Nexus Racing

Nexus Racing are a Nimban WGPO racing team, wholly owned by the government of the Nexus Wardship of Former Citizens of the Nimbus System and based at Crossbay Circuit on the edge of Nimbus Bay. A recent entrant into World Grand Prix motorsport, they have met with success in both Drivers’ and Constructors’ Championships of the WGPC and are typically competitive with the fastest cars in the field, though Ryker Lane’s world drivers’ title in their inaugural WGPC 15 campaign remains their only outright victory in either. They also operate a WGP2 team, which primarily serves to prepare junior drivers and test and refine upgrades for the WGPC. Nexus Racing are partnered closely with Nimban performance tyre manufacturer In Motion but conduct the majority of their operations in-house and have few other commercial partnerships.

Origins
Nexus Racing was founded as Project Overdrive, an attempt by the Nexus Force Assembly to rework the Dragoon medium combat vehicle after the events of the Krypton Novan campaign. The project’s major purpose, to improve the speed and traction of the Dragoon, was intended to increase the Venture League’s overall ground mobility, allowing the Nexus Force to perform rapid strikes and prepare battlefields and ambushes more easily. The project, whose personnel were assembled by then-Engineer Lieutenant Timothy Guard, met with only limited success for their year of operation.

By this point, the Ministerial Offices of Science and Technology and Sport had become interested in a joint project to further establish the tradition of Nimban racing after the local success of Cityprix and to globally promote Nimban technology. After discussions with the Ministerial Office for War, Project Overdrive was reassigned to constructing an Imagination-powered car with the purpose of entering the fifteenth World Grand Prix Championships in three years’ time and rebranded as Nexus Racing, though the project retained their former Assembly testing facilities to ease the transition.

This new focus proved successful in reinvigorating the project; the lax design constraints of the World Grand Prix regulations combined with the freedom that the extensive development period allowed were well-suited to creating a supportive atmosphere and culture of blue-sky thinking within the team. Notably, Head Designer Gertrude Thompson successfully spearheaded improvements to Imagination convertor design that made possible construction of the dual-convertor Paragon Warp array. Nexus Racing also gained the aid of Ryker Lane alongside his race engineer Martin Veri in their second year for the purpose of testing the car, with the intention that the Cityprix Drivers’ Champion would drive for the team in their first year of racing.

WGPC 15
Entering WGPC 15 on schedule, Nexus Racing were one of the most anticipated teams debuting that season. They quickly secured Marika Pedanovic for their second seat, bringing with her a partnership with Tygar Tyres, and she won their inaugural race at the Grand Prix of the Imperial Commonwealth. Though contact with Maria Cattaneo placed Ryker Lane twelfth in the same race, he would finish every race other than the Grand Prix of AF-DR in the points, taking six podiums from twelve races in the process. Despite not winning a race, Lane’s consistency and Nexus Racing’s own ability to outpace the field for upgrades put him in position to capitalise on Terho Talvela crashing out at the Audioslavian Grand Prix and win the Drivers’ Championship. Nexus Racing would place second in the Constructors’ Championship, behind fellow newcomers Red Lion Racing.

WGPC 16
Alongside the departure of Tygar Tyres and the formation of a new partnership with In Motion and Brutus Tyres, Nexus Racing would be formally detached from the military and relocated to the newly-built Crossbay Circuit for WGPC 16, while Marika Pedanovic was replaced by Jean Mercer-Daly after a promising three race wins at the end of the prior season. Though not as consistent as Lane, Mercer-Daly would win another two races and challenge for the Drivers’ Championship, taking second place with ninety-eight points. Ryker Lane would only earn forty-six points, hampered by a faltering mental state and poor reliability that the team faced in the first half of the season. Most desperately, however, Jean Mercer-Daly suffered a high-speed crash unshielded by his car’s systems at the Audioslavian Grand Prix after his car’s electronics were hacked, crushing one side of his body and forcing the replacement of his arm and leg with prosthetics.

WGPC 17
Jean Mercer-Daly, his left arm and leg now replaced by advanced Esmerelian prosthetics, and Ryker Lane were retained by the team for WGPC 17. Though a more consolidated, less optimised car made for a mediocre first half of the season, improvements in the second half and a renewed sense of optimism and determination saw Ryker Lane achieve his first race victory at the Abovian Grand Prix. Ryker Lane and Jean Mercer-Daly would secure fourth and fifth place in the Drivers’ Championship and Nexus Racing second place in the Constructors’ Championship in a season otherwise dominated by the TRÆ alliance.

WGPC 18
Continuing the partnership of Ryker Lane and Jean Mercer-Daly into WGPC 18 under the new leadership of former Head Designer Gertrude Thompson after Timothy Guard’s departure, Nexus Racing entered the WGPC having resolved the UHSGV-4’s major flaws, allowing them to properly take advantage of its eight-wheeled design. Each driver began strongly with a win each in the series’ first three races, including a victory at home for Ryker. Ryker would win again at the sprint race in Aboveland; despite this early success, however, the more technically dominant circuits of the second half of the season would see the team unable to hold on to an early title challenge and eventually fall to fifth in the Constructors’ Championship.

