I’ll admit that I generally prefer direct control in racing games, but the F1 Manager series got me just as excited about working behind the scenes. Watching risky overtaking pay off from the pit wall can be just as exciting as burning the rubber yourself, and the focus on team development and overall strategy between races can be refreshing. While F1 Manager 2024 is in many ways your typical annual update that allows for incremental improvements as opposed to massive changes, a few of these tweaks leave the latest management sim from developer Frontier more impressive than ever.
The biggest addition this year is the new ‘Create a Team’ feature, which offers a pleasantly surprising range of customization options. For example, different engine manufacturers add the necessary strategy and require you to choose your priorities between aspects such as durability or fuel consumption. Liveries and team outfits can also be detailed with a nice assortment of preset patterns, useful for the less artistic like myself. But one of the most interesting decisions is how you can set up your team’s story, which determines your overall goals. You can choose to be a small team with solid expertise but low funds, or hungry rookies determined to win at all costs, or much more. These options realistically affect your overall chances, and if you’d rather start entirely on your own terms, you can thankfully ignore them as well.
I appreciate how detailed the difficulty of F1 Manager 2024 is when creating your team without choosing an origin. Different starting budgets, car performance settings and equipment quality allow you to choose between starting near the front or rising from backmarkers to eventual champions. Of course, you can’t give every device five stars right away, which still keeps things balanced. There’s also a hard cap on upgrade points, so choosing between improved racing performance, auto parts production speed, or even an HQ helipad provides welcome depth.
In previous games, choosing a constructor was essentially a silent difficulty setting, as the team’s in-game performance matched that of their real-life counterpart. This made picking backups like Alpine more appealing when I was looking for a challenge. Securing wins is always exciting, but spending time upgrading your team to earn them yourself is infinitely better than being gift-wrapped with victory just by picking Red Bull. I’m also glad that F1 Manager 2024 is keeping it after the 2023 launch difficulty setting for race days and developing your rivals’ cars, making multiple teams instantly viable.
The ‘Your Story’ origin selection in Create A Team allows you to customize the starting quality of the team and there are no restrictions on which drivers and staff you choose. In a year where the driver line-up is almost identical to the previous season, the addition of an 11th team that can sign existing Formula 1 drivers (or even F2 and F3 rookies) shakes up that dynamic nicely. Instead of immediately picking Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc, I ended up signing Nico Hulkenberg and Yuki Tsunoda with the intention of securing their first podium finish.
F1 Manager has never felt too demanding to micromanage, and that’s especially true with the slightly improved UI this year. Once everything is set up, the new season with your own team is otherwise similar to the standard campaign, which isn’t bad. You still have to lead the overall focus of the team and instruct the engineers to create improvements for this year’s car. However, as each year brings new regulations, you are faced with a choice: Do you continue to improve this year’s car or invest in research for next season? Achieving balance remains a reward when you succeed, and the cost cap ensures you can’t just throw money away to solve every problem. And once the season is over, the board measures your performance against its expectations, and the cycle repeats into the new year, so there’s always a need to keep going.
Maintaining good employee morale remains essential, and F1 Manager 2024 uses a new “Mentality System” that emphasizes overall team morale instead of individual employees and drivers. It’s a slight improvement over the previous trust system and offers a more hands-on approach that immediately details the most pressing issues. The pit crews maintain 23 month training regimes and it’s still fun to balance improving pit times and avoiding fatigue by pushing them too hard. A rested crew is less prone to making mistakes during critical pit stops.
I was less impressed with the contract system and as a team boss you will have to interact with it a lot when negotiating contract extensions with existing staff or signing new talent. It’s a lengthy process because asking the person you want to sign the contract immediately, instead of giving them a week or two to decide, negatively affects the negotiation. For example, when I tried to sign Tsunoda to Red Bull, after two weeks of waiting, he responded only to counter-offer by saying he wanted an additional $7,000 from the existing $3.5 million salary offer. It remains a frustratingly lengthy process, and Yuki wasn’t the only one who lost her patience during the negotiations.
Extra money was previously earned by choosing optional performance goals from sponsors before races, such as reaching Q2 in qualifying. You couldn’t make bids until the second season, so it’s great to see F1 Manager 2024 using a more dynamic sponsorship system. Title sponsors grant more tangible benefits and your earnings now depend on your trust. Weighing a hefty upfront payment with minimal payouts for race day results against the opposite offer can be a satisfying risk vs. reward situation. Each major sponsor requires different “engagement activities” every six weeks that offer financial rewards but cause problems such as reduced driver performance. It’s a welcome change that better reflects the heavily commercialized nature of the sport.
Race weekends follow a true-to-life format, usually splitting time between three practice sessions, qualifying and finally the main race. Six weekends each year also feature a pleasantly straightforward sprint race where you don’t have to worry about considerations like long-term tire strategies. While F1 Manager 23 followed the rules of the 2022 season, F1 Manager 2024 now uses a less-than-exciting sprint qualifying approach split into three sessions before those races. I can’t fault Frontier for sticking to the current structure of real life; the extra work is just a pain for quite a few points when measured against the main race.
So I’m glad that F1 Manager 2024 allows you to skip the actual races by letting the team handle them automatically, a feature that was previously only available for practice and qualifying. I can’t always recommend doing this as you usually get the best performance with manual control and rushing the campaign would be pointless, but at least having this option can be a blessing if you’re on your sixth campaign. and again faces the opening race in Bahrain.
Of course, an F1 manager usually values ​​confident strategies and racing involves managing three critical areas from the pit wall: tyres, fuel and batteries. Good tire strategy can decide races, so it’s gratifying when your decisions about which two dry tire compounds to use pay off before the final lap. Tire degradation is similar to last year and telling drivers to speed up is another tricky option as it affects temperature and speed as you burn through them. Electric boosts through the ERS (Energy Recovery System) can close some critical gaps with opponents, though going full-out comes with its own risks as it leaves you vulnerable to being overtaken.
Fuel consumption also needs monitoring, but one of this year’s significant changes includes preventing the engine from overheating to preserve its long-term lifespan. You can only buy so many engines per year, and the additional unit costs are high, and that’s even before the penalties for using additional parts. These penalties can be harsh when you’re already chasing every point available, so getting through the season with minimal purchases feels like an achievement.
Overheating is also related to a compelling new mechanical failure system. The telecast-style replays will point out mechanical issues but rarely hint at what the real problem is – it seemed a little pointless other than to let me know who was having problems, but overall I enjoyed the challenge. As in reality, some glitches need to be mitigated mid-race by requiring your drivers to follow specific tactics, such as avoiding high-risk curbs and driving in clean air. I never noticed the absence of this system until now, and I immediately feel at home.
Accidents also look a little more realistic, though not fundamentally so. Incidents that would normally end a horse race in real life often didn’t result in cars being retired from previous posts – this problem hasn’t completely disappeared here, but it’s been less frequent during my recent campaigns. Visible damage to cars in collisions could also benefit from looking more realistic, as heavy impacts rarely show more than some scattered debris.
Finally, if you’re after something else, race replay is back again. They usually involve improving your chosen team’s actual results compared to what happened in the actual race, which is fine, but more specialized events keep it interesting with less realistic scenarios – things like the same performance settings for each team. What’s really fun are the events that challenge your strategic thinking even more, such as figuring out how to lead Ferrari to victory in Italy despite a mechanical failure near the end.