Announced as part of the Frontier Unlocked livestream, F1 Manager 2024 is launching on Switch on July 23marking the first time the motorsports management sim series has been on the grid on Nintendo’s system.
Instead of driving cars, the F1 Manager series puts you in the shoes of a team manager who is responsible for every other aspect of the race beyond the actual driving. You can choose from one of the 10 real teams or you can also create your own constructor in a new feature for the 2024 edition, which will allow you to create all kinds of details, including (most importantly) the colors of the cars. Stripes make it go faster, you know.
Being an officially licensed game (as the thousands of ‘®’s in the PR text demonstrate), “over 70,000 official team radio lines from the real broadcast” are included, plus commentary from Sky Sports’ David Croft and Karun Chandhok. You can watch each race at normal speed if you really feel like it, but there’s also the option to speed things up to 16x speed if you prefer. We like to imagine that the commentary sounds very high as well, although we doubt that.
Most exciting for Switch-owning F1 fans is that Frontier boasts “full feature parity” with other platforms, so you get the full octane experience on Switch in terms of functionality. Here’s a preview of the official press release, plus some screenshots:
Away from the roar of the engines at team headquarters, players can plot their route to victory by determining the details of each decision. From hiring staff who work tirelessly to develop a race-winning car and identifying new upgrade packages to advance their team, to negotiating with sponsors and balancing their finances, every decision is important. F1® Manager 2024 introduces deeper management considerations with the new Mentality system, which brings the personality of every driver and employee to the fore. Signing a star-studded lineup can help their team move forward, but favoring one driver over another can leave them unhappy and susceptible to a poaching by a rival team. In the long term, fans can shape their own future by recruiting the best talent as affiliate drivers, who will continue to hone their racing skills in F2™ and F3™ before weighing up when to introduce them to their first F1 session.
The game will launch digitally on Switch and other platforms for £29.99 / $34.99 / €34.99, with a Deluxe Edition available for 10 extra of your regional currency units, which includes “five additional classically inspired patterns for use in the Create A Team mode, while an additional five fictional Race Replay scenarios provide unique challenges for one race.”
There hasn’t been a lot of new Formula 1 racing available on Switch lately, although we enjoyed the unofficial version of New Star GP earlier this year – it remains to be seen whether this licensed non-driving sim will be as exciting outside of the track. Our sister site Push Square last reviewed the 2022 version of F1 Manager and was impressed with Frontier’s series debut, so fingers crossed.
Would you like to get started on the track and give free rein to your F1 management skills? Do you like the look of the trailer? Wondering why they didn’t use a Switch OLED with a bigger screen for a bit more ‘oomph’? Let us know below if you’re a fan of the series.