F1 2011
He thought of KERS.
Mechanical breakdowns will now feature in the game, in one of many concessions that Codemasters Birmingham has made to the vocal hardcore. Keeping the game the right side of frustrating is a tough balance to strike, especially if, 77 into 78 laps of Monaco, your engine's little end decides to turn into a big end.
It's a balance that the studio claims to have struck; damage will come about primarily through the driver's own actions, while the weaknesses of the car at their disposal will play a small but significant factor (meaning that, for what it's worth, Red Bull's KERS will prove unreliable, while the HRT will disintegrate if someone frowns in its direction).
With technical gremlins an ever-present threat, an added layer of strategy will be lent to the racing. Considerate driving is as essential as nailing braking points, and it promises to add an occasional edge; find yourself languishing some way off your opponent and your engineer could come on to the radio, telling you of the car in front's technical woes and igniting the kind of hunter-and-hunted situation that made the recent race at Monaco so thrilling.
Until, that is, the safety car intervened. It's another feature that the die-hards have been screaming for, and it's one that Codemasters Birmingham is paying serious attention to. There's the challenge of making driving at quarter throttle exciting for the less dedicated players, but it's one that the studio is searching for a solution to. It's likely that its answer will be revealed later in the year.
There are some more fundamental tweaks on the track, some a natural evolution from last year's game and other dictated by this year's radical new rule set. Handling has now been tamed, and the darting cars of F1 2010 have been tempered. "Last year, I always joked internally that it felt like Tron," explains Hood. "I felt that it was too quick."
"The problem we have is that it's F1 - the cars are so fast and you're braking such short distances it doesn't help the player when they're trying to learn the circuit or the cars. What we're trying to do this year is make the cars a little more involving. Instead of last year where you had to learn how we wanted you to drive the cars, F1 2011 is about applying your knowledge of the real world." Cars will be more predictable and more responsive, in part thanks to more attention being payed to the workings of an F1 machine. The rigid geometry of an F1 car's suspension will now be replicated, and a greater sense of impact will be communicated when running a wheel over a track border. F1 2011's cars will be stiffer, and there'll be a bigger emphasis on their mechanical grip.
A large part of that comes from the tyres, and F1 2011 will be working hard to simulate the behaviour of the Pirellis that have so successfully mixed up this year's racing. Tyre degradation will now play a much bigger part, and over the course of a weekend you'll learn to covet those sets of softs, and learn when's the best time to extract the two laps of perfect grip that they offer.
When they expire, they'll have a tendency to do so dramatically. Take them past their best and their performance will fall off a cliff - the very same cliff that Sebastien Vettel was teetering on the edge of at Monaco.
It's shaping up to be another vintage year, then, both for Codemasters' game and the sport itself. If F1 2010 was the exploration lap then F1 2011 could be the kind of blistering outing that firms up the series' position among the very best of the racing genre. Last year it came up against Gran Turismo 5 and, against expectations, held its ground, the two sitting neck and neck on Metacritic. This year it's got fresh competition in the shape of Forza Motorsport 4.
With Codemasters Birmingham now established and last year's game providing a strong foundation, can it contend with the top tier once again? "I'd love to think so," says Hood. "I love the Forza series, but I do wonder whether they're being pushed into a Kinect sphere which could take away from their main game. I'm not sure about new features, and they seem to be a bit quiet on that. We've always said we should have Forza or Gran Turismo as well as F1, but currently I think we can beat them."