F1 Manager 24: A Comprehensive Review of the Latest Racing Management Sim

F1 Manager 24 review - another step up the podium

F1 Manager 24 is the third entry in Frontier Developments' young Formula 1 racing management sim series, and once again it builds upon this promising franchise with some fantastic additions - not least of all the fantastic Create-A-Team mode that lets you add an eleventh team all of your own to the grid. On-track simulation has seen a notable step up, too. The introduction of mechanical failures means that both you and the AI drivers can suffer devastating setbacks mid-race at a moment's notice. And on top of that, driver AI - for the most part - does a very good job of replicating real-world driving styles. While some irksome bugs remain, and the game's user interface remains largely identical to last year's entry, F1 Manager 24 is a massive improvement to what was already a compelling strategy experience, and it shouldn't be missed by Formula 1 and management sim fans both. F1 Manager 24's marquee feature is undoubtedly the Create-A-Team mode. It does what it says on the tin, letting you bring an eleventh team into the 2024 F1 season and beyond. You pick your two drivers, your staff, budget, sponsors, and so on. You'll also get to define your team's look with some pretty great livery editors for your car, racing suit, and team logo. Having full freedom to create a team without any of those silly FIA restrictions of course means that you can get weird with it. My first attempt was a team specifically designed to childishly undermine the Stroll-owned Aston Martin team. I nicked their star driver, Fernando Alonso, and paired him up with F2 star Isack Hadjar. Then, at the opening race at Bahrain, Alonso was muscled off-track by Haas's Kevin Magnussen, promptly ending his race after a promising result in the third phase of qualifying. This was also my first inkling that F1 Manager 24's AI might be a little too accurate for its own good. The crash had left me feeling bitter, so I opted to start over. After all, it was only the first race of the season. So it was out with 'Aston Fartin', and in with something more mature. More believable. Something with credible backing from a respectable British powerhouse. Enter the TechRadar Greggs F1 team. With Alex Albon and Nico Hulkenberg at the helm, we became a strong midfield contender that, on occasion, got very close to challenging for podium finishes throughout the season. So what goes into creating a team? Well, there's a robust creation process that firstly sees you picking your drivers and staff including sporting director and race engineers. There's no budgetary limit here at first, but you will have to be mindful of salary in the season proper; if your staff is too expensive for what your chosen budget allows, that'll only create headaches for you down the road. One nice touch, though, is that if you pair up a driver with their real-world race engineer, they'll get a morale boost from having worked with each other in the past. On that note, I really like that you need to put some careful thought into planning out your team, especially if you've selected a small-to-medium-sized budget to start out with. But somewhere you can go buck wild in terms of creativity with no limits is in aesthetics. F1 Manager 24 has some great and easy-to-use editors for your car livery, racing suit, and team logo. While the car liveries' layouts and patterns are preset and can't be altered in and of themselves, you can fully adjust their colors, and apply gradients and different types of paint (metallic, glossy, etc.). The same goes for the logo editor, where you can piece together preset shapes and lettering to create an emblem for your team. Basically, don't be surprised if you spend upwards of an hour in this initial creation process. And fear not; you're freely able to make edits to your customizations at any time outside of a race weekend. The on-track experience in F1 Manager 24 is similar to that of the previous entries, but a number of improvements to racing heighten both immersion and enjoyment. In case you're unfamiliar with the series, you don't take direct control of your cars as you would in Codemasters' F1 24. Your drivers will instead race based on the instructions you give them. As before, your in-race dashboard is split between your two drivers. Both have menus on either side of the screen that let you adjust tire management, race pace, and your Energy Recovery System (ERS) which can help you get the measure of a rival during overtakes. Pre-race, you'll