cc can adjust the car during the race.
• Work ethic determines how fast the other ratings improve.
• Better ratings and in the right area make a better CC for your team.
• Crew Chiefs provide helpful comments and feedback following each race.

Hints about Drivers

• Make sure you change the "level" in search criteria to your current level (Elite for first-time users)
• You can sign up to two drivers if you wish, although only one is necessary.
• If you cannot sign a driver one will be issued by the sim. In some circumstances two may be issued
• The driver's rating directly impacts his performance on and off the track.
• Passing, Drafting and Blocking impact the appropriate on track performance.
• Experience effects how well he executes his ratings
• Stamina effect how well he holds up during the race and how much he has left for a late charge to the finish.
• Charisma determines how well he works for your sponsors and can increase or decrease the effect of missed bonuses.
• Reaction determines his ability to react quickly to situations such as crash avoidance, breaking and accelerating.
• Work ethic determines how fast the other ratings improve.
• Better ratings and in the right area make a better Driver for your team.
• Drivers provide helpful comments and feedback following each race

Once the signing period is over your crew (and sponsors) will report to your team overnight and the next morning you will have garage access.

When you get access to your garage, you will get access to your parts and your upgrades area for both your garage and your crew. In addition you get access to your run setting and scheduling. We will go through these sections one at a time.

Your parts will be in your garage when you get access. You get two each of engine, body and frame. In addition you get a seventh random part (i.e. a third engine or body or frame). Each part has an identification number and a rating for its ability (HP, draft, or handling) and its durability. They will all also read 0.0 damage. You can access your storage area for each of the parts by clicking the desired tab. You'll also notice the Upgrades and Marketplace tabs.

By clicking on Marketplace you can access the used parts sales lot and the garage upgrade tool area. Be careful buying used parts. Make sure you understand what you are doing first. The tool upgrades are important to the improvement of your team. Storage rooms (capacity) and Building additions are for purchase but are better saved for buying later when you need them. The tools are usually your first purchases. When you click on a tool it will give you a description of what it does. The purchase of some tools makes other tools available to you. Tool prices change day to day, so it’s best to buy them when they are cheaper. Each tool has a specific number of uses. Each time this tool is used, the use count decreases. Once the uses run out, you'll either have to replace or repair the tool. Since some tools depend on others, there's a cascade effect if a tool runs out of uses that other tools depend on -- none will function until the one is repaired or replaced.

The Upgrades tab shows all the garage upgrades that you have in your garage. Clicking the name of the upgrade will let you view more detailed information including the ability to repair the tool when applicable.

One of the first things you will do is get your build team working. Your build team can build engines, bodies and frames for $1104 and five days work. The build team can also overhaul parts (in four days). Overhauling returns your part to the "new" condition that your Crew Chief can attain at the time it is done. This varies up and down slightly as well as improves with new tools and Crew Chief skill improvements.

Your repair teams can only work on the one type of part listed for the team. Repair teams can repair (in three days) and overhaul (in four days). Once you start to race and have damaged parts you will assign them to the repair teams and have them repaired so they can be run again. Parts can be run multiple times before repair but the damage inhibits their performance. When they are repaired their durability falls slightly. Lower durability causes damage to occur slightly faster on parts. Durability is only restored during overhauls and not during repairs. Higher damage also increases the likelihood that a part will fail and thus cause a DNF.

When the race season is over for all divisions, you can repair your parts instantly. Open the part's profile, click the repair button and you'll hae a fully functional part for the next race season. Otherwise, you'll have to wait the requisite number of days for a repair next season.

When you click on a part in you garage, one of the options it gives you is to sell the part. The part will have the default selling price set based on the part's quality and damage status, but you can adjust this selling price within a certain range. It will only be sold if another owner decides to buy your part. This is a viable strategy to accumulate money to move up or reach positive dollars after falling below zero dollars after moving up. It is only a viable strategy in very limited scenarios as one of the most important parts of the game is too accumulate enough parts to run fresh parts as much as possible. When you place a part for sale, teams across all levels within the world can purchase it. Teams only receive a portion of the selling price to cover the costs associated with marketing the part.