WGP2 I
Nexus Racing entered the first season of WGP2 both as a testing ground for the next year’s car and as a junior programme to allow drivers to adjust to the unique driving characteristics of Nexus Racing’s vehicles. Taking on Rebecca Darlington, Jean Mercer-Daly’s former teammate, and Lukar Urdaneta, the team’s only significant though nonetheless morale-boosting result was a first place for Darlington at the newly inaugurated Crossbay Circuit.

WGP2 II
Lukar Urdaneta would leave the team for WGP2 II, replaced by Abovian prodigy Janne Laukkanen, who would win the first race of the season in Savojarna. While the team secured fifth place in the standings overall and Laukkanen would take third place in the season, it is arguable that Nexus Racing missed an opportunity to properly compete for prominence in the category, sacrificing it for long term gain in the WGPC 17 season.

WGP2 III
Nexus Racing debuted a new four-wheeled car for WGP2 III, intending to test the vehicle before entering it for WGPC 18. An early second place with Janne Laukkanen at the air.NK WGP2 Race of Nekoni proved a false dawn as he and Drake Stevenson, recruited from NSSCRA after Rebecca Darlington left the team, struggled with reliability and pace for much of the season in large part because the use of the CS-TCCS’s automation to control tyre camber gave the UHSGV-4 prototype inconsistent grip, significantly reducing its driveability. Nonetheless, the two showed signs of improvement towards the season’s end, culminating in a double points finish at the team’s home race at Crossbay Circuit.

WGP2 IV
With Drake Stevenson returning to his native NSSCRA, Nexus Racing instead chose Haru Jukkenna, recent victor in the NRDAS, to pilot the second of the UHSGV-5 prototypes, now augmented with the developments from the same series. The Chase Cutters would claim a quarter of the victories on offer that season (including both the sprint and feature race at Crossbay), Janne Laukkanen proving his talent beyond doubt by taking four of them and spearheading a charge to second in the Drivers’ Championship and third in the Constructors’.

Driver Academy
Nexus Racing’s driver academy was formed in response to growing concern that their WGP2 programme was unsuited as an unaugmented driver training programme, due to the inherent unreliability of the cars fielded there in combination with being thrust into open competition in cars with driving characteristics wildly different from what they had driven in their careers up to this point. Now, drivers are instead brought under Nexus Racing’s wing and given access to their facilities, training, funding and the option for a placement into WGPi, the Wardship’s WGP3 competition, with the intention of preparing them for high-level WGP racing at a steadier pace.

To offer this new generation of drivers practice with Chase Cutters before potentially offering them a WGP2 seat in one, Nexus Racing established the Nexus Racing Driver Academy Series immediately before WGP2 IV. An in-house affair lasting only a few weeks, hosted entirely at Crossbay Circuit, fielding underpowered copies of the UHSGV of the prior WGPC season to ensure a reasonable level of reliability and the core of Nexus Racing’s driver academy programme, the series works to train drivers in UHSGV characteristics, racecraft, car setup and development, as well as to acclimatise them to the team’s approach to WGP racing. The series runs semi-simulated development, asking drivers to choose different team personnel to work with whose upgrades will then be fitted to their cars, which not only suits the above goals but also gives the series the effect of an ‘engineering jam’, resulting in the creation of multiple new subsystems that can be fed into Nexus Racing’s innovation cycle for optimisation and refinement.

Though still in its infancy, Nexus Racing’s driver academy has shown promise thus far. The admittance of Haru Jukkenna to WGP2 after an excellent performance in the NRDAS resulted in flashes of genuine pace, while the more stable UHSGV-5 prototype, free from the total instability of initial testing, proved able to challenge for the drivers’ title in the hands of Janne Laukkanen.

Characteristics and Philosophy
Nexus Racing have always been significantly smaller as a team than most of their competitors on the WGPC grid while still receiving stable funding from the government equivalent to or greater than those competitors. This, alongside their cultural origins as Nimban ex-military personnel, has afforded them a radical approach to grand prix racing; unable to compete with other teams’ ability to optimise every aspect of a car, they instead focus on areas of ‘blue sky’ development shunned by other teams for their complexity, unreliability or outlandishness. Their cars, beyond being powered directly by Imagination convertors instead of the petroleum fuels used by many WGP cars or an Imagination-infused liquid fuel, have adopted underfloor air fan extraction, whole-bodywork adaptive aerodynamics, substantial electronic driver aids and, most recently, increased numbers of frustral wheels and a longitudinal steering wheel control system to change their camber mid-race. This philosophy of ‘victory by overwhelming innovation’ creates cars with unique driving characteristics, sometimes worsened reliability and increased weight but frequently grants substantial performance advantages over the rest of the field, especially in terms of power.

Nexus Racing’s internal culture has been noted as exceptional among WGP teams and contributes to especially powerful synergy between its team members. The freedom of ideas, mutual supportiveness and ambition common in Nimban culture are given increased space by an unflinching communal self-belief and willingness to seek out long-term advantages, which enhances those former qualities. This culture supports the philosophy of car development described above and helps the team to endure the intense competition involved in WGP racing.

Beyond WGPC 15, the team have tended to improve relative to the rest of the field across a WGPC season, both by addition of new systems to their cars and consolidation of the flaws in previous ones. Less productively, Nexus Racing’s approach has also placed mental strain on drivers and other team members unable to adapt sufficiently to potentially erratic performances, which has been especially problematic for the WGP2 programme; the team are in the process of integrating psychologists and therapists into their organisational structure in an effort to combat this.