Pre-Season Tests, Red Flag and Pit Lane Starts

Definitely! I suggested a few practice programms for Pre-Season

For example,

• a lap on maximum fuel so 110kg
• high tyre wear runs - what you can manage with nearly worn out tires
• minimum engine wear - no ERS deployment suggested and very early upshifts and no kerbs taken
• maximum and minimum downforce setup runs - only changing the front and rear downforce settings so your general setup can be adjusted accordingly to this.

All of them could just be rewarded so the faster you go the more resource points you get, 5 levels for each programm getting you 300 or 500 R&D points maximum depending on the whole balance of R&D points per upgrade..

Additionally a "car internals" durability stat would help in the game, just like Red Bull and Alpine struggled with their having everything internally correct with fuel flow, hydraulics etc. this would be the overall chance for a mechanical failure (not necessarily race ending) that you have to do the R&D for every new season and you can gather R&D points especially during pre season test for this, but what if you havent spend anything on it during the winter break and have such poor reliability that you can barely run any programs and barely have enough to get this durability up.. Would spice things up like for a big regulation change a team could go heavily for reliability but only medium pace but because a faster car breaks down a lot they end up higher in the championship..

All 3 you mentioned are definitely needed in the game.