The original Papyrus creation contained the 1967 Formula 1 season. It was not represented precisely as the publisher, Sierra, could not get the license to use the names of the Honda and Cooper team and some of the best drivers of the period. they also decided to use the Rouen track for the French GP instead of Le Mans Bugatti which was a wise decision from the point of view of playability and atmosphere.

Over the years, the GPL fan community created a lot of mods, patches and enhancements to the game. It is now possible to correct the omissions for the 1967 season and to extend the game over the whole 1965-1969 period. Not everything is perfect yet. Aside from 1967, the 1965 is covered best thanks to the outstanding 65 Mod that some even tend to call GPL2. The whole new physics model has been developed and sound, layout and carset files are all available, including a solid representation of the driver field. Many details, add-ons and information about the '67 and '65 seasons creations for GPL can be found at David Wright's site Legends of 65 and 67. There is very little I am not satisfied with in the David Wrigth's  driver.ini files but still I decided to develop my own.

The main reason is that I wanted to use a uniform approach to the whole 1965-1969 period, an approach based on data I have available, so that I can tune the driver.ini files to my satisfaction. It also enabled me to create a series of seasons that you can understand as difficulty levels in GPL. The 65 Mod is easier to drive for the beginners than the original game, so it is now the natural place where to start. The 66-69 seasons use the physics of the original game (though rumors are that the 69 physics mod is under way) but using my driver.ini files the AI field is getting faster and faster each year as it indeed did in reality. 1966 was the first year of the 3-liter formula 1 and teams used mostly quickly rebuilt cars or altogether 1.5-litre old cars of the 1965 season. In the next year the phenomenal Cosworth DFV engine has been introduced in Lotus 49 with other cars also improved and times got faster. In 1968 and 1969 aerodynamics downforce usage has been introduced together with many other technical improvements which made the cars faster each season. You can, e.g., compare the fastest lap times achieved at the tracks where the Formula 1 GP took place each year from 1965-1969:

We can see how much faster the races became those years. Compare those times to what can be achieved in GPL. The table below contains the GPL rank values (the community benchmark) for the original game and the 65 mod and current GPL record times (as of July 2004) on the same tracks as above:

You can see that the real hot laps of the '65 season oscillate around the GPL rank 65. The GPL rank values are quite close to the '66 season results while seasons '67-'69 were generally faster. The record times achieved by the best GPL drivers, however, are still better than the real '69 hot laps. This creates a good space for my intentions: to design the seasons as difficulty levels, with '65 being the easiest due to easier physics model and '66 to '69 being gradually more and more difficult due to AI's being faster. A comparison is given in the following table.

Go to the individual seasons for more details, installation notes and files to download.

My season files are intended for offline racing. I have no idea what might happen when you use them online and if that is at all possible.

WARNING!!! All my season files should be considered as beta, the main reason is that I am still a GPL newbie. I have tested them but there might be (and probably are) imperfections, omissions and errors. I'd be glad if you are willing to test them. Let me know about the glitches, please.

1965

1966

1967

1968

1969