Owners in their third or fourth season often ask how they get rid of old parts that are not up to the level their crew can create. This is a misunderstood concept in the game. You want to overhaul those parts not sell them or destroy them because once you overhaul them they perform as a new part at the durability and performance that your crew can achieve.

You can also discard a part. This is different than selling a part because you immediately remove it from the garage and will not receive any payment if it is purchased.

By clicking on crew management, you will find your crew upgrades option and your driver select option (only useable when you have two drivers). Here you can set your primary driver, click on your crew to see ratings (it defaults to driver and you must click on the crew chief box to see your crew chief and click for his ratings) and have the upgrades box to click on so you can view the upgrades available for crew. As crew sometimes have prior experience with other teams you may find that your crew members already have some upgrades purchased for them. By clicking on an upgrade it will give you a vague description of what it does and will give you an option to buy it only if there is a crew member who hasn't received the upgrade already. Keep in mind that crew upgrades stay with crew members and not the team. Therefore they may not always be a good investment due to the inevitable turnover of crew within your team.

Crew upgrades generally improve individual ratings for the crew member (a driver or crew chief) that the upgrade was purchased for. Commonly these improvements show at day change (8:15 pm eastern) over the course of the first two days after the purchase and raise the category one to three points. Some upgrades effect move than one category and some others still only improve ratings throughout the season. Crew members lower in age and higher in work ethic generally gain more. The inverse is also true (crew members high in age or low in work ethic may experience a lesser of non-existent gain).

The Run Settings page takes some time and most of us spend a lot of time on this screen.

Near the top you can select the race (or practice) you are trying to set up. A description of the race (name, track, purse) and track dimensions come up. The track dimensions are listed as ratio/bank of straightaway and ratio/bank of corner. So 0ft./5°, 440ft./24° is straight-aways with a 5 degree bank and a 440 ft ratio corner (that is fairly large) with a 24 degree bank. Without getting into a pile of math, the larger the number in corner ratio the more sweeping it is and the lower the number the tighter the corner. The dog-legs seem to be removed from the tracks for the game.

You can select the engine, frame and body to use. You must click "Set" after each selection to save it.

The bottom section is the car and pit settings section. There are general settings for each for newbies. Note that the vets don’t use these and if you want to be competitive you want to get off the general settings as soon as possible. You'll notice that when you adjust the general setting, it updates the advanced settings so you can get a feel for how they relate to one another.

The advanced handling settings effects can be explained as follows:

• Front Air Pressure: Higher for more straight line speed and lower for more grip.
• Rear Air Pressure: Higher for more straight line speed and lower for more grip.
• Front Lip Spoiler: Higher on rougher and slower tracks, lower on faster and smoother tracks
• Rear Spoiler: Higher for grip, lower for speed
• Left Bias - higher when the track is flatter and therefore lower when the track has steep banks.
• Rear Bias - Higher on the tracks that have a larger difference in banking from corners to the straight-aways.
• Cross Weight - Higher for the lower curve radius tracks and lower for the higher curve radius tracks.
• Front Camber - The flatter the track the lower the number, the more banked the track, the higher the number.

I understand that having to program eight settings seems to be intimidating. What I recommend is you try to take a logical approach and make a guess at what the settings should be. Then book practices (I do three 50 lappers at Elite), we will got through how to do that in a couple sections. Once you have booked them come back to the run settings screen and set one with the guess. Then set a variance of the guess on each of the other two. After the practices analyze the data and see which one is the best. Then book a couple more practices and run variants of the fastest one. In time you will find a fast setting and can run that in the race. Make sure you run race pit settings with early practices as you are trying to simulate race settings. Make sure you save after you set each practice and race. You can change your car settings after qualifying and before the race, so having a qualifying setting and a race setting is possible. If you are in a full human division it may even be necessary. According to NASCAR rules, however, a part change between the qualifier and the race will result in a starting position penalty -- you'll move to the back of the pack.

There are 3 pages related to your team's schedule for the season. The Season Schedule is a high-level view of when certain events occur during the season. The Race Schedule lists all your races and the Practice Schedule allows you to schedule practice races and view practice results. We'll focus on the Race Schedule first.