also need to adjust car setup to your drivers' liking to improve their confidence and choose pit stop strategies for the race itself. There are a lot of similarities to the previous version, then, but F1 Manager 24 still evolves the series in some rather transformative ways. For one, you'll now need to be conscious of the possibility of mechanical failures for your engine, gearbox, and ERS battery. The risk of these increases as the parts wear down from race to race, and they can range from manageable minor faults to major problems that can have you retiring a car. These mechanical faults can add some great tension to races, not to mention a lot of decision-making: do you ease up on pace to minimize risk at the cost of points? Do you retire a driver to save a crucial part for a future race? Or do you go flat out and hope to make it to the end? To even the odds, mechanical failures can also affect AI drivers, and I found I was often able to squeeze my drivers into points-scoring positions thanks to rival teams' misfortunes. One other thing to note is improvements to driver AI. I have no idea if this was intentional, but the AI of certain drivers seemed to be scarily accurate to their real-world counterparts. I've already established that in-game Kevin Magnussen seems to maintain his trademark real-world aggression. But over the course of a season, I also witnessed both Alpine drivers collide and take each other out of a race. Twice. Logan Sargeant was often prone to tire-destroying spins. And poor Sergio Perez was largely off the pace compared to his championship-winning teammate, Max Verstappen, over at Red Bull. Such quirks helped races feel very dynamic and alive, and it's very common for races to change up on a dime thanks to yellow and red flag stoppages. Lastly, I have to mention the dramatic improvements to team radio. F1 Manager 24 features hundreds of new lines pulled from official race broadcasts. Drivers and engineers will more frequently reference other drivers by name and how far ahead or behind they are. Furthermore, drivers and engineers who've worked together can call each other by name. Once again, it's a great touch that shows Frontier was willing to go the extra mile. Overall, F1 Manager 24 is a brilliant improvement on what was already a very strong foundation. Race weekends feel that much more unpredictable thanks to mechanical faults and improved driver AI. Also welcome are the new difficulty options - handy if you want an easier or tougher time of things when it comes to races, budget, and car development. I did note some race-affecting issues over the course of a season, however. For one, I occasionally ran into a bug during qualifying, where one of my drivers would stay in the garage despite my command to send them on their out lap. As such, they'd effectively be locked in the garage for the remainder of the qualifying session before they could even set a time. There is still the (thankfully very infrequent) odd bit of behavior with the simulation itself. Cars will sometimes mildly clip through each other instead of colliding - particularly at corners - and some crashes still give the impression the cars are made out of rubber; head-on collisions with a barrier often see the car comically bounce away, for example. Otherwise, outside of the largely identical user interface that made me wonder if I'd loaded up the wrong game, there is very little to fault F1 Manager 24 on. This is a great example of an annual entry providing meaningful, transformative improvements that handily makes this the best entry in the series to date. There aren't a ton of accessibility options in F1 Manager 24, but what's here is very welcome. The dedicated accessibility tab in the options menu lets you mute background noises during in-race conversations with your crew, and you can switch to mono audio should you prefer. Furthermore, there are three colorblind options (deuteranopia, protanopia, and tritanopia) for the game's user interface. For streamers, the ability to replace licensed music in the audio tab is also great to see. I played F1 Manager 24 over the course of a week, giving myself enough time to play through one full season, the interim afterwards, and some of the next season to get a handle on features like driver transfers and board expectations. I played the game on PC with a mouse and keyboard setup, specifically the Corsair K65 and Corsair M65. My rig, which includes an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060Ti, was enough to run the game at maximum graphical settings at a clean 60fps.

