What happened to the game Aztec Games was going to make?

[f1fan17]

What happened to the game Aztec Games was going to make?  It was called grand prix race manager or something I think.  

[designerx]

Are those that guys that had a website with screenshots showing progress and everything on there for like 5/6 years and never released anything? based on or around 2006?

[jops]

It basically dwindled and died out. Stu (the head/lead dev) had a pretty high power job and couldn't dedicate enough time to it.

I was heavily involved with testing in latter years, from memory there were a few key bugs that just never seemed to be ironed out:
- Going to next season basically didn't work, cars wouldnt be ready or contracts wouldnt flow through properly, which is a pretty big barrier
- Finances took a while to sort out but were mostly sorted, was difficult to strike the balance between spending too much or making too much money
- Sponsorship needed a bit more work, would take too long to get deals sorted.

It's a shame because people dont believe it ever existed, but genuinely, it was possibly the best F1 management game I played, you just couldnt do more than a season and the bugs couldnt be ironed out.

Car development was phenomenal, it was split down to various parts, and you could decide on design philosophy - lower weight, more downforce, less drag, or ay combo of the 3. Then it would have a "concept" design with the theoretical laptime improvement, which would get refined further through testing and development. At Toyota for example, you could design 4 floors simultaneously and just push the best one into production, at Minardi, you had to go with 1 and just hope the development was smooth. Seeing your car dev throughout a season and deciding a design philosophy for next car was amazing. Always sad it never made it

[saxoross]

Yeah I was a tester towards the end so can say it 100% existed. I loved testing it and couldn't wait for the next build to come along. So much work went into that project so its a real shame it never got finished.

[sparkyplug]

Seems like some of us old GPRM guys are still about I did forum admin and sent out screenshots

The game was as Jops said very much real and it was a joy to play it really was I also never saw more than one season more features etc where added but the game never progressed past one season that was never sorted and I’m not 100% sure it ever could of been!

[jops]

As an extension to this I was recently in touch with Rod, supposedly one of the issues was it was all in VB6, which towards the back end was already becoming old and the engine basically needed re-doing