There are two pulldown menus at the top. With them you can see the race results of any division in any season of your world. This includes viewing your races only in any season of yours (great for looking up settings used in the past). It also includes any season in any division you were not in as well.

When you click on a race name, it will give you a break down of the purse and the track details. If you want to quickly adjust your Run Settings for a particular race, click the "Settings" Link.

Once a qualifier has been run, you'll see how you did and can click the result for more details. Once the race has finished, you can click the result for full race results. Within the Race Results page, there are several sections.

The "Results" tab shows the most important result information -- who finished where and how much did they win.

The "Play by Play" tab shows the top 5 drivers every 5 laps of the race as well as any events that occur during the race. If you want a quick view of the top participants, this is the place to look.

The "Lap Stats" tab shows some basic summary stats about the race. The "Pit Stats" tab shows how your team did pitting compared to the leader and the rest of the field.

The "Lap Results" tab contains the nitty, gritty details of the race. It shows how each car did for every lap of the race. Learning to process this information into what you need to change to get better is an important learning process for this game.

The "Qualifier" tab shows where everyone qualified including any adjusted starting spots based on part changes after the qualifier.

The "Settings" tab shows the run settings used for the particular race.

If you want to see how you did by reading the Race Results tab before seeing the results, you can do this by clicking the "Race Results" link within the "My Locker" page.

The Practice Schedule page has four pulldown menus. When you want to schedule a practice run, make sure you set all four pulldowns to the option you want prior to hitting the 'schedule' button. When you change the track, the track details section will change to the correct track. When you miss-schedule a practice and want to change it, you can click the "Cancel" link next to the scheduled practice. The cost of a practice is based on the length of the track and the number of laps. You can only have 3 practices per day. And parts can suffer damage during a practice, so don't forget to check your parts after a practice.

Remember, practices don't involve other cars on the track, so not everything will go as smoothly in a race.

At the start of your first season you get $60,000 from your investors. How you use this money is important. There is no more cash invested into your team ever. Your team operates on what your sponsors pay and your race winnings. If you have negative money at any time (the system will still pay crew) you cannot build, overhaul, repair, or buy upgrades. So you want to have a plan to budget your money. I know of two basic plans different guys use.

a. Spend up to $50,000 of your seed money before the season starts and early into the season. In spending the money you would buy most of the garage tool upgrades (except storage rooms and building additions) and keep you build team working. Then run your team off the other $10,000 using any surplus to buy upgrades and begin accumulating upgrade money once you have achieved your shopping goals for the Elite division.

b. Spend conservatively and stay around $50,000 on hand. Buy upgrades as you have surplus and only have a small amount of money to accumulate when you want to move to the next level. You would, of course keep your build team working all the time here as well.

Option 'a' is used more by the experienced guys wanting to jump divisions quickly. I see option 'b' as a more safe and steady newbie strategy.

You can view your team's current financial situation and forecast the future by viewing the "Finances" page and the "Financial Ledger" from within that page.

Teams will be able to move up when they have attained an acceptable level of success and experience at their current level. There is also a monetary buy-in to move up levels. This buy-in increases with the level.

The current prestige and money needed to advance are shown in the following table:

Move To	Prestige	Cash
National	500	$60,000
Bush	725	$350,000
Cup	1000	$1,000,000

You start with 400 Prestige. Your prestige rises only at season end and goes up by an amount calculated by:

Poles x .5, Wins x 5, Top 5 x 2.8, Top 10 x 2, Non top 10 finishes in races qualified for x .7

Only the Pole value is cumulative.

So if you finish with:

starts 33, poles 2, wins 2, top 5's 9, top 10's 18

The calculation is:

(2x.5)+(2x5)+(7x2.8)+(9x2)+(15x.7)=59.1

poles + wins + top 5 + top 10 + starts= total prestige increase

Of course the amount rounds to the nearest whole number and is added to your existing prestige. It never goes to higher than the max for your division.

You must reach the minimum level for prestige AND pay the cash fee to move up each level.

Prestige is capped at each level and you will not be scored prestige beyond the cap.

