Pitwall
A Football Manager-style game for Formula 1. You run your team from the pit wall: hire the people, develop the car, do the deals, and watch the race play out lap by lap. Decide to drive strategy and set up, or delegate it to staff.
- Build a team. Hire and train engineers, mechanics and marketing staff from junior to senior, and manage a driver market where drivers age, improve and decline.
- Do the deals. Negotiate engine, tyre and fuel supply and court sponsors. Contracts don't renew themselves.
- Feel the money. Every race comes with a P&L. Crash damage hits the repair bay, and your mechanics get tired.
- Grow the factory. A 3D campus that expands as you succeed, with day and night, seasons and a test track.
- Pick your start. Go it alone as an independent, or run Pinnacle as a big team's junior outfit, on easy, normal or hard.
- Play the long game. Found a junior team for your academy drivers, build your own engine and sell it to rivals, or strike backroom deals, if you can keep the paddock from talking.
Free, runs in your browser, saves automatically. Best on a laptop or desktop.
Red Box
You're the new Chancellor, three weeks before the Budget, and you inherit the real numbers: debt over £3 trillion, gilts around 5% and a fiscal rule already being missed. Balance the books and pay down the debt without losing No 10, your party, the voters or the bond market.
- Govern from Whitehall. A 3D model of Downing Street, the Treasury, Parliament, College Green and the Bank of England. Click a building and its brief slides open.
- Write the Budget. Set taxes, spending and welfare, and choose from 36 reforms, each with an OBR-style costing and a full Red Book.
- See the reaction coming. A live scorecard shows your headroom against the fiscal rule and how No 10, backbenchers, voters and markets will respond.
- Survive the politics. The PM has to sign it off, the Chief Whip counts the rebels, and measures can fall in the Commons. Break a manifesto pledge and everyone notices.
- Live with the outturn. Reforms rarely deliver exactly what was scored. The real effect only shows up later, by which time the phone in your red box is ringing again.
Free, runs in your browser, saves automatically. Works on desktop and on a phone held upright.
The Sunday Nonsense
Each week, one story from the history of the Lloyd's market, told for people who don't work in insurance. Great fires and floods, heists and hurricanes, early space launches, terrorism and the World Cup, and what the market did when it mattered.
It started as an email to my own team. It now lives on the blog and on LinkedIn.
Latest posts (at time of making this page)
- This cow deserves her moment25 Oct
- Heresy in the Cathedral of Lloyd's18 Oct
- A different form of extremism11 Oct
- I time the washing machine4 Oct