F1 Manager 2024 Review

Formula 1 is a sport of fine margins, precision and analysing lots and lots of data. Equally, to have a successful team, you need drivers, engineers and pit crew who are capable of taking your four-wheeled rocket to success. Managing a team, then, isn’t an easy task but big fans of the sport like myself relish the challenge. I last reviewed F1 Manager back in 2022 and I was very interested to see what two years’ worth of development has brought to the table. Whilst I expected many things to be the same, I was equally underwhelmed by what I experienced… but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The biggest addition to the series since I last played, and new for this year’s incarnation, is your ability to create your own team. For the moment, this may be the only way for Andretti to try out the sport, it’s also your chance to start a team from scratch and forge a new power in the F1 paddock. It’s not an easy path and to start with there’s only a handful of drivers that you can choose to drive your team to glory or, more likely to begin with, mid-pack mediocrity. It was good fun figuring out my team’s livery and I employed the assistance of my eldest daughter who has a clear talent as there’s no way you’d miss Abstergo Racing’s cars on the track.

As well as deciding on your team’s colours you also get to choose, for a select set of drivers, who’s going to pilot your cars. I settled on Ricciardo and Bottas because if nothing else, my imaginary social media profile would be huge. You also get the chance to set your team’s origin story. Each of them define your starting balance, the rating of your team, who manufactures your engines and the quality of your facilities and team. Depending on your choice, your pool of drivers and staff will be better or worse. Plump for the ‘Industry Giant’ and you could pair Verstappen and Hamilton together. Alternatively, if you go for ‘Hungry Newcomer’ you have a selection of back of the grid drivers, reserve drivers and affiliated racers.

I went with the option to create your own story. Here, you get to set your own parameters but the pool of drivers remains the same though you do need to keep in mind your budget cap. Once you’ve settled in, the task remains the same as if you had taken over an existing team. Upgrade, or maintain, your facilities, perform well at the races, keep sponsors happy and hopefully you’ll guide your team to success. Sponsorship management is also a new addition but mostly seemed to consist of forcing your team to do events to keep them happy and picking an obtainable challenge each race weekend. It didn’t seem to add much to the gameplay but did add another element to the constant challenges facing team principals.

One thing that can really affect your team’s performance is their happiness and looking after that is another new aspect in F1 Manager 24. Some of the variables are out of your control to a degree such as their own performance, but by developing and delivering a top quality car with facilities to match can go a long way to keeping your team happy. Part of that is dealing with issues, and now and again you’ll get items appearing in your inbox asking for your input. It's here that you must decide to intervene or trust that it’ll sort itself out if you leave it be. Your choice can have either a positive or negative effect, though thankfully I didn’t have to deal with any Red Bull-style power struggles during my playthrough.

The thing is, though, that even with the new additions it is still essentially the same game. It looks the same, the engine is the same and how you manage races hasn’t changed a bit. This means that it still has the same issues I noted back in F1 Manager 22. The AI is still a bit wonky with drivers losing seconds when being lapped or if you ask your drivers to swap places as well as overtakes still look, visually at least, a bit odd. There’s still no realistic damage model with cars rarely ever showing adequate signs of damage after an incident. The engine still seems to show signs of rubber-banding with cars seemingly able to make up time from nowhere.

There’s also still no option to be a team principal at an F3 or F2 team and earn a promotion or a position in the main game as part of a career. This lack of career progression really stifles F1 Manager 24’s longevity for me. Whilst the race replay feature, where you can try to change the outcome of recent real-life races is fun, once you’ve won everything or brought someone like Williams back from the brink what else is there to do? There needs to be something more added to the series in future releases to remain worth the price of admission.

For all its faults, however, F1 Manager 24 is still a fun game to play and can scratch that management itch for F1 fans who dream of taking their favourite team to unparalleled success. It still looks pretty good too, though I still really dislike its use of motion blur. There’s much more potential in this franchise, however, than the series has so far shown. I’m hoping that, like the new engine regulations coming in next season, something big is in the offing to really shake things up.