Level	Prestige Cap	Minimum Seasons To Advance
Elite	545	1
National	725	2
Bush	1000	2
Cup	Unlimited	N/A

It is normal in most instances to take a year longer than the mathmatical minimum on each level. Some owners spend many more years at a particular level due to their preference to do so.

You will receive an Inbox message at the end of each season regarding your potential to move up. To view the process, visit the "Level Advance" page from the Office drop down menu. At Elite and National it is usually from day 6 to day 8 after your last race of the season.

Make sure you renegotiate your crew contracts upon moving up and before recruiting. Your lower level crew will usually take less bonus laden contracts to stay with the team when you move up a division so you will want to take advantage of this. If you do not renegotiate with them or they refuse your offer(s) their old contract will be in force. You can do this right away when you move up and not wait for renegotiation day or the message from your investor. The sim is programmed to respond right away to these offers so you can make three or four offers in a matter of minutes.

At the beginning of recruiting (in the first day before the signing period) you can fire crew you don't wish to keep. Be sure you know what you are doing before doing this. Crew with multiple years left on their contract will result in expensive payouts as severence. Crew with short term or no term contracts will have small or non existent payouts. This can be a good way to improve your team.

If you do not finish in the top five for standings, you will still receive a discount on your next Clutch Dynasty season (discounts vary based on the how well your team performed). If you do place in the top 5, you will receive reward points good for use in our Rewards Center. Here's the breakdown:

Final Standings Position	Elite/National (Div. 4/3)	Bush/Cup (Div. 2/1)
1st	3,000	6,000
2nd	1,500	3,000
3rd	800	1,600
4th	600	1,200
5th	400	800

You'll need 2,000 Reward Points in order to make the conversion into a Clutch season. And at time of writing, the sim only recognizes human teams (not sim teams) when determining placement for award point distribution.

You can access the Rewards Center From the WIS drop down menu on the main WhatIfSports site.

It's also important to note that the Reward Points payout decreases the longer you remain in the lower divisions. Here's the breakdown:

Level	100%	75%	50%	25%
Elite	<= 4	5 or 6	7 or 8	8+
National	<= 5	6 or 7	8 or 9	10+
Bush	<= 6	7 or 8	9 or 10	11+

To add seasons to your team you simply go to your office (the screen you default to on entry to your team). The last line of the 'Team Information' box says 'Seasons Remaining' and then a number. The number is the number of seasons remaining. A '1' means you have a season after the current one. After the number there is a link with 'add seasons' in parenthesis. Click on 'add seasons' and it will take you to the purchase seasons page. If you want to add a season from rewards points, go to the rewards center first and then add seasons. The credit season will show on the purchase seasons page.

Prevailing wisdom among seasoned owners is that you concentrate your upgrade buying power on your garage for the first season or two. The background reasons are that Elite level crew are normally not kept for many season and that crew improvements are rather small.

Garage upgrades improve your Crew Chief's abilities and speed in building, overhauling and repairing. While it is very rare in Elite to have a Crew Chief who can work faster than the base time (3 day repair, 4 day overhaul, 5 day build) each part enhances the garage and stays with the team when you change crew. Each part also enhances the ability of the crew to build quality parts. You will likely see these slight rises in part quality (don't confuse it with the random fluctuation of part quality that also exists) quickly and the increases are cumulative and stay with the team after the departure of the crew member.

Crew upgrades generally improve individual ratings for the crew member (a driver or crew chief) that the upgrade was purchased for. Commonly these improvements show at day change (8:15 pm eastern) over the course of the first two days after the purchase and raise the category one to three points. Some upgrades effect move than one category and some others still only improve ratings throughout the season. Crew members lower in age and higher in work ethic generally gain more. The inverse is also true (crew members high in age or low in work ethic may experience a lesser of non-existant gain).

Regardless of which upgrades you choose to buy it is most prudent to watch the price fluctuations of the upgrades you choose to buy and buy them at their lowest levels (the upgrade selection also varies each day with not every part being available every day).

We hope this guide helps you understand the exciting world of Clutch Racing Dynasty and plays a role in taking you from Elite to Cup status!

We also want to thank one of our users, kettlevalley, for helping us put the majority of this guide together.