I've found that I have had to plan my seasons out. My first was all about getting experience and the occasional points if the opportunity presented itself, and attracting the attention of a bigger, more competitive team. Now that I am in the McLaren, my second season will be about developing the car. My third season will be about a title bid and finishing development, and the fourth about the constructors' title.
I won 5 races in the Renault in my first season, despite severely limiting development in order to keep the car at the back of the midfield, so I was offered contracts with Mclaren and Force India in the middle of the season, and again at the end of the season. I stopped development after Monza, so the other teams overtook us in the second half of the season, and towards the end even points finishes were becoming a struggle.
I was again offered a drive at Mclaren and Force India (and I think Toro Rosso), but chose to stay at Renault and use the points I'd saved up. I had to wait until Bahrain for the upgrades to be applied, but the points I'd saved were enough for all the third tier upgrades. Now in the development standings, Red Bull is a significant chunk ahead of Merc, who themselves are ahead of us, and we're a solid third ahead of Ferrari. My results so far in season two are third in Melbourne from 5th on the grid, fourth in Sakhir from third on the grid, and a win at Shanghai from pole. I'm definitely going for the title this season, and then I plan to move to Ferrari for next season and develop them into champions.
Shanghai was an awesome race. I took pole by 3 tenths, and got through Q2 on softs, while everyone else used super softs. I started off defending from Versteppen for the first few laps, but then his tyres must have started going off because I started pulling a gap before they started making stops. I ran my second set of softs for my second stint, while both Red Bulls and both Mercs ran another stint on super softs. I made one more stop for mediums, and ran those until the end, while the Mercs and Bulls all ran their third stint on the softs and then made a third stop for a short stint on mediums. Vettel had run the softs for a long stint in the middle, and another long stint, on mediums, 'till the end, so he'd jumped the bulls and mercs through strategy. At the end, I won by 18 seconds from Vettel, who was 10 seconds ahead of Ricciardo. Magnussen took tenth place to grab his second point of the season. He literally scored no points in my first season, despite me finishing the drivers championship in 5th lol.