We’ll have to get the obvious joke out of the way first.
For the third edition of their official Formula 1 management game, Frontier is giving players the opportunity to create their own team and join the championship to compete against the existing 10.
The Andrettis will undoubtedly tell you that this is an extremely unrealistic addition to the game.
It’s not the only new feature F1 Manager 24 offers to those who want to try their hand at becoming a virtual team boss. There is a new ‘mentality system’ that governs the behavior of all staff, including drivers. Junior driver programs are now fully modeled and you can register up to 10 drivers for your team as ‘affiliates’.
During the races you can expect more technical challenges, which you can help your drivers respond to. Helpfully, there’s a new ‘helicam’ view to help you keep an eye on your cars.
But the ‘Create a team’ feature is the most important addition. RaceFans got the chance to play an early preview build of F1 Manager 24 to test these and other changes.
When you assemble your team for the first time, you will be presented with six options. One is essentially a blank slate to start from scratch, while others give you ready-made backstories, such as a wealthy entrepreneur or luxury car manufacturer looking for success in F1.
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The livery, overalls and logo editors are immediately familiar from other games, such as the official Formula 1 racing title, which has offered a similar ‘MyTeam’ mode since the 2020 edition. If the RaceFans colored design in these screenshots looks rough, consider it a reflection of my lack of time and design skills.
There are plenty of options to create endless styles that will make your car stand out from the rest of the field. Although, as we have unfortunately come to expect, nothing is as liberating as the ability to import your own skins created in third-party software such as Photoshop.
The hiring and firing options are largely familiar from previous games. Perhaps because I was too aware of FOM’s requirement that all newcomers show that they are “competitive”, I poached Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton from their teams, leaving Red Bull and Mercedes to continue plowing with Richard Verschoor and respectively Roman Stanek. It’s going to be a tough day for the RaceFans servers if that double whammy on the driver market ever happens.
The sponsorship management system is more nuanced than in previous games. The bigger the deal, the more time you will have to spend taking care of your customers, which will take up your staff’s time.
It seemed strange to me that the value of your sponsorship deals seemingly has nothing to do with the size and position of the logos. My sponsors were content to pay the same for huge, flashy logos as they were for small logos that were invisible in my car’s color scheme. In the real world, Hewlett-Packard would have paid a lot of money to add their corporate blue to Ferrari’s red.
Not missing a single opportunity to give myself every advantage available, Team RaceFans took a one-three debut victory. Verstappen only failed to achieve a perfect result because he suffered a flat tire during his lap before the tire change.
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Both drivers suffered a 4kg fuel shortage after their final pit stops, making the final stint a nail-biter. Even after shamelessly dealing myself the strongest possible hand in setting up my team, it wasn’t a completely easy win, so the difficulty looks good.
For the second part of our test drive with F1 Manager 24, the development team pits us against a racing scenario where we manage the Red Bull drivers stuck in the midfield in Melbourne with various technical issues developing on the power units and gearboxes in their RB20s.
As their race engineers identify the developing problems, I have to push the drivers to take more conservative approaches to keeping their cars running. Moving Vertappen to a one-stop strategy to get him in the open air is working well and a podium finish is on the horizon.
But if Perez falls out of the points, I mindlessly tell him to go all out anyway, reasoning that a zero score is a zero score regardless of whether the car breaks down. His subsequent retirement leads to a Safety Car period that harpoons Verstappen’s strategy, leaving him ninth. If only I had paid attention to McLaren’s warning to Oscar Piastri not to trigger a Safety Car while his teammate was on his way to victory in Miami last weekend.
Create a Team promises a level of customization that many players have been looking forward to since the series launched two years ago. Frontier looks to reward buyers of the upcoming F1 Manager game with a satisfyingly detailed implementation of the concept, as well as a series of updates that create a more realistic facsimile of the F1 racing universe.
Since this is an early development version of the game, not all of the new features behave as intended in the finished version, including some notifications about car malfunctions during the race, which made it a little tricky to stay on top of. . But as always, we’ll wait until we play the final release version of the game before passing judgment.
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F1 Manager 24 trailer
F1 Manager 24 will be released on July 23 for PC and major consoles.
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