F1 Manager 2024 - Review

For the third year in a row, Frontier Developments gives us the opportunity to step behind the scenes of the world's fastest motorsport. But not as a driver, no, rather in the far more complex role of team manager where you are forced to learn to swim among the other sharks. It's a world where everyone eats everyone, where only the toughest survive, and where political intrigue, scheming and thievery are commonplace. How many times have you sat there, tearing your hair out, uncomprehending of the seemingly obvious decisions that need to be made? Whether it's underperforming drivers crashing and costing the team dearly, or key personnel fleeing to competitors, F1 Manager 2024 gives you the tools to handle these situations in the best possible way. Absolute control is the motto as we dive into Frontier Developments' third game in their eminent F1 Manager series. A management simulator that has gone from strength-to-strength since its debut more than two years ago, and although it was a shaky, criticised one, the team has since proven itself and this year's edition is the best yet. As expected, it's not about reinventing the wheel with F1 Manager 2024. Refining and improving is the name of the game and I personally wouldn't have expected anything else from just one year of development. That being said, I am incredibly excited that we are finally being given the opportunity to create our very own team to conquer the F1 world with. It's an incredibly welcome addition and something I'm actually shocked wasn't included from the get-go, but Frontier Developments certainly had their reasons. Names, car liveries, logos, overalls, etc, can all be customised to your own liking and of course I dressed my Guenther Steiner Racing™ crew in the most spectacularly ugly outfits I could. The settings also allow you to completely control how experienced your new racing team actually is, with clear slider menus that dictate whether your drivers are total rookies or scarred veterans, how well developed your car is initially, and how competent your staff and factory, where development takes place, are. It's worth mentioning that while it is now possible to design your own logos and liveries, those tools are relatively simple, especially when compared to similar systems in other racing games. But as we have finally been given the opportunity to influence this aspect, I won't complain too much, and hopefully these tools will be even better next year. After all, it is exciting to make your very own custom organisation, all by choosing the engine supplier, sponsors, technical staff and drivers. A definite (and very welcome) boost from the previous game in the series, which also leads us immediately into the next big, long-awaited change that F1 Manager 2024 is dishing out. Namely, being able to run your very own Driver Academy, giving you opportunities beyond what was available in F1 Manager 2022 and 2023. You can now sign young, promising drivers to join your own team, without affecting their ongoing F2 or F3 career. Instead, they are allowed to continue competing and thus improve their skills. What's also particularly pleasing here is how well Frontier Developments has leaned on the real-life models and drivers, such as Oliver Bearman being in F1 Manager 2024 and tied to Ferrari, as well as Liam Lawson having his contract with Red Bull. Not that this makes it impossible to persuade them to come over to your side, but it does make it all the more authentic. Another new and exciting aspect of F1 Manager 2024 is what's called "The Mentality System", which reflects not only the wellbeing of your drivers but also the team as a whole. Keeping this under control is just as important as most of your other jobs as a manager, and reflects everything from how well the drivers perform during the races to how well the development of the car is progressing. It's a constant balancing act where your choices more often than not have unforeseen consequences, with grumpy drivers and unmotivated staff. It's an extra layer of drama that makes the experience even more nuanced, and I found it frighteningly easy to be blindsided by the decisions of some individuals, which also meant that Guenther Steiner Racing™ more or less imploded under yours truly's reign. But the innovations and upgrades don't stop there, because just like last year, Frontier has really listened to its customers and worked hard on the points that have previously been criticised. This brings me straight to the game's AI, an aspect of F1 Manager that has previously been middling to say the least, and which I'm happy to report this time actually feels distinctly sharper and less chaotic in its decision-making. The computer is now more ruthless and does not hesitate for a second to go after your most promising talents if you do not entertain their interests. However, you can quickly find yourself losing your best technicians if you don't maintain a good helicopter view and immense control. This is something I found out the hard way with Guenther Steiner Racing™, where my underpaid stars quickly found themselves new and far more lucrative contracts. There is simply a lot to learn and what has become clear after the time I spent in F1 Manager 2024 is that the game offers a more complete, nuanced and not least challenging experience than ever before. It's a big, positive step forward for Frontier, who once again demonstrate not only their responsiveness to fans with this year's edition, but also a seemingly genuine interest and passion for the sport. F1 Manager 2024 is a joy to play, with the hours flying by at a downright terrifying pace and I can't help but tip my hat to what is so far the most complete, competent and absorbing F1 Manager experience you can get, well... without actually being employed as a manager of a real F1 team, of course. If you have even the slightest interest in F1 and find joy in tinkering with details, then by all means give this game a go.