So now that I have an actual idea of what the heck I'm doing (and because I may have beefed it with Haas by not acting fast enough on car development issues), I decided to start a new save with Aston Martin because why would I ever want to manage a competent team, y'know? Now that I can actually process all the numbers being thrown at me though, I can see that this game has another similarity to Motorsport Manager in that each team has its own clear scenario you have to work with to really get things going.
In the case of Aston, the team has a generous budget and many of the facilities are at level 2 but arguably the two most important ones, the wind tunnel and CFD, are lagging behind. On top of that the head engineer and head of aero are less useful than a drunken ferret with a screwdriver taped to its head, so unless there's some big spending on replacing personnel and upgrading at least one of those two facilities (a $10 million investment for each one), development for most of the season will be several steps behind everyone else. The big starting budget is more of a red herring than anything, it seems.
On the drivers' side, Seb is good but clearly on the decline, and I can see how the temptation many would have to make him the team's focus would cause problems after the first season. Stroll still has the potential to become a good driver, but his development needs to be laser focused in order for that to happen (pay more attention to your surroundings and learn how the brake pedal works, for starters). And as for the reserve, Hulkenberg has the double whammy of both being on the decline and being in a long term, high dollar contract that will either cost a lot early to replace him or drain the cash slowly as he sits around doing nothing.
So judging from that, it looks like the team has some fundamental flaws but there's enough money to throw at the problem to fix it, as long as it's being thrown in the right direction. Should be interesting to see how this goes, especially now that I'm not just guessing blindly at what needs to be done in the early stages. Right now my main decision is whether I should just settle for free agents in replacing the useless engineering staff, or try to cause a shakeup behind the scenes by stealing someone from another team (and likely massively overpaying for them in the act)... 🤔