F1 Manager 2024 review – managing expectations

Frontier’s Formula One management sim offers a major improvement on last year’s game but how realistic is it really?

If you’re a Formula One fan but don’t consider yourself a skilled virtual race driver, you may not be aware of the alternative gameplay experience that F1 Manager offers. As franchises go, it’s relatively new and F1 Manager 2024 is just the third annual iteration. Like EA’s F1 24, it bears the official licence of motorsports’ most prestigious formula, but instead of putting you behind the wheel of an F1 car it casts you as the principal of one of its teams: a worthy challenge for lovers of management sims, given Formula One’s famous complexity.

It’s impossible to assess F1 Manager 2024 without also addressing the existence of F1 24: the latter is so sprawling and complex that you could already play it as a management sim, if you so wished. However, that would require a vast amount of trawling through menus and would leave you with the feeling that you were defeating the object of the game. F1 Manager 2024 is a very different kind of game to F1 24: it’s focused and easy to understand, and much, much cheaper.

This year’s version of F1 Manager adds a whole new game mode, the inclusion of which telegraphs the fact that it’s still a new franchise. Called Create-A-Team, it lets you enter Formula One from scratch, as the proprietor of a fictional eleventh team on the grid, which you can name and whose logo and livery you can design. It’s the sort of feature you would’ve expected as standard but it’s only now that it’s being added.

However, Create-A-Team has a way to go yet, as it fudges the issue of starting a new team from scratch. Instead of giving you a preparation period in which to design your car, and perhaps cherry pick components from the previous year’s car of an affiliated team (as the Haas team effectively did with Ferrari, when it entered Formula One in 2016), it plunges you straight into this year’s season with a pre-designed car. So the whole exercise feels rather too similar to simply opting to take charge of one the real-life teams that perennially struggles at the back of the grid.

Sure, there’s a great deal of satisfaction to be had from scoring your first World Championship point, and developing upgrades that elevate you from the back of the grid to the midfield, but that’s the same satisfaction that you would get from taking the helm of, say, Sauber or Williams. It would have been nice to see more points of difference between the gameplay of Create-A-Team and the main mode, which invites you to take charge of one of the real-life teams.

When you do that (and most people will surely run parallel games involving one real team and one self-created one) there’s plenty of fun to be had, within the context of what is actually happening in the real-life Formula One World Championship right now. For example, we opted to take charge of McLaren, to see if we could – as has happened over the course of this season – turn them from a promising base into realistic contenders, to topple Red Bull from their position of dominance.

Which is exactly what we were able to do. F1 Manager 2024 throws much of what constitutes modern Formula One at you, forcing you to juggle a number of factors including poaching and improving staff (if, for example, you overtrain your pit crew, sheer exhaustion will lead to them making mistakes in races); drilling down deep into the perks you offer potential sponsors (which can also interfere with your staff, while they pursue their core jobs); and, of course, choosing which parts of your car to develop in order to address weaknesses and build on strengths – all while keeping an eye on the sport’s cost cap.

Staff morale is a new and much-needed mechanic that developer Frontier has added to the game, as you also have to nurture affiliate drivers from lesser formulae, putting them in your car in practice sessions to ensure they are ready to step in if injury or illness strikes.

But the fun really starts when you enter each race weekend. Obviously, given that F1 Manager 2024 is a management sim, you’re not actually doing the driving yourself, but you can instruct your drivers to operate in specific ways during different stages of sessions or races: preserving new tyres at the start of a stint, using all of their ERS electric power boost to effect overtakes, or driving super-defensively in a bid to keep faster cars behind.

Perhaps the most fun aspect of F1 Manager 2024’s gameplay, however, comes in the practice sessions before each race, in which you send out your drivers on different tyres to glean information about car setup and then, via what amounts to a mini-game, adjust parameters such as wing angle and anti-roll, toe-in, and camber settings to achieve the perfect setup.

In the races, you swiftly discover the importance of tyre strategies, and often experience the thrill of having to adjust your approach on the fly when, say, a safety car comes out. F1 Manager 2024 is the first game in the franchise to include mechanical failures (manufacturing spare parts when you’re away from the track is a must), which adds another element of authenticity.

But we found that in the actual races, far fewer crashes and offs occurred than they do in real-life, and widespread track limit violations, leading to time penalties, were absent whereas in real-life, they can dominate racing at certain circuits. Although, admittedly, there are plenty of Formula One fans who would be only too happy to see the abolishment of such penalties.

Guiding your drivers to success, or otherwise, is great fun, helped by another new feature: a bird’s-eye view of the track, which you can combine with speeding up time so that the race passes up to 16 times faster than real-life (although any incidents which require your attention will drop you back to real-time – you can even pause races while you ponder team management dilemmas).

There’s also a Race Replay option, which lets you rewrite history by taking control of specific teams during replays of real-life races. This offers a great means of jumping into particular challenges when you fancy a quick blast on the game.

However, there are provisos, mainly in terms of polish and detail, which become particularly noticeable if you have played one of EA Sports’s F1 games. Such comparisons are a tad unfair, since F1 24 costs at least twice as much as F1 Manager 24, but can’t be unseen or unheard.

For example, F1 Manager 2024 includes David Croft and Karun Chandhok from Sky’s commentary team, but they are only used to introduce races in a very generic and bland manner. During the races, you do get plenty of radio communication from the drivers, whose real-life voices, commendably, have been recorded. But the build-up and post-race periods lack the intensity of the real thing.

Plus, our review copy threw up a few visual glitches, including ghost tyres that remined in the pit after tyre-changes, and the odd crash in which cars sailed undamaged through the barriers. Hopefully, those will have been addressed by the time the game launches.

Overall, F1 Manager 2024 is great fun to play, offering a solid facsimile of the mad, complex, and overblown circus that constitutes modern Formula One. It tests your skills as a team manager and strategist, but it also leaves you with the nagging feeling that it could be better.

Formula One fan are detail obsessives and while this gets the fundamentals right it doesn’t feel as startlingly realistic as F1 24. To its credit, F1 Manager 2024 is a huge improvement on the previous instalment, but it’s still got a way to go before it becomes the perfect management simulator.

Formats: Xbox Series X/S (reviewed), Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and PC
Price: £29.99
Publisher: Frontier Developments
Developer: Frontier Developments
Release Date: 23rd July 2024
Age Rating: 3

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