Entering Formula 1 as the 11th team might be a well-publicized difficulty right now, but thanks to Frontier Developments’ F1 Manager series, it’s less of an impossibility — at least in the virtual world.
That’s because along with the typical refinements you’d expect from an annual release, the headline addition to F1 Manager 24 is the ability to create your own team and run it against the 10 real world competitors — which you can still opt to play with should you wish.
Players of the first two installments of the F1 Manager franchise will immediately feel at home with the latest game. Its overall look and feel are familiar, but under the skin there’s been changes, with new dynamic team AI and mechanical failures enhancing unpredictability in races, and more than 70,000 lines of real-world broadcast audio in an expanded radio dialogue system. A new “Mentality” system places further emphasis on driver and staff morale, too — you’re very much running the team in every aspect, unlike the comparatively surface-level experience EA’s F1 series gives you with “My Team.”
Speaking of which, this is the first version of F1 Manager that allows you to create your own team from scratch. Unlike Andretti in the real world, you don’t get a run-up of years to build and prepare, but it’s a game — you want to go racing.
There’s plenty of freedom when it comes to creating a team — and we don’t just mean by forgoing the FIA and FOM processes and paperwork. You can choose from a list of preselected back-stories, such as coming from a big conglomerate or such like, then opt for a starting budget of anywhere between $2-$40 million and individual facility and car performance ratings of between 1-5.
There’s also a vast selection of driver choices; the default is Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen, and while that’s an appealing prospect, for our play-through we went for the somewhat realistic option of choosing the soon-to-be free agent Esteban Ocon and Daniel Ricciardo, whose future is the subject of much speculation in the real world. You can also scout and poach affiliate drivers to keep an eye on with a view to promoting later down the line once you get going — we went for the much-talked-about Kimi Andrea Antonelli to see what all the fuss is about, and the highly-rated British youngster Abbi Pulling.
Senior staff and race engineers are next on your shopping list (we went down the experienced route of Williams’ Pat Fry as technical chief, McLaren’s Peter Prodromou as head of aero, and Mercedes’ Ron Meadows as sporting director). For the race engineers, again, any from F1’s real world pool are available — our choices were Ocon and Ricciardo’s actual current engineers Josh Peckett and Pierre Hamelin.
Aside from a rather detailed livery and suit editor (which strangely includes a helmet design editor, with drivers’ actual helmets absent for your choices), and the need to acquire sponsors and then manage their expectations — another new feature for this year — the “Create a Team” experience remains familiar to players of F1 Manager 22 and 23: you manage races from the pit wall, and balance the teams’ finances and wind tunnel and CFD time against real world restrictions, all while keeping your staff happy, your pit crew trained — with care needing to be taken to not over-train and thus burn them out needing to be taken.
It’s not quite a pick-up-and-play experience, it’s one you have to play to do it right and enjoy to its fullest. But it is accessible. Through smart spending — developing facilities early on and carefully spending what money was left to steadily develop the car — we were able to get “Team RACER” on the podium at the Chinese Grand Prix. But then this review needed to be written, so whether or not our very own F1 team joins the winners club remains to be seen…
Create A Team is a welcome addition to the F1 Manager franchise, and comes a year after we asked the developers why it wasn’t already in the game. The reason given at the time was that the team behind the game wanted to focus on “building up an authentic experience of managing a real Formula 1 team that exists,” That’s not something that’s been forgotten, with the ability to take charge of one of F1’s existing 10 teams remaining.
Or if you want to balance the real with the imaginary, while playing in more bite-size chunks, you can again play the Race Replay scenario mode to thrust yourself into actual events from the ongoing season to see if you can do it better your way. A selection of Exclusive scenarios are also available in the Deluxe Edition.
Despite a few tweaks and the introduction of new camera angles, the game does slightly lack the visual appeal of the driving-centric EA F1 series, but that’s immaterial. The experience is one that provides something different to your typical racing game, and provides bucket loads of satisfaction if you get it right.
F1 Manager 24 is available now on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S|X, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and for the first time, Nintendo Switch for $34.99/£29.99/€34.99 or $44.99/£39.99/€44.99 for the Deluxe Edition, which adds the aforementioned additional fictional race scenarios, plus five additional classically-inspired Create A Team livery options.